Finally watched Tenet. After all the hype and discussion on Reddit when it was released, I was expecting some sort of neigh-on impenetrable profound piece of cinema, but it’s just Primer with action sequences.
I watched it on my phone to spite the director.
Wasn’t worth perpetuating a pandemic.
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I enjoyed it. I’m a sucker for time travel concepts. This one was done in a fun way. So, it has one fan at least.
I don’t really understand why people act like I’m bullshitting when I say it wasn’t confusing. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t linear, but I understood the basic concept.
There are parts that go “forwards” in time and there are parts that go “backwards” in time and the streams of events influence each other when they meet. The relative perception of the characters is that all events go “forwards”. Some characters pass through the macguffin machine and their flow starts going backwards, and they influence themselves in both directions. Past this, you just have to watch the story happen.
The only confusing thing about the movie is the visuals. We’re not exactly used to watching shit happen backwards so shit looks weird sometimes. The big fight with a ton of soldiers was probably the worst at that.
I’m still convinced that it was only the soldiers moving forward and backward in that scene and no one else was there.
The only confusing part was when people were speaking (until I turned captions on).
I swear Nolan needs to listen to his audio team more often.
That’s his secret: he doesn’t have an audio team.
I enjoyed it, but I agree with you. Nothing too groundbreaking in it.
Chris Nolan automatically gets a pass at this point for “groundbreaking” even when it’s boring. I don’t get it.
You have to watch it 10 Times, in reverse
It was groundbreaking in terms of how some of the action looked I guess but the rest of the movie was straight to DVD quality with top class talent due to the director.
I still can’t get over the ridiculous audio mixing…the dialog in some scenes is virtually inaudible, which is the last thing you want in a movie with such a convoluted plot. I love most of Nolan’s work but Tenet is by far my least favourite.
That’s a good take, I hadn’t thought of comparing it to Primer. In Primer, it’s clear Shane Carruth thought out all the implications of his time travel system. I don’t get that feeling from Tenet, where it feels like Nolan thought it would be cool and didn’t go further. What you end up with is a movie that’s fun while you’re watching it but falls apart once it’s over and you think about it for more then 5 minutes.
The scene I think is the most egregious is the air terminal fight. It’s a cool idea in theory but a fist fight between two individuals going in opposite directions in time would immediately result in a paradox. It’s hard to explain but it essentially boils down to the fact that both fighters are reacting to their opponents reaction to the move they’re about to make.
As real SF I preferred Primer.
I really disliked this movie, there were some really well done scenes but I feel like it was just a bad film.
The whole movie is about palindromes and we don’t finish where we begin.
The main character doesn’t get a name and explanations are just poor “don’t think about it”. Even if we weren’t to think about it it could have been presented better.
Washington was boring in this, and he isn’t boring generally speaking. Robert Pattinson is probably the best in this but he can’t make it interesting.
I was disappointed despite some fantastic scenes.
Great concept, bad script, fantastic screenplay making the most of the terrible script with some truly great set pieces, great cast, great visuals, terrible audio mixing, sums it up for me.
I’m surprised that you say that there was a lot of hype when it was released. I remember seeing a lot of hype before it came out, but all of the discussion I saw when it was released was just complaints about the audio mixing and lack of character development.
For the record I like the movie as an action movie. I feel like it’s at a similar quality to most of his Batman movies and Inception in that sense. I just don’t think it was ever intended to be profound or particularly deep (outside of the standard complexity that comes with a time travel story)
I was disappointed. Nolan usually does a good job of grounding his “concept” movies in human personalities and relationship. I understand how he was trying to do that in Tenet, but it just didn’t work. The result was a movie full of action set pieces without anything to hold them together.
Patrick Willems made a good video about Tenet. He calls it a Vibes Movie, in his explanation all the secret agent movies, like Bond, Mission Impossible, are vibes movies where the plot is actually meaningless. Tenet ups this to eleven. IMHO Nolan is a serial perpetrator of over his own head concepts, but I nevertheless like his movies because the’re at least not franchises.
I want to watch it again. Maybe going in not expecting certain things to happen that drives a story. Like you know, character motivation.
But to watch it like it’s a visual jigsaw puzzle.
Still haven’t seen it yet, but I wonder if it’s not reminiscent of his earlier film Memento, which also played with time, in a way. It’s not literal time travel, but it at least plays with timing before the viewer realizes what’s going on.
It is completely different from Memento in every way
Fleur Delacour says it best in the movie:
Don’t try to understand it.
That was a bad scene
