Film TENET

UnrelatedPsuedo said:
Aye. I can tolerate a pretentious “The dialogue is quiet to draw you in”. That’s a film making tool.

Having key essential dialogue inaudible because you decided that someone in an oxygen mask would be hard to understand?... It’s wrong headed.

The film makes more sense with subtitles on. So I have to add a reading element because his audio is so bad. It was ruined in theatres because there was no way to rewind to check what A character had said.

He’s wrong. But thinks the whole world is wrong. I’ve not heard a single person advocate for it being that bad.
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I need subtitles at the best of times because my house is a cacophony of kids playing games, jamming away on pianos or flutes etc. Wanted to get this on Prime to see what it was like but, surprise surprise, there didn't seem to be any closed captions for it.

Tried doing it with Dunkeld and all I could decipher from the *mmble mbmble BRRRRRAAAAAWWWWWWWW mbmle* was that some wee cnut in a plane was being an arsehole to a bunch of British tourists who were suntanning on a French beach.
 
The rip I downloaded had no audio issues, adjusted by the ripper I assume, but the film was still utter nonsense. Not hard to understand, just rubbish. What a waste of 2.5 hrs.

Maybe the crap sound in the cinema was to distract from how shit the film itself was.
 
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Was so hyped to watch this movie and was utterly disappointed. Saw the first hour just hoping that it will get better because it's Nolan and I loved his previous films.

Couldn't understand most of the audio (the audio equivalent of the GoT dark battle) and the scenes were transitioning WAY to fast to get an idea of what the story was, hardly any time to think about the last scene before the story quickly develops more.
 
It reminded me of that awful Netflix movie. In the shadow of the moon (i think that was it). Felt it was too much of a mindfeck to really appreciate it. I like Nolan but I feel like he tries to make smart movies for dump people. I felt the exposition throughout the movie was very similar to the end of interstellar where it could have been left to the audience to piece it together but Nolan didn’t trust them to do it

Overall I thought it was good but not great.
 
really enjoyed it, but i found it much more confusing than even memento. I understood the concepts enough, but there was a jarring feeling during a lot of the sequences where similar to when your stumped by a maths problem that's quite simply and you've done a million times before but for some reason its just not going in. something in my brain just cant comprehend the reversal stuff play out in real time.
 
I thought we established that the awful sound mixing is to cover up the noisy IMAX cameras.

But yeah not a film I think I'll get the urge to watch again soon.
 
CassiusClaymore said:
I thought we established that the awful sound mixing is to cover up the noisy IMAX cameras.

But yeah not a film I think I'll get the urge to watch again soon.
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Can't they just ask the cameras to be quieter?
 
The movie has some good things to like but unfortunately by the midway of it, it looked like Nolan was focusing on making the story as convoluted as possible rather than making it actually interesting. The inversion idea was cool, well, it was cool until this fecking interrogation scene midway in the movie and once this scene started, the implication of the idea went downhill.

I won't even talk about the last fight because midway of it I just lost interest in understanding who is hitting whom and what they are doing. It was a complete mess.

I found Inception and Interstellar to be easier to understand and follow, believe it or not. They were also more interesting stories than whatever story Tenet was telling.
 
One of the few movies I’ve ever stopped watching halfway through & have no intention of revisiting.

Crap.
 
Watched it for the first time about a week ago. Very disappointed. Seems like Nolan has been living in his head for too long. As a creative its easy to get lost in a vision and not see the wood for the trees and I think thats what happened here. It just couldn't be conveyed properly to the screen. ''Don't try to understand it, feel it''. Lazy. This is not Stanley Kubrick 2001 Space Odyssey.
 
ClaytonBlackmoorLeftPeg said:
I thought it was a good mystery, and kept me guessing. It’s been well over a year since I saw it, so can’t be specific. At the cinema at least, the sound issues didn’t seem to be as significant as others are reporting.
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Fair enough. The place I watched it, you couldn't hear shit in seemingly key scenes but I was able to understand by the end what was going on. I just found it to be a bit weak in comparison to some of his other stuff, it was like a try hard imitation of prime Nolan. I think in this film his major problem was the characters, I didn't care about any of them... and it was a long movie with plenty of opportunity to develop the characters.
 
ClaytonBlackmoorLeftPeg said:
At the cinema at least, the sound issues didn’t seem to be as significant as others are reporting.
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I believe the issue was that it was mixed in a way that would only make sense in perfect conditions, which most cinemas couldn't match. I watched it at home, which wasn't a comfortable experience either, but at least I could rewind and turn on subtitles.
 
