Tenet (Christopher Nolan, September 3, 2020) Movie • Page 54

Memento was such a mind-blowing movie to see as a teenager. That experience alone made me a Nolan fan for life.

 

Inception is fun. I enjoy it. That is all.

 

I thought this was good. My favorite Nolan film since Inception; wish I could’ve seen it in a theater.

Kinda feel like some of the talk of it being confusing were a little overblown? Granted, I had subtitles on, but I felt like I always had enough to get the broad strokes & be in for the ride.

 

I honestly missed at least half the dialogue in the theater. This is also no where near as good as Dunkirk.

 

I can’t really compare the two in terms of, like, objective quality or whatever. All I know is that Dunkirk was very much so not a film for me, while this was. *shrug*

 

I was REALLY not a big fan of Dunkirk at all

I haven't seen Memento, Following, Insomnia or Interstellar but for the rest I'd go

1. The Dark Knight
2. Batman Begins
3. The Prestige
4. Inception
5. Tenet
6. The Dark Knight Rises
7. Dunkirk

 

fools

 

Interstellar
Dark Knight
Prestige
Batman Begins
Inception
Memento
Tenet
Dunkirk
Dark Knight Rises

 

I watched with subtitles on so I didn't miss any of the dialogue, but as far as actual mechanics of inversion and how any of the shit actually works, or also what is actually going on within a scene, I honestly felt like I only ever had a very basic understanding of what was going on. Like if I had to describe how much I understood what was happening I would gauge it at like 10-20%. Maybe I'm just dumb though, or I was missing stuff.

I still very much enjoyed the movie, but like I said before, I absolutely love the two main leads and I love Christopher Nolan's style of shooting a film, so those things alone do like ¾ of the heavy lifting for me.

The whole thing struck me as a little bit silly, but in a very fun way.

I haven't the foggiest fucking idea what a 'Temporal Pincer Movement' is though, and all kidding aside I haven't the slightest clue what was going on in the climactic battle at the end. And not in the typical hollywood sense of hyperkinetic editing and spatial orientation problems within a scene - I could see all of the players and knew where they were in relation to each other. I just had no idea what the hell any of them were doing there, but whatever happened with that building looked pretty damn cool.

 

I liked it. Was lost for like 60% of it. Full of eye-rolling exposition dialogue but I didn’t mind because the movie’s so propulsive — in Inception, there’s several 10-minute sequences that are just a drag to me because the story stops to explain Nolan bullshit; in this, the story is just propelling you forward and the Nolan bullshit dialogue is just thrown all over the place throughout. Makes it way harder to understand and easier to enjoy, IMO.

Easily the worst characterization of any Nolan movie — I mean the protagonist is “The Protagonist”, so I guess he’s not exactly going for three-dimensional character arcs. But the setpieces are incredible, Pattinson’s insanely charismatic, and I had fun just sitting back and letting this big ridiculous movie give me a concussion.

Seriously it’s like Nolan turned himself into a drug and then snorted it before making this.

 

Interstellar on top my man

 

I really liked this response:

 

I think the broad stroke answer to what temporal pincer movements are is relatively straightforward. You know how pincers have the two sides, like scissors & whatnot, to grab things? It’s just a two-pronged attack using that basic principle, where the one prong goes forward through time while the other does the fancy backwards stuff.

As for the specifics of that particular temporal pincer movement strategy... I don’t recall what the deal was, outside of it being helpful having a team moving in both directions, since the threat could move in either direction. But, that was good enough for me, especially since I had a good sense of the goal, motivation, & perspective of both the Protagonist & Kat.

 

One of my least favorite Nolan films. I feel like the interior logic of inception made way more sense than this. Like reverse entropy, time goes backwards, got it, the whole “will” aspect seemed glossed over, and why they’d annihilate each other didn’t really make sense? It’s fiction so it’s nitpicky stuff but it just didn’t feel satisfying the same way inception and interstellar did. Nolan’s films always deserve a rewatch IMO so my opinion might change.

Also I actually really liked interstellar’s ending and not sure why it got so much hate. Temporal and spatial coordinates flip in a black hole and they just wanted to do some very loose over the top visualization of that which I thought was cool.

 

I honestly really liked the preemptive hand waving of certain potential questions (which was funny to see when I already knew a lot of people hadn’t been ok with that). Like, I love that this was in the scene with the first explanation:



I know results vary for this kinda suspension of disbelief stuff, but I feel like I got everything I needed explanation-wise in the film. There’s stuff that gets messy if you try to think it out too far, but that’s true for so much of this kinda genre storytelling. I personally had enough rules, stakes, etc., for the ride to not break down & for me to stay in it.

Reminds me of this quote by one of my favorite comic writers, which I think about all the time with these kinda sci-fi, fantasy, whatever stories:

 

the problems with this film are less due to comprehension of plot and are more to do with how dry and plodding it is until the last 30-40 minutes

 

I disagree with that soooooo hardcore.

 

There are three incredible action sequences in the first two hours.

 

Honestly the runtime flew by for me, I didn’t think it was plodding at all

 

"incredible action scenes" (just going with it, though I disagree with the exception of one) and a plodding movie are not mutually exclusive

 

I personally didn’t find it dry at all. The cast, beautiful scenery, compelling visuals, score, etc., kept me fully engaged. I just found the whole thing, I dunno... really cool.

 

Maybe on a second viewing it'll drag a bit more since I won't have to constantly try to process the plot and mechanics, but for me the movie had this constant momentum that rarely let up. I didn't feel the runtime at all.

 

Also, that fucking score.
All timer.

 

It's blaring but also like... hypnotic and entrancing. It worked very well for this. I'm curious if I'd enjoy listening to it on its own.

 

I wasn't trying to suggest that my not understanding what the hell was going on was a negative for me. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie and can't wait to watch it again. I would say I loved it. But usually when I have that strong of a positive response to a movie I understood almost all of what I've just watched, and I definitely did not for this movie. There were huge swaths of it where I didn't have a damn clue what was happening or why or how.

It is just that if someone says that they didn't understand it at all and that was a negative for them I can completely see that, because I didn't understand it either.

Also want to point out that I'm not one of those annoying people who says this movie isn't confusing as hell. The actors flat out say that they didnt know what the hell was going on some of the time and Nolan had to repeatedly explain it to them.