Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#226 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Oct 05, 2020 11:49 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Tue Aug 11, 2020 1:08 am
therewillbeblus wrote:
Tue Aug 11, 2020 12:41 am
You could also just wait for Tenet to come your way and then submit
I'd wager that we'd all be, oh, 6 months behind deadline by then
Guess this'll be available during the sci-fi project after all

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Never Cursed
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#227 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Oct 06, 2020 2:21 am

Glad to be wrong! I kinda can't believe that Warners is giving up after so much in the way of stubborn insistence on this playing in the theaters this year, though

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tenia
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#228 Post by tenia » Tue Oct 06, 2020 2:26 am

I guess it's underperforming in ways they think a video release will be able to compensate, or possibly anticipate the current surge of cases and death to impact even more theaters and are looking for a plan B.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#229 Post by John Shade » Thu Oct 08, 2020 9:36 am

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Oct 05, 2020 11:39 pm
Coming to Blu-Ray December 15th, for those who’d rather not potentially die to see this
I can't tell if this is really hyperbolic or sarcastic, and thus felt the need to quote it and ask. I will say--as I did in my brief post about the movie--that there are definitely precautions at most movie theaters; plus, no one is in a rush to a) go to a movie theater and b) see this particular movie; so I tend to maintain that it's fairly safe to visit a theater during an uncrowded time to see this great big-screen spectacle. Plus, movie theaters might simply not exist after another couple months of this...(On the other hand, I too look forward to the blu ray of this because viewing it with subtitles will more than likely help.)

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#230 Post by MichaelB » Thu Oct 08, 2020 10:16 am

Every cinema I’ve been to since the lockdown started has taken sensible precautions, including taking my temperature on entry. And the risk of them closing their doors permanently seems to me to be considerably greater than me catching Covid-19 from someone wearing a mask several seats away from me.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#231 Post by beamish14 » Thu Oct 08, 2020 12:45 pm

In spite of the hostile responses this has gotten in some quarters, I do want to still wait and see this in 70mm like
I have with every other Nolan film since Dark Knight.

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Persona
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#232 Post by Persona » Thu Oct 08, 2020 2:28 pm

I really just wish Nolan had dumped most of the dialogue and went all in on making this a leaner, meaner, more abstracted action thriller. The screenplay has its merits conceptually but is also clunky as hell.

There is a lot to admire technically but Jennifer Lame doesn't seem to have the same instinct that Lee Smith had for organizing and pacing Nolan's material and at a certain point it becomes absurdly comical how much the film wants you to follow along with non-ADR dialogue that has to compete with goofy accents, masks, rapid delivery (and sometimes muttered or whispered) info dumps, and in-the-red sound FX and score mixes.

One throw-away line had a subtitle and it was proper blissful, reading that thing.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#233 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Fri Dec 11, 2020 4:26 pm

blu-ray.com

There are no spoilers in the paragraph about the blu-ray's video quality. I didn't read or look at the rest (due to a concern about possible spoilers).

I was curious about the amount of the film in the IMAX aspect ratio, but I didn't see that anywhere (unless I missed it while attempting spoiler avoidance).

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tenia
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#234 Post by tenia » Fri Dec 11, 2020 6:34 pm

I watched the BD a few days ago and there is quite a hefty amount of IMAX content, though I unfortunately didn't thought of trying to time how much it approximately amounts to. I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is more than 50% of the movie in that format, though (the rest is 2.20).

On another matter, the soundtrack is a nightmare. At normal volume, it's clipping everytime the music gets ready. The intro at the opera and the car chase in particular are stupidly hot. I usually have my AV amp (a Yamaha) at -32.5 dB, I had to lower the sound at -55 dB and it almost still was too loud (though of course, simple dialogue scenes are on the other hand way too quiet at this level).

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#235 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:51 pm

tenia wrote:
Fri Dec 11, 2020 6:34 pm
On another matter, the soundtrack is a nightmare. At normal volume, it's clipping everytime the music gets ready. The intro at the opera and the car chase in particular are stupidly hot. I usually have my AV amp (a Yamaha) at -32.5 dB, I had to lower the sound at -55 dB and it almost still was too loud (though of course, simple dialogue scenes are on the other hand way too quiet at this level).
Mark Kermode mentioned this problem in his review of the film as shown in theaters. For a movie with so much important expository dialogue, having heavily accented people whisper it on loud boats is a pretty baffling choice.

For the most part, though, I liked it, even though the time-travel gobbledy goop gets a bit nuts. My main questions:
SpoilerShow
What is the deal with the "temporal pincer" at the end? I'm not fully clear on the purpose or how it's supposed to work.

Also, why exactly did they need to break into the Free Port? To steal a painting for that guy's wife? Why?

Who were they stealing the artifact from during the car chase? And why?

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#236 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 16, 2020 11:47 am

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:51 pm
tenia wrote:
Fri Dec 11, 2020 6:34 pm
On another matter, the soundtrack is a nightmare. At normal volume, it's clipping everytime the music gets ready. The intro at the opera and the car chase in particular are stupidly hot. I usually have my AV amp (a Yamaha) at -32.5 dB, I had to lower the sound at -55 dB and it almost still was too loud (though of course, simple dialogue scenes are on the other hand way too quiet at this level).
Mark Kermode mentioned this problem in his review of the film as shown in theaters. For a movie with so much important expository dialogue, having heavily accented people whisper it on loud boats is a pretty baffling choice.
It wasn't so much, for me, a question of the dialogues being buried by the rest of the mix that the whole thing just being so freaking loud. I have a Yamaha received and my usual volume is -32.5dB. I set it up like this because at this volume, its test tones are around 70dB (ie reference volume).