Gringo said:
Watched it for the first time about a week ago. Very disappointed. Seems like Nolan has been living in his head for too long. As a creative its easy to get lost in a vision and not see the wood for the trees and I think thats what happened here. It just couldn't be conveyed properly to the screen. ''Don't try to understand it, feel it''. Lazy. This is not Stanley Kubrick 2001 Space Odyssey.
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Did he need a stronger production team to reign him in a bit maybe? He kicked up a stick when it looked like it would be streamed at home so would be a tough job.
 
I've watched it a couple of times now and the thing I hate the most about it is how low concept the whole reverse entropy thing is in the film. After the trailer I was genuinely expecting a film where the story was about a group of eco terrorists who could reverse entropy of objects at will. So the whole car chase scene would've been the Russian guy with a device that lets him make things go forward and backwards in time at will. I even thought that was where the story was going in the first act.

But no, it's just a standard machine that you walk in to and it makes you now go backwards in time. Ok. Pretty fecking boring if I'm honest. Considering it's from the "genius mind" of Nolan it's actually a pretty basic story. The only thing confusing about it is how shitly it's told, almost like he doesn't know what the feck he's writing about.

Really let down by the film as it had so much potential and ultimately it was a very narrow minded story with some pretty poor set pieces and a third act that made absolutely no sense.
 
Heardy said:
Watched it last night on Sky - genuinely didn’t have a clue what was going on.
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No need to thank me.

In an opera house in foreign land the CIA are sent, with the help of some local assets, to find another CIA who has been compromised. This CIA guy has part of the deus ex machina that somehow destroys the planet, but it's best not to ask questions. The whole thing goes wrong when the local assets turn out to be bad guys and are looking for the deus ex machina, which is now missing because it's best not to ask questions.

Denzel Washington's son, who seems to have had a lobotomy since Blackkklansman, wakes up on a boat because his death pill wasn't real and now he works for a group called Tenet. He gets shown a hand signal and code word that gets used twice in the upcoming ten minutes and then never used again because it's best not to ask questions. He meets a sparkly vampire who surprises everyone who only knows him as the sparkly vampire from the sparkly vampire movies because it turns out that he's not actually, as we were led to believe since the sparkly vampire days, a massive whiny cnut. They find an arm's dealer who tells Lobotomy Washington to find some nuclear material and give it to the guy who is the boss of the folk who betrayed him in foreign land. They decide to get to him by using the very tall blonde woman who, based on every role I've ever seen her in and because Nolan has never understood what woman are, will now be called Denzel in Distress because it's a pun and I'm fecking amazing at puns. She also has nice pins which also autcorrects as puns on my phone but I'm not sure why I'm telling you that.

So they go to a place where the picture that is being used to blackmail Denzel in Distress is and Denzel's son - feck it this will be too confusing I need another name for her tall blonde woman who always needs saving from a man. They don't get the photo even though that was why they went there and instead find a machine that you go in one side and come out of the other, even though it's made patently clear later on that the process to do this is different than what transcribes in the fight scene, but it's best not to ask questions.

They finally meet the bad guy, who turns out to be that actor that is in lots of stuff but you never remember because he has the appearance and acting ability of a shoe with a speech bubble beside that says "I'm very angry raaarrrr". They then mess up a driving lesson and end up giving the bad guy the final piece of his Deus ex machina and now he's going to destroy the world and the woman who needs to be saved all the time gets shot so they have to go backwards in time so she can be healed which will take about a week and then they need to bring her back to forward time so they decide to go back to the place where the picture is and use the machine again but this is when we discover that Lobotomy Man is fighting himself, which we already knew because Nolan as a writer has all the subtetly of a foil wrapper in a microwave, and then they fight and escape and then get back into the forward universe it's very badly filmed and difficult to keep track of its best not to ask questions.

Then they have to stop Evil Werthers Originals Man From destroying the world using the same pincer movement he used against them, where half his team to through an event backwards and relay intel to the ones going forwards, and so they land in his hometown where they fight......nothing as far as I saw. But they fire their guns and blow up a building twice for no reason other than because it looked cool as feck. Then sparkly vampire sacrifices himself so Washington can save the world and they all leave happily ever after. Oh, and the woman who always needs saving gets her redemption arc in the only way Nolan thinks woman can which is by fecking up the entire plan and almost destroying the world because she gets emotional and kills her husband.

Then Neil says "I'm going to go back in time and get shot in the head now, bye bye" and Washington doesn't say anything that a human would remotely respond with as their parting words because Nolan was raised in a test tube and his only interaction with humans is his brother who is equally weird.

The film finishes off with some thing about how the events in the movie happened without anyone knowing about it which is exactly how I wish this film had been in general. Then you realise that Neil must have somehow saved Washington at the opera House as well which means he must have gone back and forth in those entropy machines for ages and I keep asking why they didn't just end the film with a set piece in the opera House to go full circle but it's best not to ask questions fecking hell this film was shite.
 
