Tenet (Christopher Nolan, September 3, 2020) Movie • Page 55

yeah those are fair points. For this movie it's not necessarily that I was taken out of it, just left wanting more - hard to pin point what that is but I think it's just a very subjective thing. Interstellar was doing cool things based in physics, Inception was doing cool things based on dreaming (I think the time thing there is relatable at least), Tenet was harder to pin point in that sense. One big thing is "if I allow a world in which A can happen/exist, I reasonably expect the responses/plot to go like B" which this movie did well enough.

 

I don't know where these amazing action scenes ya'll are talking about are. The "we put a plane in neutral and pushed it into a storage crate"? The awkward fight (dance) scene in the hallway? The "we pinned some cars as we traveled at a leisurely pace down a highway"?

I could give fuck all about the logic of it, I'll be fully in if it leads to some cool shit but everything about this movie is boring

other than the score, I'll agree the score is great.

 

the car scene was pretty great. and I did like the turnstile scene even if logically it was dumb as hell. the last 30 minutes were cool. the rest was pretty drab.

 

whoaaa now I see this thing is 2 1/2 hours

 

Agree this was fairly boring.

 

i mean bruce or alfred is probably pumping those tires, no?

 

Everything that happens around the midway point is great, other than that this is some really pretentious shit

 

Lol what. I feel like it is actively trying NOT to be pretentious.

 

Yeah, I disagree with but understand some of the criticisms in here, but it’s definitely not what I’d define as “pretentious.”

Because of Nolan’s tastes & sensibilities, it has a certain energy that I could see being misinterpreted from afar... but, in a lot of ways, this is the non-Batman, non-Inception film that feels the most a product of someone who loves James Bond, Star Wars, Richard Donner’s Superman, & yeah, Michael Bay. (Isn’t he also a Fast & Furious fan?)

This is how Nolan does blockbusters, for better or worse, lol.

 

I'm so curious what comes next for him, especially assuming he leaves WB (which seems pretty likely). If he ends up at Universal, I'd love to see what he would do with one of their monster properties.

 

Hm. I dunno. I’ve been guilty before of imagining him doing different franchises (still a little curious what he’d do with a Star War, though I want him nowhere near Disney now). But, at this point I don’t know if I want him to touch a preexisting franchise. With how franchise-driven Hollywood is, I appreciate his ability to make his own name a strong enough brand.

All that being said, those monsters are an interesting proposal, lol.

 

dunkirk and the batman movies are nolan doing blockbusters. interstellar and inception are nolan being pretentious. this is between the two and not really either (the box office can tell you definitively it's not a blockbuster), but it's closer to the latter of the two.

it's not a qualitative thing. dark knight rises is my least favorite of his and it's objectively his biggest blockbuster type movie.

 

If I had to describe Nolan films as pretentious (a word I don’t use much when talking art or entertainment anymore), I’d use it for Interstellar & Dunkirk long before I would for Inception or this, lol.

I guess I don’t understand how you’re defining “pretentious” is those are the films you’d apply it to. Like, nothing within Tenet itself screams self-important to me. Feel like that kinda take is influenced by things outside of the film way more than the film itself. If anything, the premise of the film & blatant refusal to deal with implications of such tech existing feels like something out of a silver age comic book, which is one of the least pretentious types of entertainment I know.

 

This definitely felt to me like Nolan having a lot of fun and wanting the audience to have fun too. He has a way of making movies now that I suppose can come off as pretentious, but for me it's more just I look at his movies and know they were expensive as all hell to make. This didn't feel pretentious to me.

Where I felt Nolan was being a little pretentious and arrogant was in his stubborn - and in my opinion misguided - attempt(s) to use this film to get people back into movie theaters before it was safe to do so. I understand where he was coming from, and I love going to the movies and the whole movie theater experience much moreso than the average person, but I think it was the absolute wrong call to shove this into theaters and encourage people to tempt fate during a global pandemic for what at the end of the day is entertainment.

I know piracy is a real profit killer at this point, but I think enough people would have paid top dollar to watch this in supreme quality at home, and you could throw in some tickets to see this in theaters when it's safe like a bundle. I could be dead wrong on that. Nolan and the other people working to put this out certainly know a lot more than I do about people's theater going habits and trends.

 

If nolan wanted the audience to have fun be should have made a fun movie

 

he's done it before. and this isn't that.

 

I loved the ride. It was a fun movie for sure.

 

Someone explain the phone call shit at the end to me. She calls and he just comes there from wherever he is in time?

 

I think he really needs to start working on his scripts with his brother again.

Based on the reception to this, and the reception to Westworld, I feel like they're better together.

Also, with time (heh), I'm softening on my criticisms of the movie and I kinda want to give it a second spin.

 

I personally had a lot of fun with it, though I do get why others wouldn’t. Certainly a better critique of this particular film than “pretentious.”

Yeah, pretty much. I imagine he gets the coordinates in time, & is then able to make his way back to that moment & take care of whatever’s going on.

 

But the way time travel works in this, you have to spend the same amount of time in a turnstile to travel that far back.

if you need to go back 3 days, you need to spend 3 days in the turnstile.

so if he gets the call, and the coordinates are 6 years in his past...he’s going to go sit in a turnstile for 6 years?

(I only grasp how time travel works in this because he stole it from Primer)

 

yeah this is my issue. She calls and is in trouble and he goes back through the turnstile for 6 years or whatever?

 

Nolan isn't the only one guilty of this by any means but why can't people make villains interesting. The bad guy in this was so boring and his motivation was lame.

 

Sure, but he gave Kat the phone towards the end, & Priya seemed pretty concerned with closing loose ends. I imagine he suspected it’d happen sooner than later, & simply needed more information for what time(s) something suspicious could be going down. That way, instead of shadowing her 24/7, he could just be prepared for the moment Priya goes in.