All the action scenes from Tenet were so loud I had to lower the movie to -55dB, which is on the other hand extremely low. And then, at -55dB, every quieter scene was just too quiet so I had to increase the volume back to around -38dB. It's not a question of mix, but of the general volume. The whole track is too hot.

And then, yeah, any scene that's not quiet has its dialogues buried underneath the rest of the mix, but that was an additional issue.
TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:51 pm
SpoilerShow
What is the deal with the "temporal pincer" at the end? I'm not fully clear on the purpose or how it's supposed to work.
SpoilerShow
The not-inverted team is able to use the intel from the future coming from the inverted team. This way, they're able to navigate in the present with more knowledge than they otherwise would, being able to move, also, more accurately on the scene and prevent the algorithm to be buried. Something like this.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#237 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:12 pm

tenia wrote:
Wed Dec 16, 2020 11:47 am
TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Tue Dec 15, 2020 11:51 pm
SpoilerShow
What is the deal with the "temporal pincer" at the end? I'm not fully clear on the purpose or how it's supposed to work.
SpoilerShow
The not-inverted team is able to use the intel from the future coming from the inverted team. This way, they're able to navigate in the present with more knowledge than they otherwise would, being able to move, also, more accurately on the scene and prevent the algorithm to be buried. Something like this.
SpoilerShow
So the Red Team's pre-battle prep session, given by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is based on the intel gathered by the Blue Team. And that intel came from the future, from the inverted Blue Team having already (in the future) experienced the battle with the Red Team. A "you guys will do this and see this" kinda thing? And I'm guessing the Blue Team had to continue to recede into the past a little bit in order to give that info to a pre-battle Red Team.

My goodness.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#238 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:20 pm

To be honest, at this point, I stopped caring about the details considering how the whole movie gave me the opportunity early on not to care about those.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#239 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:40 pm

tenia wrote:
Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:20 pm
To be honest, at this point, I stopped caring about the details considering how the whole movie gave me the opportunity early on not to care about those.
What is frustrating to me is that, sound issues aside, I really enjoyed the movie. The action is great fun, I love the visual trippiness of the timey-wimey gimmickry, and the IMAX photography is impressive. This impels me to want to understand the actual plot, to believe that an actual, coherent plot exists. But I'm afraid it doesn't. I'm afraid it is not just complex but, instead, literally nonsensical.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#240 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 16, 2020 2:05 pm

I actually think it is rather simple once you understand it's not time travel but time symmetry. My larger issue is that the film is a high-concept movie that keeps handling its high-concept as a daily business thing.
SpoilerShow
After barely 15 minutes, the main protagonist (who nobody bothered even give a name to) is told a madman managed to "reverse entropy" that allows time to go backwards, and he barely reacts to it. And then, the movie tells us about the Grandfather paradox only to brush it off with the back of the hand. That meant 2 things :
- if this is all no big deal for the characters, it shouldn't be for me.
- if nobody cares about exploring the paradoxes and consequences of time symmetry, then why should I bother ?

But I'm quite sure that past these, actually, once the events are written down on a chronology, it's all quite simple. The movie makes it a bit complicated because we're in the middle of it kinda seeing things unfolding in front of us, but I don't think there's much more to it.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#241 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Wed Dec 16, 2020 2:36 pm

tenia wrote:
Wed Dec 16, 2020 2:05 pm
I actually think it is rather simple once you understand it's not time travel but time symmetry. My larger issue is that the film is a high-concept movie that keeps handling its high-concept as a daily business thing.
SpoilerShow
After barely 15 minutes, the main protagonist (who nobody bothered even give a name to) is told a madman managed to "reverse entropy" that allows time to go backwards, and he barely reacts to it. And then, the movie tells us about the Grandfather paradox only to brush it off with the back of the hand. That meant 2 things :
- if this is all no big deal for the characters, it shouldn't be for me.
- if nobody cares about exploring the paradoxes and consequences of time symmetry, then why should I bother ?

But I'm quite sure that past these, actually, once the events are written down on a chronology, it's all quite simple. The movie makes it a bit complicated because we're in the middle of it kinda seeing things unfolding in front of us, but I don't think there's much more to it.
Yeah, that bothers me a bit. It wants to have its time-travel cake and eat it too. It likes the heady concept for trippy action scenes but doesn't want to get too bogged down in the logistics or philosophy of it.

But even aside from that timey weirdness, plot points are comically convoluted.
SpoilerShow
For Example: They need to crash a plane into a building so that they can steal a forged drawing so that they can free that woman from her husband's blackmail so that she can pay their favor back by introducing them to her husband so that the protagonist can, uh, I don't know.
That strikes me not as complexity but as bad storytelling.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#242 Post by tenia » Wed Dec 16, 2020 3:45 pm

Oh yeah, the plot construction is hilarious in this regard, because it takes 1h15 to finally get to its point, but it does so through often the lowest-concept ways possible.

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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#243 Post by feihong » Thu Dec 17, 2020 12:50 am

I've seen Tenet twice now, and I can begin to unpack some thoughts about the film. As many people who've encountered me on the forum probably already know, I'm not a fan of Nolan films at all, so your mileage with my scattered reactions to the film may vary. Of his work, the films I think I can still watch with at least some interest are Following and The Prestige––those are the ones I remember liking, though a second viewing of either film could possibly reverse that feeling. I did not bother to see Interstellar or Dunkirk, because neither promised much interest for me, personally. Still, I loved John David Washington in Blackkklansman, and the secret agent stuff in the Tenet trailers looked interesting.