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Why did you watch it multiple times, birdman?
 
Maagge said:
Why did you watch it multiple times, birdman?
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Twice, second time with subtitles because the missus wanted to watch it. But I understood it all after the first time because of my big brain. But unfortunately it turns out the movie is just really, really shit.
 
Got round to watching this movie. It was convoluted shite. Some bits were fun. Some of the implications were pretty interesting viz relationships and whatnot but overall it was just a big mess. The backwards forwards fighting sequences didn't really work as visual spectacle either so even the set pieces were underwhelming. I think I followed it for the most part. Bit I didn't really understand was why the guy went to do pull ups in a windmill. Was he putting himself out of the way so his future self could take his place? Think the bloke who sacrificed himself at the end had a more interesting arc. Film should've been centred around him in my opinion.
 
Just watched this, can't believe it took me so long.

Nolan cannot go wrong when he works with time - the man is the grandaddy of time-based plots in sci-fi movies at this stage. I loved the whole movie. The tension, the mechanics, the action sequences, the emotional reveal at the end.

Pattinson was great, the ending where he basically tells Denzel Jr he's known him for a very long time (clearly as Max) hit home hard and made sense about so many things. His knowledge of Denzel Jr's habits, his emotional involvement in saving his mother, his motivation for the entire plan. Felt like Pattinson was the lead, after that reveal. The scene where Pattinson takes off his assailant's mask and lets him go kinda made it obvious he'd seen Denzel Jr, and the moment they explain the turnstiles, it was obvious that it was Denzel Jr. fighting himself on the other side as well. I was in Oslo recently, at the Opera House, and loved how both featured in the film. I also have a weird obsession with seagulls after having read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach, and loved how they were flying in reverse. The car chase was extremely cool, as was the fight at the end, with the same building being affected both in forward and reverse time.

Thematically, I loved how the concept of 'what's happened has happened' did not stop the leads from acting out of belief and faith, despite not knowing the big picture, and despite not being sure if their actions will even change anything. The hand has to move for the bullet to be caught, and that means our actions mean something. I felt that was crucial, since no one would walk into a turnstile otherwise. 'Hope' is something Nolan loves playing around with.

Other directors would stop at the first reversal, but this Nolan - he likes multiple levels of depth. So of course, we had multiple inversions within the first one, and the biggest and most impactful one being revealed at the end. I had heard people talk about needing multiple rewatches - but I felt like I got everything in first go. Sure, I would look at Pattinson differently in the second go, but the mechanics themselves seemed clear. Either that or I don't even know what I don't know.

I can't wait for Nolan's next, he's just insane.

Edit: Just realized where I had seen Sator before - in Hamlet, as part of a course on Shakespeare.
 
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Gandalf Greyhame said:
Just watched this, can't believe it took me so long.

Nolan cannot go wrong when he works with time - the man is the grandaddy of time-based plots in sci-fi movies at this stage. I loved the whole movie. The tension, the mechanics, the action sequences, the emotional reveal at the end.

Pattinson was great, the ending where he basically tells Denzel Jr he's known him for a very long time (clearly as Max) hit home hard and made sense about so many things. His knowledge of Denzel Jr's habits, his emotional involvement in saving his mother, his motivation for the entire plan. Felt like Pattinson was the lead, after that reveal. The scene where Pattinson takes off his assailant's mask and lets him go kinda made it obvious he'd seen Denzel Jr, and the moment they explain the turnstiles, it was obvious that it was Denzel Jr. fighting himself on the other side as well. I was in Oslo recently, at the Opera House, and loved how both featured in the film. I also have a weird obsession with seagulls after having read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach, and loved how they were flying in reverse. The car chase was extremely cool, as was the fight at the end, with the same building being affected both in forward and reverse time.

Thematically, I loved how the concept of 'what's happened has happened' did not stop the leads from acting out of belief and faith, despite not knowing the big picture, and despite not being sure if their actions will even change anything. The hand has to move for the bullet to be caught, and that means our actions mean something. I felt that was crucial, since no one would walk into a turnstile otherwise. 'Hope' is something Nolan loves playing around with.

Other directors would stop at the first reversal, but this Nolan - he likes multiple levels of depth. So of course, we had multiple inversions within the first one, and the biggest and most impactful one being revealed at the end. I had heard people talk about needing multiple rewatches - but I felt like I got everything in first go. Sure, I would look at Pattinson differently in the second go, but the mechanics themselves seemed clear. Either that or I don't even know what I don't know.

