Tenet (Christopher Nolan, September 3, 2020) Movie • Page 57

If you’re trying to make a hard sci-fi movie with realistic depictions of black holes, or at least depictions that are scientifically plausible, why wouldn’t you consult with astrophysicists before making it? That’s just doing research.

 

it’s less the presentation of the actual movie and, to the point i think you were making earlier anthony, the fact that he makes a point to repeatedly tell everyone about the very smart people that he talks to all the time about his movies that are just supposed to be fun and not overly dissected.

 

Yeah I mean I’m not saying his movies shouldn’t be overly dissected, that was other people. I think he makes movies that are fun but also have enough depth that they can be enjoyed on both a surface “turn your brain off” level and a deeper level. I’m just saying I don’t think that his movies are pretentious, even if he himself can come across pretentiously in person.

He does excessively name drop the experts that he consults with on his movies but I don’t think the act of consulting with them in the first place is pretentious. The guy just cares about his craft and when he wants to do something like the epic space sequences in Interstellar, he wants to make sure he gets it right.

I wish more big budget filmmakers were that thoughtful lol (cough Zack Snyder cough)

 

it's a point to talk about. Director's constantly have to talk about and promote their movies and that's something he thinks is interesting to talk about. Tons of directors talk about the effort they put into researching and planning stuff for their films.

 

Yeah that’s part of it too, if you watch a ton of interviews from the same press tour you’re gonna hear the same anecdotes over and over again.

 

yeah, i mean, i like the dark knight rises (my least favorite nolan and not a good movie) way more than the best of snyder haha

 

right. director bullshit is dumb no matter who is doing it. i don’t need to hear about how a captain america movie is actually the parallax view.

 

this is formally known in the industry as James Cameron Syndrome

 

lol to be fair though I think there's a difference between Kevin Feige disingenuously calling The Winter Soldier a "Cold War spy thriller" and Nolan over-mentioning how many astrophysicists he consulted with on the logic of black holes and relativity in Interstellar

 

Iirc the buzzy buzz with Interstellar was that it was the model of the black hole that served as the true to science visual for the film. It was the newest and best computer model we have and it made the film uber ‘scientifically accurate’. Mr. Degrassi, the people’s scientist, concurred.

 

there is probably somebody out there who saw Interstellar and thinks tesseracts are as real as black holes

 

It is pretty funny how the movie goes from near-total scientific accuracy to magical pocket dimensions in the blink of any eye lol

 

I need to re-watch Interstellar, I haven't seen it since the theater even though I own it

 

make it a double feature with The Happening

 

you couldn't pay me to watch The Happening a second time

 

There’s also a big difference between doing research in your movie & expecting people to do research to understand your movie.

 

A Children's Literature course I took basically revolved around the premise that any art can be enjoyed by anyone, as well as interpreted in different ways. You can deep dive into whatever you care enough about regardless of the artist's vision or intentions

 

there’s also a difference between doing research for your movie and being the teachers pet who brags about how much homework you did over the weekend.

 

“Teacher’s pet”? lol. If I were telling this kinda science-fiction-y story, I’d do a ton of research in the process & be excited to talk about it to anyone who’d listen ‘cause that’s something I find fun. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean the final product would be some kinda pretentious work of art that people had to watch multiple times & do research on in order to enjoy (though that’d still be there for people who wanted to dig into it).

(& Interstellar isn’t even a Nolan film I like, but the science aspect has nothing to do with it & is honestly pretty neat to me.)

I mean, think about all the work that goes into costume design sometimes, or into fictional languages in a lot of fantasy stuff. All stuff that takes a lot of work & is a cool added layer to explore, but who’s gonna watch something & say that, in particular, is pretentious?

 

chris nolan isn’t going to fuck you, tim

 

I’m not even that big a Nolan fan! lol. I had a lot of criticisms of his work in this very thread!

Even this film I liked a lot more than most people, but there’s still things I don’t like about it, like the sound mixing & some of the treatment of Kat. And, while I found it engaging, I get why some found it boring. This particular line of criticism I just very much disagree with.

 

are fantasy languages pretension or just nerdy?

 

Definitely nerdy.

 

for sure nerdy