On first viewing I thought Tenet was the worst movie I had ever seen, not just for its blatant incoherency and deliberate obfuscation of its own material, but for it's badness in the face of both enormous artistic ambition and production resources second to none. But also the film knocked back all other "worst evers" on my list on their own terms. Ninja Busters had a solid grip on a coherent plot, next to Tenet. Miami Connection, measured side-by-side with Tenet, had greater understanding of human motivations and character. Fast Food Fast Women unpacked its themes with more relatability and understanding. Admittedly the action in Tenet was better constructed and more sure-footed than in Roar––at least until Tenet's finale, which is as incomprehensible as that part in Roar where Melanie Griffith's brothers keep driving dirt bikes off the roof of the Lion house. The first viewing of this felt riotously stupid and incomprehensible. It was loud, hard to follow, and on top of that, it was hard to care what was happening in the movie. Characters in the movie tell you to feel your way through rather than think about it, but with so little to feel (the film is locked into Nolan's "cool" pose), it was hard to know just what to do with it. The first time I was able to hear the characters mention that
SpoilerShow
this whole plot was about evil time-travellers––whom we never see––planning to invade the past from their base in the future,
I burst out laughing––a little like my uncontrollable reaction to Fast Food Fast Women––which in its time nearly got me kicked out of that screening.

With my second viewing of Tenet––fortified with an English subtitle track, and with the sound turned down––I was able to pick the plot apart and figure out what was happening and why. Scenes that mystified me on initial viewing (probably 50% of the movie) came clear on second viewing. I found it was far easier––whether because of the subtitles or my familiarity with the film, I don't know––to figure out why, at least, the secret agents were doing all the things they were doing. The ingenuity of the central concept––absolutely impenetrable on first viewing––came clear here, and I gained a certain amount of respect for Nolan's artistic purpose and motivation, the cleverness it took to make this idea even begin to seem like a movie, and I even appreciated more the general plot construction, which makes a lot more sense in retrospect. I better appreciated the cinematography, the general quality of the performances, but to get into those performances a little, because that is a lot of what the lay viewer has to hang their hopes upon...I found John David Washington likeable both times. Robert Pattinson––who I have never seen in a movie prior to this––does a hero's work, and almost stitches the whole movie together, giving clarity to the plot and emotional depth to the action. Kenneth Branagh gives, I think, the worst performance he has ever put to film; a genuinely embarrassing caricature with no depth, oily-seeming in spite of looking bone-dry (there is a stomach-churning scene where his wife slathers greasy sunscreen over his onion-like skin that made me want to vomit), and literally impenetrable line delivery, and without any sense of the threat he is supposed to pose. Branagh would have done well to watch Vincent Cassell offer a more febrile and disturbing threat with much, much less material in Birthday Girl, but I think the truth is that Branagh was just the wrong actor for this part. In fact, anyone that well-known takes away from the sense of unpredictability and anger this character is meant to project. Elizabeth Debicki might be a pretty good actress––this movie doesn't afford me any chance to know. Her character's story is perhaps the least-developed element of this movie, when it in fact is supposed to contain the central human motivations of the plot (secret agents like Washington and Pattinson, as we all know, have no emotional barometers of their own). She creates a brittle-seeming portrayal of all-purpose victimhood, awkward and astringent, and while she is more human-seeming and more fleshed-out than female characters in earlier Nolan movies, there is this sense of unreality permanently bonded to her, making her role in the movie far less striking and urgent than it needs to seem. The character comes across as very stupid, even though she's often given sharp lines and quick jumps to understanding, and has a background in scholarly knowledge. She gets the reverse–entropy premise of the movie right away, after seeing it in action only once, so she's not really dumb. None of the other characters understand it so quickly. But it seems to have been a somewhat unfathomable mistake to have married this violent arms-dealer who she doesn't respect at all (we're given no reason this would ever have happened––and a reason for this marriage seems a crucial omission), and it is stranger still that in her job as art-authenticator, or whatever she is, she has this absurd blindspot for a charming forger of paintings (presumably charming? This forger––also essential to the plot of the film––is one of several characters key to the motivations of the film, whom we never see). It would have been a little interesting if Anne Hathaway would have played this role, since her real-life marriage to a con-man might have given the Debicki character's strange gullibility some metafictional reinforcement. Certainly Debicki does not merge these two, seemingly contradictory sides of this character, hung between "quick savvy" and "fool for love," in any satisfying way. But in truth, I think this character is just not thoroughly imagined, and I can hardly fault the actress for not being able to account for her character's varying levels of canniness in the midst of an absurdly complicated story. Near the end of the movie, Debicki provides a key element of the plot, which hadn't existed before, and which is a conclusion which she jumps to without any ons-screen reason to do so. This moment sets the stakes for the finale of the film, and it comes literally from out of nowhere. This is a screenwriting problem at its core, and I think it's very harsh to have placed the onus for this awkward last resort on one beleaguered actress
SpoilerShow
(I'm talking about the moment where Debicki suddenly realizes that Branagh's character is not just dying, but that he also wants the world to die with him––a James Bond-level villainous motivation that we have no evidence of prior to that moment––but on a side note, this is the only movie I've ever seen whose plot hinges very specifically on a Fitbit? and I hope it never happens in another picture).
Debicki doesn't bring it off plausibly, and really, I don't know how she could have done so. But this speaks to the general level at which Nolan uses his actors, especially in this film. They speak solely in exposition––even when they talk about emotions, it is only nakedly in service of advancing the plot. And it's interesting to see this commonality between Nolan and Zack Snyder––none of the emotions the characters talk about take place in the present-tense. Always it's about feelings in the past, which can't be reclaimed. Never do the characters give voice to the feelings of today, or to feelings they imagine having in the future. I think this goes some ways towards explaining the feeling of remoteness common to lots of Nolan movies––where the action is pulsing and pounding onward, leaving the sense of motivation and meaning far in the rearview mirror. In an almost delicious irony, the most emotional moment of this film's climax involves
SpoilerShow
Pattinson whooping in joy as he looks into the rearview mirror of a car and sees that he has saved John David Washington and Aaron Taylor-Johnson from certain death, dragging them out of a mine shaft via the winch on his assault vehicle.
But this is only one example of the way in which Nolan is attempting to reverse-engineer the audience's experience of this film.