I can't wait for Nolan's next, he's just insane.

Edit: Just realized where I had seen Sator before - in Hamlet, as part of a course on Shakespeare.
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I personally really liked it even though it seems to not have been people's cup of tea. Agree on all your points, for me my favourite part was in the middle with the "backwards" interrogation scene that basically flipped the film on its head.
 
flameinthesun said:
I personally really liked it even though it seems to not have been people's cup of tea. Agree on all your points, for me my favourite part was in the middle with the "backwards" interrogation scene that basically flipped the film on its head.
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Loved that scene, yep. The blood on the window next to the bullet hole was haunting as Sator held the gun to Kat's head. You know the bullet has been shot already, you know that's her blood. It is going to happen, and there is no avoiding it. Surely she's dead?
At the last moment, Sator gets her off the chair and shoots her in the midriff instead, subverting expectations with a sigh of a relief. That's a 30-second dynamic you will never get in any other movie.
 
Gandalf Greyhame said:
Just watched this, can't believe it took me so long.

Nolan cannot go wrong when he works with time - the man is the grandaddy of time-based plots in sci-fi movies at this stage. I loved the whole movie. The tension, the mechanics, the action sequences, the emotional reveal at the end.

Pattinson was great, the ending where he basically tells Denzel Jr he's known him for a very long time (clearly as Max) hit home hard and made sense about so many things. His knowledge of Denzel Jr's habits, his emotional involvement in saving his mother, his motivation for the entire plan. Felt like Pattinson was the lead, after that reveal. The scene where Pattinson takes off his assailant's mask and lets him go kinda made it obvious he'd seen Denzel Jr, and the moment they explain the turnstiles, it was obvious that it was Denzel Jr. fighting himself on the other side as well. I was in Oslo recently, at the Opera House, and loved how both featured in the film. I also have a weird obsession with seagulls after having read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach, and loved how they were flying in reverse. The car chase was extremely cool, as was the fight at the end, with the same building being affected both in forward and reverse time.

Thematically, I loved how the concept of 'what's happened has happened' did not stop the leads from acting out of belief and faith, despite not knowing the big picture, and despite not being sure if their actions will even change anything. The hand has to move for the bullet to be caught, and that means our actions mean something. I felt that was crucial, since no one would walk into a turnstile otherwise. 'Hope' is something Nolan loves playing around with.

Other directors would stop at the first reversal, but this Nolan - he likes multiple levels of depth. So of course, we had multiple inversions within the first one, and the biggest and most impactful one being revealed at the end. I had heard people talk about needing multiple rewatches - but I felt like I got everything in first go. Sure, I would look at Pattinson differently in the second go, but the mechanics themselves seemed clear. Either that or I don't even know what I don't know.

I can't wait for Nolan's next, he's just insane.

Edit: Just realized where I had seen Sator before - in Hamlet, as part of a course on Shakespeare.
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How did you watch it ?I remember seeing it in the cinema and struggled to hear the dialogue due to the music being louder than the conversations at times
Was the case on your viewing?
 
Sylar said:
How did you watch it ?I remember seeing it in the cinema and struggled to hear the dialogue due to the music being louder than the conversations at times
Was the case on your viewing?
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I watched it on Netflix, with subtitles. I suppose the audio was equalized as well. I'll admit I could not have followed their quiet accents with the background score and explosions and car chases otherwise.
 
Pattinson was the highlight. This was basically Nolan going full Nolan (you never go full Nolan). Batshit premise that makes less and less sense the more you think about it.

One thing that doesn't get the recognition it deserves is the mental choreography, whether it be fight scenes or the part when they're walking away from the plane crash. An insane amount of work went into making it look right.

Now that he's got it out of his system let's hope he'll give us some more classics.
 
One thing I don't think is mentioned enough about this film is just how boring it got. I guess that's partly due to how incomprehensible it was, but for the last hour or so I just wanted it to end.
 
Watched this a few times recently and got my head around everything. I think it's a masterpiece. It's made me even more excited for Oppenheimer too.
 
I finally got round to watching “Tenet” and found it a bit of a mess. Too much concept and not enough storytelling or development of characters (the motivation for Washington’s character to want to save Debicki‘s was particularly unconvincing). Not particularly original either beyond the time flow concept - at times, it felt like I was rewatching “The Night Manager” (Debicki plays basically the same character in both) or a Bond film with the usual voodoo science McGuffin.

We’re probably on safer ground with a film based on real life like “Oppenheimer” , although, as with “Dunkirk”, I doubt Nolan will be able to resist splicing up the linear flow of the story.
 
Watched this last night. Found it to be utter nonsense while also thoroughly enjoyable.
 
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