Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

lol, this was garbage! i just wanted a dumb enjoyable sci-fi movie and what i got was a bloviated, muddy and self-important time travel movie that's too cool to admit it's a time travel movie with a plot for that infinitesimal audience that finds bond films too pedestrian and direct. all the relationships are pointless, the sound design and mix is as terrible as you've heard it was (watching with subtitles made the story clear, but no less garbled and silly). the punchline is THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE and the moral is we should stop global warming or else the future will send gold to russian gangsters. the much ballyhooed visual fx are, by and large, pedestrian and - eventually - boring through repetition. complete waste of time, energy and resources. Recommended if you're the kind of person who likes to rewatch fight sequences that are reshot backwards to see how they mesh up with their prior iteration, otherwise skip this shit and wait for Synchronic which looks about twenty times better.

i am at a complete loss why i am supposed to care about the tall white lady or her kid; she's utterly horrible throughout and it's a safe bet the kid is gonna grow up to play polo with barron trump

I *think* the young kid was supposed to grow up to be RPatz's character.

We just watched it for the first time (inspired by this thread popping up) and mrs aldo's assumption at the end is that the kid becomes RPatz.

What a complete mess this was, it made absolutely no sense and at various points there were multiples of the leads going in the *same* direction in addition to those going backwards.

Nolan has taken a half-formed idea and built an action movie around it because he thinks a particular effect looks cool.

Nolan has taken a particular effect and built an half-formed idea around it because he thinks an action movie looks cool.

That's a fair comment. Which makes him of the school of Bay and McTiernan rather than peer to Kubrick etc like he believes.

yes imo

In terms of talent I'd put him more in a peer group of ex-Grange Hill directors that go on to make dental website videos or something, but this lad - "the saviour of cinema" © Sight & Sound magazine, tbf on him has really made an artform of putting out tedious dross that lots of people seem to like, until now of course!

He seems a deeply strange, pedantic person

That Fall lyric about "highest British attention to the wrong detail" always floats through my head when I think of him

john mctiernan is a significantly more talented filmmaker than christopher nolan!! i think the combination of genre schlock with poorly paced portentousness makes nolan more comparable to like... abel ferrara.

man nolan hasn’t made a movie as good as predator

i also feel insulted on behalf of ferrara now

or even the 13th warrior

xpost

or even predator 2!

lol read that as John McTernan at first, never mind US posters - he's an insignificant UK pol thread lurker!

man nolan hasn’t made a movie as good as predator

DUDE. Much ink has been spill nolans deficiencies with basic grammar of blocking, staging, shot-by-shot cutting, etc... I just rewatched Predator for the first time in forever and spent much of it being amazed at how good McTiernan was at all of that stuff.

Its a movie made up of shots where theres usually only one individual in the frame at a time, standing in front of nondescript monochromatic jungle backgrounds, plus one character who is moving around in the treetops in three dimensional space all around them (and is fucking invisible most of the time to boot!) - by all rights that movie should be completely spatially and visually incoherent. And yet you always have a crystal clear sense the geography and physical relationships of everybody and everything thats happening. It's honestly pretty impressive. Especially when you think of how much Nolan struggles with that stuff when working on a way simpler canvas.

The guy can take something as basic as a giant bat-tank chasing a huge van on a deserted city street (or whatever that scene was in the dark knight that people clowned on) and leave you confused about, like, how many vehicles are involved or where the fuck they are.

is the man a bat or is the bat a man?

I *think* the young kid was supposed to grow up to be RPatz's character.

This whole film reminded me of a time when i was at a hotel and this guy came over and started aggressively hitting on my date and was doing sleight of hand close up magic and every time he finished a trick he stared at me like "HOW ABOUT THAT?!?!" and after the third trick and the third time he asked "any idea how that happened? want to see it again?" I said "i take it you practice this stuff a lot" and he found that simultaneously offensive and boring and went to get my date drinks and i think we left.

SO much expository over so much "serious smart stuff" and so much left unexplained for no reason except *handwaving gestures*

so much that was so obvious: pretty clear that he was fighting himself in the first freeport battle, just not why or how; pretty clear that rpatz was FROM THE FUTURE and that washington hired him; pretty clear whenever some "you'll see this again backwards!" shit was going on because they labeled it with visual highlighter

so much that i'm willing to put up with if not for the impossible cardinal sin with an action sci-fi extravaganza like this: it was pretty boring.

lol. yeah this was so bad.

i knew he was fighting himself, yeah. it was telegraphed for sure

someone's a little cranky
https://www.cnet.com/news/christopher-nolan-hbo-max-is-the-worst-streaming-service/

taken a half-formed idea and built an action movie around it because he thinks a particular effect looks cool

i thought this was an interesting comment because that's how i've always assumed predator happened! some cgi wonk figured out how to do the active camouflage effect and they figured out a movie around it. and despite that, it's one of the best movies ever, definitely in my sci fi top 10, and the sequel definitely in the top 20. i don't have any proof this is how predator actually happened, just guessing here, but i imagine there's at least a few good sci fi / fantasy / horror movies where the effect came first and they built the film around it.

still haven't seen tenet, as a physics teacher and spy movie fan who can tolerate nolan for the most part i was pretty excited for this. i really like the concept of a bond movie built around reversing the flow of entropy, sad to hear that this movie apparently sucks so bad

it is funny to me though that ppl in the future can figure out how to break the most basic law of thermodynamics (ie reverse the direction of entropy) but ... can't solve global warming? you'd figure if you can reverse the flow of heat you could probably work out how to cool down the earth without needing to obliterate it?!?

then again idk what i expected, interstellar definitely had some embarrassingly bad physics in it (gravity on this planet js strong enough to noticeably warp time, yet we can take off and land in a shuttle with a reaction engine that doesn't look like it could make escape velocity on earth)

yeah, anything that doesn't fit the program is basically given the "but more importantly" treatment

that CNET interview is rich. "Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker's work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don't even understand what they're losing. Their decision makes no economic sense."