There is a real, solid feeling that, in spite of the extra clarity in the plotting, character development and motivation continue to drag throughout Tenet; even in a second viewing. Washington's protagonist is thoroughly unmotivated through the scripting. Washington the actor is compelling, but at the end of the second viewing it becomes clear his character never has a real, human reason for doing any of the things he's doing in the film. His character is literally named only Protagonist. That is how he appears in the credits, but in one of the many metanarrative elements of this movie Nolan hopes will work in the place of actual narrative, Washington's character repeatedly refers to himself as the Protagonist. He seems available for the action, but the only suggestions of motivation for this character are vague references to both past and future. Martin Donovan identifies him as a "patriot," essentially, and figures that's why he'll plunge into a crazy intelligence project, no questions asked. Late in the film it is suggested that Washington's Protagonist will keep doing this job in the future. At some point in the middle of the picture other characters start assuming Washington's Protagonist has romantic feelings for Debicki's character. Without Washington saying much of anything at all, this becomes a character motivation for our Protagonist. There is almost the sense of a postmodern game being played here, wherein the elements of story accrue around the assigned "protagonist" without his having any motivation to take part within them. All that's needed are essential cliches: a game is being played, and Washington is eager to play a game, for...reasons. Because he's a patriot? He did bite that suicide capsule in the beginning. But none of it feels real––it is almost impossible to track our Protagonist's evolving character arc, if he actually has one. Every scene depicting him is either a briefing scene––in which his reactions are cryptic––or a scene of him leaping into action––wherein it's hard to tell what his exact motivations are. This is a huge problem right from the jump––our Protagonist is pretending to work with Russian security forces at the beginning of the movie, during the opera house siege. He enacts a completely different mission right in front of their eyes, subverting their own (I guess––the Russians seem pretty mad at Washington and his partner, considering they knew the two of them were CIA or whatever from the beginning). When the Russians start torturing Washington and his pals, and Washington takes a suicide pill, none of it feels very real. The intensity with which the scene is shot comes off far too over-the-top. This is a tonal clash which will repeat again and again throughout this movie, wherein characters react with hysterical violence to insults or threats against them we are only told about but which we never see. Frequently violent events occur that only make sense seeing them in reverse later in the movie––i.e., the Protagonist's fight with the Protagonist. But the outcome of this cart-before-the-horse approach, rather than schooling us on the innovative way this movie might operate, simply obscures what is actually happening. When the guy in the S.W.A.T. suit bursts out of the doorway the first time we see the scene it is impossible to figure out what's going on, and our attention is immediately grabbed by him trying to fire his gun at the Protagonist in reverse. When we see the scene again, from the Protagonist's later perspective, it's especially unclear why he would ever fire his pistol when he knew he was fighting himself. This is hugely distracting, because the scene is actually leading us towards other ideas––the introduction of inverted humans the first time we see it, and the understanding later on what the inversion process entails in a fuller sense. Also, the scene is about stealing the painting––which in spite of the disruption by the Protagonist's future time-traveling self, isn't accomplished anyway, because Sator has already moved the painting to another location. This is ultimately important, because a) it's the hold Sator has on his unhappy wife, and b) Sator characterizes his decision to move the painting as a "sixth sense," which he says has made him successful throughout his career––later we learn that these are the time-traveling villains of the film, tipping Sator off that these agents will steal and destroy the forged painting he uses to keep his wife compliant, by sending word back to the past as...what? Sator sends them time capsules. I was never clear how the villains from the future were going to ever get to the present. Were they going to walk backwards until they reached it? Anyway, this section of writing, which reveals the depth of my own confusion, in spite of basically being able to follow the plot after having seen the movie twice, should indicate the level upon which you are forced to negotiate this film. In term's of John David Washington's performance, like many others in the cast, the through line of his character's motivation gets tweaked and wrenched and yanked upon in order to make this hyper-dense and extremely muddled plot come together. So while he is a likeable performer, and he seems to know what he's supposed to be doing at all times, he frequently doesn't effectively communicate to us, the viewers, what he knows and why he's doing what he's doing. Conversely, Pattinson manages to make more of less here; he seems to have read and really understood the script, and figured out a compelling emotional through line for his character, which he delivers in spite of exploding aircraft, inverted bazookas, firetruck auto sieges, and other actors staring at him like they don't know what's going on. The thoroughness with which Pattinson approaches the role means he can modulate his performance very adroitly throughout the proceedings. So when the story gets excessively serious, Pattinson seems to be taking things more lightly to compensate. When the story is at its most convoluted and silly, Pattinson seems serious, underlining that there are, in fact, meant to be stakes to this comedy of errors and overemphasis. But no one else in the movie brings that level of clear-headedness. Part of this speaks to the enormous ambition Nolan brings to this movie, to make a film about reverse entropy in which the elements you need to put the film together arrive in reverse order. And it's probably the right time to talk about that now.

