Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

"but this thing is not fucking Inception, which was very good! or Interstellar, also very good!"

it's worse than that he's dead jim!

My 2014 comment about Interstellar:

in the future, space travelers will put their kids into stasis and then revive them when they return, so they won't miss out on attending all their ball games. kids will put their pets into stasis and revive them months later, just as a joke to confuse them. housewives will put leftovers into stasis instead of a refrigerator. laid off workers will be put in stasis to save on unemployment benefits. the possibilities are endless!

rip van wanko otm

Interstellar may not have made sense, but I thought it looked AWESOME with many striking and memorable images (the fucking bookcase! the dust on the desks...), and I got swept up in it. and I watched it at home! Inception with a packed summertime crowd was so much fun. I haven't seen it since then but those were two really fun action movies. I don't care if he's a dilettante! Brits get SO worked up over Nolan.

I've got to admit, I do like the idea of event movies that aren't just piggybacking on existing properties. And honestly even when Nolan *did* do that with the Batman movies he did it in such a way that made just as much of a cultural impact as Tim Burton's did, if not bigger. So if I'm being honest, I'd rather have a bunch of pretentious shell game twaddle that aims big and falls short than not. I mean, yeah, I'd still rather have a *good* movie first and foremost, but Nolan's not the only dude letting anyone down on that front.

I'm sympathetic to the new editor of Sight and Sound trying to grow - or even retain - a readership, but this cover is the absolute pits. Saviour of cinema, even with a question mark, fuck off.

https://i1.wp.com/thumbs2.imgbox.com/64/89/Vj6T0KQv_t.jpg?ssl=1

I mean, only if he literally means keeper of 70 mm or whatever.

just a very serious artist in a suit. lol he looks like such a prick! And there was me thinking S&S had a rep to protect, desperate stuff.

you know, the first 45 minutes of this where we had fun buddy comedy with (FINALLY) a non-white charimastic Bond and R Patz doing his usual good job were quite good fun. then you add on 100 more minutes of a very very bad sci-fi film which basically does the same thing as Bill & Ted or Red Dwarfs' Backwards minus all the joy, comedy and interest that this concept should provoke, and i just wanted to die. At one point i did think "hmmm am i just not clever enough to keep working this out" - and then i decided that no, it just wasn't WORTH me giving a shit to try to decipher. Intersteller had it's problems but it at least had enough going on in various ways to make me keep wanting to watch. this is just a total artistic bomb and it doesn't deserve having a worldwide pandemic as an excuse for it's shitty box office. also, Kenny Branagh seems to take his bad guy inspiration and accent from classic 90s vhs board game Atmosfear's Gatekeeper:

https://youtu.be/2lJYFLvjkuo?t=25

feel bad for Chadwick and R Patz because no amount of their heavy lifting can make this dull weight of shite worth watching

John David Washington

I agree it starts out strong, I think it all goes downhill not after but during the plane crash. It's astonishing he could make something so inherently exciting so fucking boring looking.

just as much of a cultural impact as Tim Burton's did, if not bigger.

damning with faint praise

Much bigger

Saw a good comment:

And the hubris of their release. The local theater here before Tenet was playing older films for $5 in about 50% of it’s houses to fill the void of content. All but Black Panther are gone now. Replaced by 9 screens of Tenet. NINE. I saw it at an early access screening and there were less than 10 people. What in god’s name made them think that at ONE single theater over 1,000 people were going to simultaneously show up to watch Christopher Nolan for over a week three times a day.

Yeah it's nuts. Makes it even more incredible that the movie only made $12mil Labor Day weekend.

Luckily it only cost eight trillion dollars.

that did piss me off actually. cos i sure as hell ain't sitting through Tenet again, and now not much else playing.

btw basically 30 of the last 60 minutes basically is the same as the ending of Interstellar, where the unseen characters doing things on screen in the present are later revealed to be the main characters visiting from the future

Makes it even more incredible that the movie only made $12mil Labor Day weekend.

― flappy bird, Monday, September 14, 2020 12:27 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

How much of that was IMAX upcharges?

But yes, Tenet is in the vein of Interstellar and Memento--in retrospect you can fit the individual parts back into a linear narrative, but the whole doesn't live up to the effort. And if you subtract the "reverse entropy" element you're left with a so-so espionage film. The only element I enjoyed was the crashing of a cargo plane into the freeport as part of the raid. (What's Norwegian for "I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue"?)

i really liked this, but i like p much all nolan movies and don't relate to the comments on the ilx threads. the plot was a little too complicated, i wish he'd dumbed it down a bit more or had one more scene of exposition. the explanation for the turnstile machine is really quick for how important it is

john david washington is amazing

this movie was not good! twilight was kinda ok but branagh's evil russian was fucking horrible. also looked like they ran out of money by the big battle scene at the end, serious kirk vs the gorn desert landscape vibes

otm. never had any urge to check this out again.

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