...If you're just tuning in, this is distribution advice from the guy who insisted on burning $100m of WB money by insisting his movie get a theatrical release during an airborne deathvirus pandemic

this is a bad james bond movie with sci-fi guns added

that's how i've always assumed predator happened! some cgi wonk figured out how to do the active camouflage effect and they figured out a movie around it

In fact, remarkably, there's no CGI in Predator at all.

still haven't seen tenet, as a physics teacher and spy movie fan who can tolerate nolan for the most part i was pretty excited for this. i really like the concept of a bond movie built around reversing the flow of entropy, sad to hear that this movie apparently sucks so bad

it's actually good

This whole film reminded me of a time when i was at a hotel and this guy came over and started aggressively hitting on my date and was doing sleight of hand close up magic and every time he finished a trick he stared at me like "HOW ABOUT THAT?!?!" and after the third trick and the third time he asked "any idea how that happened? want to see it again?" I said "i take it you practice this stuff a lot" and he found that simultaneously offensive and boring and went to get my date drinks and i think we left.

this guy sounds awesome

my man 😎

"the guy who insisted on burning $100m of WB money by insisting his movie get a theatrical release during an airborne deathvirus pandemic"

A selfless act to save cinema you mean.

I half-watchec a dload copy of this while playing Civ and not paying much attention and I still figured out he was fighting himself in that first bit and then it was like "oh ok its a rick and morty episode with car chases" and lost interest.

AND IT WAS SO BLOODY NOISY.

i'm very glad I didn't pay money to see this in a theater. it was groanworthy. and how this is Nolan's most expensive film is beyond me; I guess blowing things up costs a lot, but it wasn't visually stunning at all. Dunkirk, Interstellar, and Inception are all more interesting to look at (as well as being better movies)

this may piss some of you off but the early-on realization for me watching this was the sensation fo sitting through a 2 1/2 hour Hideo Kojima intro. Same tangential connections to common sense, knotty dialogue, pointless relationships, pseudo-intellectual intrigues but none of the actual gameplay.

watching Tenet with the subtitles off like pic.twitter.com/D9ZQ1PNR3s

— Eric Allen Hatch (@ericallenhatch) December 23, 2020

So glad I saw this in a big theater with big sound

xp It did frequently remind me of a Kojima production (missing the military gear fetishization in yr list) without any of his gonzo redeeming qualities.

This is bone dry and so demanding of an audience to put in the work for what exactly? It’s a lot of algebra for a fucking Bond film.

I stuck with it for the spectacle. Practical effects shit is neat, especially on this level. Pattinson the only memorable human in this.

i kinda liked it! esp the highway heist car chase scene

It’s weird, one of the reasons I keep signing up for these Nolan joints is to see actual planes and cars and trucks shot with IMAX cameras doing crazy things with a lot of money, but I still feel like he’s strangely inept at putting together action scenes.

Watching this tonight. This really is Nolan’s attempt at a Bond film with time fuckery and an American protagonist, isn’t it? The fact that they have a catamaran race kinda gives it away.

Am just now reading through this thread and seeing that my basic feelings about this have been expounded upon thoroughly and viciously. Haha.

Watching Tenet on my toilet seat, as Christopher Nolan intended pic.twitter.com/PPhg6We35f

— Bertrand Fan (@bertrandom) January 24, 2021

i love when Kenneth Branagh's in my shitter

cmon, you know where that's going

ready to pounce!

The dialogue in this film, when it's not buried under layers of sound, is insane. It's so clipped and freighted with information it's like every conversation is between two people with a lifetime of shared history and semiotics, even when they've only just met. (Which, I suppose, is technically true given the nature of the relationships.) If you replaced each line with a functional description you wouldn't lose that much:

"Threat of violence"
"Sardonic response"
"Promise of violence"
"Cryptic allusion"
"Offer of a deal"

With dialogue that brittle though, if you lose even one word in twenty the whole thing quickly becomes incomprehensible. I had no idea what was going on with the plutonium 241, what The Protagonist's deal with Sator was meant to be. I like that this thread barely deals with the mechanics of the story but here's some other things that confused me, without even getting into the reverse entropy:

What was going on with the opera house siege (who were the terrorists, who were our guys rescuing, who were the other fake cops, what was the piece of the algoremuffin doing in the cloakroom)?
Why did he go and live in a wind turbine?
Why did he need all that subterfuge to meet the scientist, couldn't they just have set up an appointment?
The scientist says we don't know how to reverse entropy but by the end they're doing it left right and centre
Why did Priya Singh want Sator to assemble the algoremuffin?

Also the soundtrack was doing so much work generating tension and emotion in the action scenes, feels like cheating.

If it wasn't for the dazzling production values, this film would be in so bad it's good territory, and I think it will be seen as such once the superficial lustre has faded. A colossal misfire.

The soundtrack was indeed far too good for the movie.

it did feel a bit like playing a text-based computer game from the 80s in which very quickly you didn't even understand what game you were playing or what commands you could even type in and then threw it in the garbage can