Memento reverse-engineered film noir; The Prestige offers mystery in its first half in lieu of full motivation, and delivers motivation in its second half which sobers our understanding of the intrigue and gamesmanship we saw in the first half. Tenet attempts to double-down on both ideas, and in the process presents a movie that not only focuses on reversing the entropy of objects, but also on reversing the direction from which film narrative reaches us. This is where the film is at its most ambitious, and like a lot of films of the moment, it attempts to make a lot out of metanarrative, at the expense of actual narrative (the company I see it in in this respect includes the recent Star Wars movies, Batman vs. Superman, etc.). When he is briefed by a scientist on reverse entropy early in the picture, the scientist tells Protagonist that in order to interact with reverse-entropy objects, you can't think about it; you just have to feel it. This provides Washington a way to interact with reversed bullets, and later to interact with reversed people, and eventually with a reversed chain of events. But it might as well be an instruction to the audience in how to watch this film. In fact, in a metanarrative sense, it is unequivocally an instruction meant to be taken that way; the film will double and triple its own absurdity and convolution as it runs, and as audience members we are meant not to think it through, but to feel our way through. This becomes an increasing problem for the viewer, because of the reverse entropy applied to the film narrative. Emotional quality and character motivation are withheld for vast amounts of the narrative, distributed to us with convulsive velocity the closer the film gets to the end; meaning essentially that the larger character motivations of the movie are backfilled at a pace that makes their revelations seem insubstantial, rather than in the standard narrative, where motivation and meaning is reinforced through the film's progression. In literally the last few minutes of the movie, Pattinson lays out for the audience how he knows our Protagonist, why he's helping him, what the Protagonist's actual mission is––what role the Protagonist has played in this whole drama has even been. This is not exactly a twist: he is the protagonist, but we didn't know how or why until this last minute revelation. All I could think was that I wanted to know some of this information literally hours ago. Allegedly, this movie runs two and a half hours; but it seems far, far longer. At the end of what felt like an enormous amount of exposition I looked at the counter and learned to my dismay that there were still two hours of movie left to go––and this happened, at almost exactly the same point, both times I watched the film. The urge to escape my own entropy was, both times at that same point, overwhelming. It was a little like reliving the same events from a different angle, and seeing myself move through them––which of course happens to the characters in this movie. But this self-reflexive way Nolan puts the audience through the exact experience of the characters––encountering a chaotic world with less than the necessary information needed to understand it––makes for a movie-watching experience that is far less than the sum of its parts. Disappointment at how this metanarrative special effect works permeates to all aspects of the viewing experience. Every whispered or muttered line of dialogue seems to come at too slow a pace; and yet, the almost exclusively expository nature of this dialogue means that everything is happening too fast to unpack and understand––at least on first viewing. Upon second viewing, most of the tortured plot of the movie comes clear, but with that much clear it is increasingly evident how threadbare the dramatic and emotional reality of the story is. This is a movie structured in a playful way. The structure is such that we are introduced to a surprising idea in a playful, intriguing manner, and then the film endeavors to expand our idea of how this game could be played in action scenes of increasing scale throughout the movie. And yet these scenes are not in and of themselves playful in any aspect. And the central emotional narrative––sort of about sadomasochistic control and domestic abuse––is not a fun item to center the game around.

