Tenet (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2020)

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.

yeah, it's not better served by understanding it sadly

The captions are worth it just to get a sense of how hilariously ridiculous the dialogue is. A world where everyone talks in the same tortured, overwritten 3rd-tier Mamet-speak. I felt sympathy for actors who had to deliver it all with a straight face - its clearly one of those scripts where no one thought about how any of the lines would sound coming out of a human mouth until they were on set calling action.

So I haven’t watched much tv, let alone movies, in the last 3 yrs - just haven’t had the attention span - but I watched this on a plane last week and it was really good and even fun?! It’s pretty dry but I didn’t mind that. It was just nice to watch a movie that gives you an idea to think about afterwards. The whole inverse entropy thing was a pretty original take on time travel, regardless of how factual it was.

I watched The Northman right after this, and it was so fucking bad all round. I looked up reviews and couldn’t believe how high people were rating it. So corny.

I watched this recently and enjoyed the angle...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OoLokmqo0A

hmm! i do appreciate the idea that basically the equivalent of a GAMES Magazine elite-level brain-teaser, delivered as an action blockbuster, rather than an action blockbuster that founders on all its brain-teasing attempts.

did disagree with the idea of JDW as a blank slate. i thought he was great, but i definitely felt like this was his *next* huge star turn after BlackKklansman.

Xp that was a good analysis and summed up why I enjoyed the movie so much

Watching that also made me realize I’m a dumb fuck bc until he mentioned it, I didn’t realize JDW was Denzel’s son - the stupidest part is that while I was watching tenet I kept thinking how much he sounded just like Denzel but I never made the connection

This movie’s good as heck and that’s my most horrible opinion from the last couple years

In the last couple of months I've heard a couple of people say this is actually Nolan's best movie. It's making me want to revisit it even though I didn't really care for it too much the one time I saw it. Maybe this is the one movie in his filmography which actually gets better on repeat viewings? (probably not)

It's going to take me about a week to watch it but so far I'm enjoying more than the first time. Subtitles definitely helping.

silby is right, tenet is good now - in the sphere of timey-wimey films that need to be watched at least twice, anyway.

https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/eagle-mountain-california-ghost-town-18096768.php

Finally saw this today at an arthouse theater (had tried to watch it only a plane once and only got a few minutes in). Definitely want to re-watch with subtitles sometime, but enjoyed it a lot -- imagining Nolan pitching this as a James Bond movie.

Spoiler for the first two minutes of the movie: can't believe Nolan had the audacity to open this with a mass shooting at a theater with stadium seating.

*on a plane once

alternatively could be formulated as a clunky joke: can’t believe nolan had the honesty / prophetic power / foreshadowing skill to open this movie with a theater full of sleeping people

i like nolan and this movie tho

I'm gonna watch it tonight for the first time....after the Barbie screening lol

I feel like I might have liked this better if the theatre had closed captioning when I saw it

like what were the backwards people experiencing? what were they trying to do? i don't understand

this is a hilarious and perfect level of not getting it, since the backwards and forwards ppl are the same ppl, and the backward ppl in the second third are mostly just ppl you’ve already seen moving forward. so this implies you don’t understand what forward ppl are doing either!

tbf not understanding what the forward ppl are doing or saying is like 90% of the complaints about this movie

you have to remember it’s a nolan movie tho, so when you remember that the backward ppl in the second half are the forward ppl from first half, you think about what the second third forward ppl are trying to do, and then remember back that the first third forward ppl are reacting to the second third forward people going backward in the first third, and that’s why the backward ppl in the second third are doing what they’re doing, which is important, because then when you see the final third all those ppl going forward are now reacting to the backward ppl in the first half while the backward ppl in that part are doing incomprehensible shit because they’re mostly from the in world future and have foreknowledge of stuff that hasn’t happened yet to anyone, so basically you’re doing inception on your own big brain as an advanced viewer of big brain cinema

there’s LEVELS to nolan do u see which is why just like cremaster movies they’re always in weird big buildings with spiral staircases and odd hallways with weird forms of ingress and egress

xpost
as someone who hasn't seen the movie your last paragraph is the funniest thing I've read all day

what’s funny about restraint, masturbation, big spectacles, masturbation while restrained and a ten hour film cycle about your own testes?

also, i know this is the nolan thread but what’s so funny about mathew barney?

wokka wokka i know but honest to god i assume someone has already done this? the tweets write themselves (gif of the demolition derby in the guggenheim juxtaposed with dark knight returns batman making the joker’s long truck stand weirdly erect like a skyscraper)