Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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

The entropy reversal is a pretty neat idea - if you like that kind of thing - but I don't know if you could ever make a movie with it that would appeal to people who don't fancy multiple rewatches and drawing timelines and the like.

when introduced it is actually a really entertaining idea, then about a half hour in, I realized what they were doing with it wasn't interesting to me anymore.

It would have made a great watch if it had just been a freewheeling, different location every 15 mins, mildly techy Bond-style thing.

the chart-drawing crowd has given up on nolan ever since inception didn't make sense when examined closely.

xp and with audible dialogue.

the problem with asking logical questions about this film is someone on the internet would love to give you answers

Hey Forks, did you catch Synchronic?

i haven't yet! it's available to me, just having a hard time getting to it.
i love Benson and Moorhead to death but the reviews have not been strong...

I have it lined up for later, I'm a big fan of B&M too.

they haven't made anything i haven't liked yet

The entropy reversal is a pretty neat idea

I don't think it was at all. I think Nolan thought "hey, wouldn't backwards fight scenes look rad" and then made up some utter bullshit to justify doing that.

christopher nolan is the drake of filmmaking

^^^ something my girl Jasmine said that seemed correct somehow

U da fuckin we worst
Baby u da fucking worst

“Tom and Jerry made more money its opening weekend than Tenet”
https://www.vulture.com/2021/03/tom-and-jerry-has-good-opening-weekend-at-box-office.html

Surprised it didn't get nominated for any Oscars.

The only noms I think it deserves are music for sure, maaaaybe cinematography?

It wins the award for movie causing the most deaths

it's up for two oscars isn't it?

lol abanana

still amazed at the logic of his tantrum: insisting on releasing a movie during a time when most people are legally prohibited from seeing it vs waiting until this summer when people are going to be flocking to theaters to see any old dogshit 10 times in a row just bc theyll be excited to get out of the house

Since the other Synchronic mention is in the post-2005 horror thread, adding here due to above comments. Liked this a lot. The jump edits worked well with the theme, and the characters were sympathetic and decently acted. Lots of cool images. Look forward to their next film. It's on Hoopla, for anyone using that US library app.

wow this was utterly, supremely baffling. genuinely had no idea what was happening for most of the running time. maybe i'm dumb, but at a fundamental level, i just straight up did not "get" the reversal gimmick, how it worked, how people related to it or worked around it, how you would make weapons with it or execute plans with it, what was going on when people were parallel to each other in those rooms with the big goofy steampunk machines, or any of the light-bulb "wooooah" realizations i imagine i was supposed to have during the setpieces that involve action going both directions (?)... just utterly totally lost. fundamentally could not tell the difference between people going forward in time versus backwards --- like what were the backwards people experiencing? what were they trying to do? i don't understand.

but over top of that, the actual stakes or goals of most of the big scenes escaped me. okay so he's going back in time! or maybe forward! to get the case from the guy at the site of the last car chase! or maybe he's leaving it there? before the scene happened? or is this like ten minutes after that scene and the case is just like, still there? or maybe this is days before the chase? wait why did they bring her back in time with them again? and on and on...

obviously the main problem here is that, easily, 1/3 to 1/2 of the dialogue was indecipherable through the mud of the sound mix. which seems like a mistake when your plot depends on keeping people up to speed with a confusing gimmick and also a whole lot of what i gather may have been plot twists or maybe even character development (the latter seems doubtful). more the fool me for watching this on the big screen in 70mm as the director intended it --- being able to switch on closed-captioning might have been a game-changer.

i wish i could say it at least worked for me as pure action shot-on-film practical-effects spectacle or something. i'll say that i rode the general momentum being confused but not actively annoyed for most of the running time, but then it hit the climax and all throughout it my brain was overtaxed trying to grasp the action or give meaning to the fast-paced onslaught of overstuffed images by extrapolating my always limited comprehension of the original, unhelpful, "inverted bullet" demonstration scene. might have been cool if the guy giving the briefing on their "pincer operation" were not just as muffled and overwhelmed in the mix as everything else. ultimately this was like watching Inception in a language i don't speak, turned up very loud, and recut in random order.

more the fool me for watching this on the big screen in 70mm as the director intended it --- being able to switch on closed-captioning might have been a game-changer.

Yeah, watching it on a laptop with subtitles made its dopey-ass plot crystal clear.