This is where it occurs to me the value of comparing Nolan'a approach to games to Johnnie To's––maybe because throughout watching Tenet I kept wishing I was watching Mad Detective, Blind Detective, or even Election. Playing a game is a central theme of so many To movies; and To uses the idea of a game––the inherent sense of play embedded within it––to add fun and intrigue to his storylines. Mad Detective, for instance, offers us stakes as serious as in Tenet (albeit Tenet deals with
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bombing the past history of humanity into oblivion,
and the outcome of Mad Detective is just that a few cops are dead at the end, so there is a differing scale of stakes. Yet the tone of the murder investigation in Mad Detective remains playful, even as the film develops darker implications, and we begin to see the morbid edge of its' protagonist's mental illness. The lightness of touch To brings to his story is consistent with the playfulness inherent in a game, generalizing the unstable protagonist's situation as a Cassandra complex not even that uncommon, and giving the film's drama and existential valence which provides rich readings of meaning back into the movie. The heaviness of Tenet is baffling in comparison, because the premise is so patently absurd from the get-go. Why did Nolan need to structure the potentially playful idea of reverse entropy (an idea he seems to find interesting and amusing on at least some level) around a nuclear-style arms race? In contrast, Mad Detective's structure––a police investigation of the irrational––gives us much more room to smile and enjoy what we're seeing, because the stakes are so much more appropriate to the playfulness inherent in the concept. For those who haven't seen it, the playful premise of Mad Detective is that a great detective is completely insane; touched in the head, he seems to have the power to see people's inner personalities manifested as other people––and the villain he's chasing is another police detective, who has multiple inner personalities––thus the hero sees the villain as a gang of thugs, any of whom might step in to defend the core personality. There is tragedy at the end of Mad Detective. But there is humor even then, the irony of the younger cop who lost faith in the detective, endlessly rearranging the crime scene at the end of the film to try and make sense of the covolutions of plot that has led him to that point. For those who haven't seen it, the playful premise of Tenet is that you can irradiate objects to change their entropy, so that they move backwards in time from what you chose to enact upon them in the future. So a bullet can leap up into your hand, so long as you remember having dropped it or...something. I am not a science guy; this premise was offensively complicated, all the more so because it had no relevant human dimension to it. it would be like if the villain of your movie isn't a person; it's guns. How do you care, then, about what happens with those villainous guns? There is a scene near the end of the movie––which isn't spoiling much, because it didn't insofar as I can tell have any effect on the overarching narrative––where reverse-entropy soldiers launch a bazooka in reverse at the rubble of a building, reconstituting a sniper's nest full of enemies, and forward–entropy soldiers immediately launch a bazooka in forward motion at the building, blowing it up again. Next, a soldier somehow gets sucked into and sealed up inside a wall, or something, when someone reverse-fires an explosive at the wall. This final scene, with it's forward-moving and reverse-moving battalions, is supposed to suggest the ultimate inventive destructiveness of this technological breakthrough in a fun, awesome combat/special effects scene. But I am still laboring to work out exactly what is happening in these quick little moments, even after seeing the film twice. I don't get it, and struggling to get it makes me feel the way I did as a freshman in high school, taking Physics; so out of my depth I couldn't even say what I was supposed to be thinking at any given point in the duration. The point here is, In spite of a lot of attempts to be playful, especially in a metanarrative sense, Nolan really fails to make this movie as fun as he seems to find it. There are lots of little postmodern jokes parceled throughout the film; it begins with an orchestra tuning up––which did make me laugh, though mostly in a derisive way. I can see why Nolan analogizes the start of this incredibly complex movie to an orchestra prepping for a virtuoso performance; but this movie hasn't turned out the virtuoso performance Nolan seems to have planned it to be. Nolan's by this point uncomfortable 9/11 obsession is treated here with a kind of offhanded jokiness––Himesh Patel appears midway through the movie as an operative who seems to specialize in spy actions that look like terrorist attacks––we get an extraordinary helping of his work, with a plane crashing into a hanger, spewing gold bars out its back,
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all in service of stealing a forged painting. This is layers upon hilarious layers of fakery,
I suppose, but it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth thinking of Nolan's strange shorthand, casting a South-Asian actor as the expert on faking terrorism––It would have landed entirely differently if, for instance, Pattinson were the expert on faking terrorist attacks, and Patel were
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the secret agent from the future, moving in loops of reverse entropy towards a tragic conclusion, where he saves his friend and mentor Protagonist's life at the cost of his own.
But instead Nolan leans into the stereotype in order for the audience to catch on fast to what fun misdirection we have imminently in store. And then there is the funniest line in the movie––which isn't meant to be funny at all, but which is hysterical after you've sat through all this garbage leading up to it. I'm talking about the point where Kenneth Branagh reveals that
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the actual villains behind everything are villainous time travelers from the future, trying to wipe out the past so they can move backwards and colonize it.
Within the logic of the movie, this patently absurd idea unfortunately makes a kind of sense, but...you have to already have travelled so far from reality in your own mind in order to accept it...it seems howlingly ludicrous. When a critic complains that the plot of a novel or a film stretches credulity (and maybe critics don't say it enough in response to recent major films), I think we have to accept that Tenet is the new standard for stretching that credulity, meaning that so long as you wave your arms fast enough in front of the audience's face, anything you present should be plausible. So much about this film presents itself as emerging from the real world of the now. We have an arms race following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have an international intelligence community that operates with sinister impunity, creating a world of false catastrophes like crashing jets and sieges of hidden Soviet cities. We have radiation poisoning, and
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the threat of climate change
as the ultimate motivator for the villains of the piece. And yet, it's all very unblinkingly about time-travelers from the future trying to depopulate and move into the past. That's why Protagonist has to dress in a better-than-Brooks-Bros suit
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and bungie-jump his way into arms dealers' apartments and pretend to hit on other arms dealers' wives so he can set up a real plutonium deal with that other arms dealer, which turns out to be a deal for a piece of a time machine instead,
and do all this intense spy stuff in a bizarre parody of James Bond. At this level of convolution lots of Nolan's most obsessively faux-accurate details of the time-reversal process sound utterly stupid. A soldier tells Protagonist that he needs his own oxygen in his reversed state, because standard air won't pass through temporally–inverted lungs. That was another howler to me. It's not that it's wrong; in fact, it makes a commendable amount of sense––if only such a detail mattered at all when you're almost two hours into this endless experience, and all the stuff Nolan is talking about is––let's not forget––made up.

