Tenet (2020)
Recommended by jmd
OK, yes, the sound mixing is a little dicey on this, and depending on how nice the audio plays with your home setup or headphones, it might not be the worst idea to just turn on the closed captions. This is best enjoyed as a visceral mind-bending experience with a great premise and ambitious, terrifically cool action sequences that are unlike anything else, not a story where you try to track everything that's happening at a given moment. It also improves dramatically on second and third viewings (which I'd say is a typical feature time-travel movies in general, but Tenet is certainly on the extreme end of that).
(I sometimes idly wonder if there could be a viable version of this where Elizabeth Debicki's character is more centered as the actual main character, instead of John David Washington’s unnamed "Protagonist," because it seems like she's the one with the more interesting dramatic situation and character arc. But that’s neither here nor there.)
4 months ago
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@citizenactual
(1/?) I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm a bigger Nolan apologist than most and this is his one movie in his filmography that I keep going back and forth defending. I remember leaving the theater in awe feeling like I've watched something revolutionary (albeit extremely high) and I enjoyed rewatch after rewatch for months. But now I find myself really disliking it, not for any of the superficial complaints like the sound mixing but it's just...so sterile. And the more I rewatch Nolan's filmography the more I dislike Tenet and Oppenheimer and ESPECIALLY Dunkirk because they share my same complaint — They're mostly vibes based movies and maybe that's the whole point? Is Nolan trying to rely less on the traditional narrative audio and visual elements and make us understand the movie by FEELING? I've wrestled with this back and forth for forever now. And I kind of get it but I'm not sold.
@citizenactual
(2/?) Yes there is a truth that a movie never needs to be 100% consistent in its own logic to work, otherwise movies just wouldn't work. But I think this movie is kind of proof that no matter what Nolan thinks about making audiences absorbing the movie via sensory osmosis, he does still care a bit too much about visual spectacle. It feels like he wrote these set pieces and made macguffins to get us there. The final quarry battle looks so...movie like? Maybe this is my own disfunction and that I'm this super heteronormative male who really likes nitty gritty realistic action scenes and maybe Nolan is revealing the artifice of it all. I'll use Dunkirk as an unnecessary analogy. The beach scenes felt so lonely and clean compared to the chaos of what actually happened to those soldiers. The sands were so pristine and white. The soldiers just standing single filed for what seems like hours, days. Uniforms still freshly pressed looking. Someone may have wet hair or sweat a bit.
@citizenactual
(3/?) Is this what I'm missing? Did I just hit the nail on the head but I'm just not allowing myself to accept the answer? Is this Nolan being smarter than I give him credit for and he's really peeling back the artifice of film making in the same way that he made Inception about movies? Is this all his way of trying to make us feel his intentions rather than a straightforward movie and the cool action stuff is just for the general audiences? If so then I admire him greatly from an artistic perspective, but as someone who's autistically obsessed with realism, it's just not for me.
But I appreciate anyone who's passionate about this movie. I certainly prefer people defend this movie rather than...modern Terrence Malick.
@jmduncan
I definitely don't think Nolan is doing anything meta here and making this about filmmaking, and for this particular movie (unlike, say, the Mission: Impossible or Marvel franchises), I also don't think he entirely started by deciding on the big action set pieces and then built the story around those. But it's for sure a premise-driven movie, and I'd guess it went something like, "OK, I have a very cool sci-fi concept that will allow some very cool action set pieces, and now I need to come up with some kind of overarching conflict that will let me do some of those," and then once had that in mind, he decided on some of the major story beats and set pieces, and then the characters came last.
@jmduncan
So strictly from a story perspective, this has plenty of flaws, largely resulting from the fact that the characters are by far the least important thing in it. Like, I've watched this at least three times, and I don't think I could tell you a single thing about who "the Protagonist" is as an specific, individual character or what his motivations are. He's basically just an audience surrogate so that there's an excuse to fill us in on the premise and then someone to get swept up in the action. (I can only think that not even giving him a name is an attempt to sidestep this by admitting that there's not much to him as a human character.)
@jmduncan
But: I'm OK with all that! I'm fully on board for a big, ambitious visual spectacle, and I'd say part of the core appeal of this for me is just that it's so unlike anything else I've ever seen, and it's one of those things that could *only* exist as a movie—there's no world in which you could do a novelization of Tenet, because the best parts of it are purely visual and have to be enjoyed (or not) entirely on those terms. And if you're someone who's autistically obsessed with realism, yeah, this for sure isn't going to be for you, the same way that someone who's not that into song-and-dance spectacles just isn't going to like musicals and someone who isn't that into acrobatically choreographed fight scenes isn't going to like, say, Jackie Chan movies.
@jmduncan
(Also, agree on Dunkirk.)
@citizenactual
Oh lastly I want to post this hilarious comment I saw critiquing the movie (which I know is meant to be super facetious) :
"Yeah, entropy inversion is cool and all until you realise that when inverted people need to take a shit, the poop shoots out of the toilet and into their ass. Same thing when they need to piss. I don't think I can survive the trauma if any of this shit was even remotely based on reality."
@jmduncan
😂
Across Rec League
Tenet
Daniel Menegaz
“Unfairly maligned movie. Better on rewatch. Pattinson wears an all-timer suit in the Freeport scene. Dont try to understand it. Feel it.”
116
Walter
“Idc, its goated. Just dont try and understand whats happening”
1
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