But the James Bond element to the film is very prominent, and says something about where Nolan thinks this movie ought to be, in terms of how serious you should take it, what kind of fun you can have with it, and so on. Nolan is taking a lot from Bond in order to make this movie, and the irony of this is that both the coarseness and the chasing after class that is so evident in the Bond films (the elements that seem to make them most exciting for large audiences) rubs off completely upon Tenet. Following the orchestra tuneup, the next scene that gets into this element of the movie is one with Michael Caine, playing an English Lord who seems to be involved in MI6. It's always funny to me nowadays how Caine––an actor known for bringing a hitherto largely uncelebrated working-class roughness to English cinema of the 60s and 70s––ends up nowadays playing all these toney, high-born characters. Not that Caine is anything but a very accomplished actor, and certainly up to the essentials of the task, but there is a very different quality actors born into that world of privilege can bring to a role like this. Watch Christopher Lee play a nobleman, and I think you can see the way in which entitlement settles over him as naturally as a coat around his shoulders––whereas Caine always has a kind of watchfulness that calls unnecessary attention to his poise; in the world of the upper crust, Caine remains a liminal character, with his eyes on the exit sign. Nonetheless, Nolan seems committed to throwing Caine old man parts, and here, for one scene, he plays M to Washington's Bond. This M wants to recommend Bond a tailor, beginning this film's crazy equation of posh living with extreme, world-in-the-balance adventure stakes. Throughout the film we spend most of our time in the world of ultra-high-end luxury, from restaurants where it would be gauche to ask what's on the menu to enormous private yachts which look as if they could house a small city's population. So much of the relationship drama of this film hangs on a forged painting, misidentified by Debicki's allegedly high-class character as the real thing. You might think the film is making some comment on the illusory nature of this expensive form of living––in fact, Nolan does make the connection between these plunderers of the modern era and his ultimate bad guys,
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the plunderers of time coming from the future, having despoiled their world with the same industrial profit motives that are despoiling our world today.
And Washinton is immediately called out as not belonging to this world, in spite of his classier-than-Brooks-Bros suit. But the elements of class and privilege remain incredibly solid and real within this movie. The yacht is not so much a comment as it is a plush freakin' yacht; money means privilege more than greed, for the heroes of the piece are floating money freely in this system, and there are arms dealers working for the good guys as well as ones working for the bad; and class is something to flash in front of the audience, to tease them in the way they do in James Bond movies, even as Nolan discreetly allies himself with those concerned about the damage these modern oligarchs are doing to our world. Why doesn't this equation work in the movie? For the same reason, I think, it doesn't work in James Bond movies. We are meant to ogle the elements of class––to embrace their sensual qualities without critical comment, appreciating the veneer the film creates for us as we experience it. And the film, for all its late-breaking protestations that it's sentiments are on the side of right, has ultimately been asking us to buy into the charm of these illusory riches for far too long to come across now as sincere.This is part and parcel of the way the James Bond films are so ultimately valueless––essential examples of entirely escapist entertainment, where character motivation, thematic coherence, and credible ambience are sacrificed to quick plot, fast action, and an exploitative, offhand attitude towards any other concerns. And I think this indifference––an indifference to artistic quality, even as the films pelt us with markers of cultural/class-based quality––has completely infected Tenet in the same way. However, Nolan is also interested in cribbing not only the effect of the Bond films, but also a little bit of the John le Carre spy thriller. Specifically, Nolan makes a big deal of Protagonist's chaste pining for Debicki, along with Debicki's character's desultory anti-love affair with arms–dealor husband Sator (really, who can credit any past passion or interest between these characters? One could imagine Debicki's character being born into class, losing her fortune, and marrying Sator to recapture her social position, all the while critical of his attempts to equal her status––but that isn't what actually happens in the movie, so if that was in fact Nolan's intent with this subplot, it has not successfully transferred from script to screen). This strand of the film has a little bit of Le Carre's burnished romanticism, and his feeling for spies closing off their feelings in order to do their jobs. But I think what Nolan misses is a quintessential part of the Le Carre formulation, which is that the life of a spy sucks hard. Le Carre goes out of his way to show the ways in which a spy's all-consuming job makes a squalid, fetid havoc of his personal life, offering nothing but an essential emptiness in return. Smiley's ultimate win over archnemesis Karla is an entirely pyrrhic victory, with the two superspies basically at retirement age anyway, and what with Karla essentially giving up rather than being really outwitted, and with the way the world has moved on from their concerns anyway. Le Carre knows that his spies are inescapably conservative figures, who will not change the world for the better, but only revert it to a previous state of slightly less internal agitation. This anti-glamor serves to illuminate and comment upon all the action of Le Carre's thrillers, but by comparison, Nolan's efforts are closer to the Bond-style escapism. Even though the
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world almost ends
at the climax of this movie, Hollywood triumphalism takes the prize at the end, with Protagonist deciding
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he has no choice but to be an awesome time-traveling agent for life.
I feel as if someone should be blowing an airhorn during the final scene to celebrate
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how awesome Protagonist turns out to be in the service of the temporal present. F*ck those future A-holes! Oh, wait. Nothing happens to them, anyway.
As a result of the pitfalls of adopting a Bond-like tone, whatever the intensity with which Nolan intended to deliver his message about environmental despotism and the complicity of the rich therein, it all lands with a damp squishiness. Who can save us from ourselves as we ruin our planet? I guess it's the secret agents? But you know that the Le Carre thrillers work precisely because he knows these agents save us from nothing. They can't even save themselves.

Honestly, I wish Nolan's message had some force behind it. In a way, James Cameron's grotesque and overblown Avatar works far better in explicating with passion our problems of industrial development and the need to overturn our social structures in order to make the world livable in the future. The trickiness and the superficial detachment inherent in Nolan's filmmaking style serves to very effectively blunt his more laudable sentiments. It's hard to take the speaker's message seriously when he has dressed up as the world's most pedantic clown in order to make his points. Because this movie isn't as fun or funny as it thinks; it goes on seemingly forever, it feels convoluted as hell, and its themes just don't deliver any punch at all. It wants to be classy, cool and clever, and it misses each one of those marks, in turn. When a movie is this loud, big, and proposes such a payload of complex plotting and conscientious themes, if that mixture is also overwrought, frustrating, and misjudged in many respects, then I think the ambition serves as a massive counterweight, making the resulting movie far, far worse than poorly made movies of lesser ambitions. For instance, I would say that Roar's message about preserving and nurturing other animal species in an ideal habitat for them feels so much more heartfelt and passionate and meaningful than Tenet's murmured threats about environmental despoiling and another coming arms race––in spite of Roar's overwhelming convolution of its own, and its inability to clearly express its' thematic sentiments. What makes Roar a more effective communicator with its audience than Tenet, when both movies fail to articulate almost anything? Partly it's seeing the animals themselves in Roar, for extended periods of time. In order to empathize, we have to be able to see them. Which is why it's so interesting that many key characters remain offstage for the entirety of Tenet. The art forger, whom it is implied Debicki may have had an affair with, doesn't appear. The principal villains of the piece never arrive. Debicki's son, who is sometimes referenced as a source of some of her character motivation, shows up for, like one-and-a-half scenes. The structure of the international organization the Protagonist is working for never becomes apparent. And the characters we do spend time with remain cold and calculating, keeping their poker faces on until the end of the movie, at which point each of them explains themselves with prosaic completeness. Whereupon we learn, to no surprise, that they in fact have no real depth, at all. For my own part, I would rather watch lions and tigers tear the plot of the movie literally to shreds. Tenet is a movie that ambition has turned into incompetence, on a massive, massive scale. And I find, to some surprise, that even though a second viewing of the picture enables me to make sense of it, I still feel, with some despair, that it is the worst movie I have ever seen. True, I don't watch the kinds of movies Red Letter Media gets into, like Deadly Prey or Ryan's Babe. So there's a level of bad that I don't usually approach (though I have seen trash like Weekend at Club Wildside and Truth or Consequences, N.M., so I have been around, thank you very much). But if you set your sights on something a little higher-echelon, there's still that extreme badness to be had. Like the worst Bond films, the supposed "coolness" of this movie curdles as you watch it. It's a shame, I suppose, to level all this vitriol at an original film concept, instead of at the Transformers movies (which I also don't watch), or Batman vs. Superman. Certainly those movies deserve it as well. In a way, I suppose this reflects my contempt for an entire genre of big-budget movie-making, from which I feel almost completely alienated.

But the funny thing is this; I think I would have liked Tenet, if I had read it as a comic book series. I could see this being an amazing 60-chapter manga series, or an epic 4-year run of some monthly comic. Part of feeling that way is my suspicion that, if I could unpack the material and think about it at the more deliberate speed Nolan approached it as he was devising and writing it, I might be able to better appreciate the cleverness of the premise, and maybe appreciate the individual plot lines and their themes a little better. And there would be more opportunity in an expansive publication schedule to delve more into elements like Debicki's character's disastrous marriage. And without the pressure of film editing urging you to keep going, to keep up, a reader could ruminate on the potential meanings of parts of the story left ambiguous. But it is partly Tenet's pace and compression that spoils it. It is at least 4 different movies' worth of material––4 better movies, with more opportunity to entwine character development with story structure than the finished film affords. Plus, in comic form––in a genre that gives rise to much more thorough character development (at least potentially––few amongst modern comic writers can resist the impulse to make their comics more like movies, and so they provide far less detail in their narratives than they once did), the characters in this story could be fleshed out. We could get the a whole chapter where we explore the decision, for instance, to name the protagonist Protagonist, so that that decision falls with some weight, instead of passing us by at the speed of light in order to get the premise of this movie nailed down. As it is, the movie is overstuffed to the point that none of its ideas falls with appropriate weight, and that is a huge part of what makes this movie so thunderously, world-ending–in–reversedly bad.

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Finch
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#244 Post by Finch » Thu Dec 17, 2020 9:29 pm

Maybe Barbara Broccoli will let Nolan direct Bond 26 so he can finally get it out of his system.

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Persona
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:16 pm

Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#245 Post by Persona » Fri Dec 18, 2020 1:26 pm

Wow, uh, feihong went in.

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domino harvey
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#246 Post by domino harvey » Fri Dec 18, 2020 1:50 pm

Surely that must be the longest single post dedicated to one movie in this forum’s history?

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hearthesilence
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#247 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Dec 18, 2020 2:39 pm

His dedication to this particular film reminds me of my experiences with Bob Dylan's terrible-to-medicore albums. As much as I hated them, I still insisted on going back to them (which is probably a lot easier to do with an album than a newly released film), trying to see if something will change. In most cases, the time wasn't worth it, but there were probably a few I grew to appreciate.

beamish14
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#248 Post by beamish14 » Fri Dec 18, 2020 2:56 pm

Finch wrote:
Thu Dec 17, 2020 9:29 pm
Maybe Barbara Broccoli will let Nolan direct Bond 26 so he can finally get it out of his system.

The Bond franchise doesn't hire "auteurs"-that's why they never took Spielberg, Tarantino, etc. up on their offers to make entries.

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Brian C
I hate to be That Pedantic Guy but...
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Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#249 Post by Brian C » Fri Dec 18, 2020 7:50 pm

I think feihong’s post is one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve read and I really appreciate his taking the time to write it. I was largely indifferent to the film myself despite liking a lot of Nolan’s work, but I think it would do Nolan a ton of good to stumble across this thread and actually read that post.

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

#250 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Dec 18, 2020 9:12 pm

I enjoyed reading that as well. All fair criticisms, though I'm a Nolan-defender, this is definitely the film of his to rip apart. I only disagree that all his characters talk about emotions in the past, for in his best work they emphasize the effects of past loss on sustained emotional dysregulation in the present, and while I believe that most of his films function only as facades of intelligent-heavy self-congratulatory works that are actually about universal common denominators of emotion, Tenet fails to deliver the emotion and gets too caught up in that self-gratifying intellect, forcing a necessary sharp stare in that direction. Hence, it's a great opportunity for all Nolan-detractors to say, "see?" as evidence of a familiar trend, when I think it's a glaring outlier in his work.

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