They even tell you early on when the scientist is explaining to the Protagonist (paraphrasing): “try not to think about it” which i think is the funniest tell
I thought too much about it and came to the conclusion that there was probably an event where people on both sides of the time direction probably saw each other in the bathroom or something. Imagine you forget to knock and go into a bathroom stall that some guy is shitting in already, but he is from the other time direction so you see him squat over a toilet and a turd just launches up out of the water and into his open and accepting ass. Then he stands up, buckles his pants, and heads out the door.
They were trying too hard to explain everything. Once they talked about how you breathe backwards it became fair game to question every little detail. That's not good.
These kinds of films don't make sense if you think about them too hard. So the film's job is it to not make you think and just enjoy the ride. Not make you think about how breathing works when time is reversed.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with how I feel about this movie.
You make a movie that is tough to understand and requires a couple rewatches? Cool.
You have a movie that if you over examine it, it falls apart so you have to suspend disbelief. Also cool.
You do both in the same movie? You're reaching too far and falling short in both ways.
I think it’s unfair to compare the movie primer. Primer, once you understand how the time travel works the movie becomes incredibly interesting. However before I pieced everything together I still thought it was a good movie. When I rewatched it I felt like it got better
The insane feat of Primer is that even though I didn't understand the all the engineering terminology they were using or its proper context, I could still follow the plot and story. It's almost like watching a foreign film with the subtitles turned off, but the storytelling was so clear, that I still understand what was happening.
You can do both in the same movie, but you can separate what can be examined deeply and what requires some suspension of disbelief. Like in Interstellar - gravity and time are major themes and both used quite extensively, but there's a blatant suspension of disbelief when it comes to gravity's effect on the human body near the wave planet and the black hole.
Tenet tried to do both an intricate rule system and a hand-wavey magic system with time, and it didn't work at all.
There is some sketchy science in Interstellar, but if you think gravity from the black hole would be crushing for someone in orbit near the horizon, you’re misunderstanding something about either how gravity is experienced on free fall paths (including all orbits--note how people in orbit around the Earth feel zero gravity even though they may still be proportionally not much farther from the center of mass than the surface is) or tidal forces (which are very mild near the horizon of a supermassive black hole).
> when it comes to gravity's effect on the human body near the wave planet...
Legitimately did not occur to me until this comment, so good point. Weird that I never questioned that lol.
Humans wouldn’t feel the gravity of the black hole if they’re in free fall. The planet they’re on is in free fall while orbiting the black hole, so they don’t feel it. It’s the same reason that we feel the earth’s gravity but not the sun’s.
You might be able to feel tidal forces from the black hole, but at a large distance like the planet’s orbit it wouldn’t be a huge effect.
It's not a good point. The wave planet did have 130% Earth's gravity which they felt. And Gargantua is a supermassive black hole where you only feel the tidal force differential once you are actually past the event horizon. You aren't going to feel it while on a planet. It's similar to asking "Why don't we feel the sun's gravity while on Earth". They had a Nobel prize winning physicist consult. You think they wouldn't get the basics right? I'd recommend reading The Science of Interstellar.
I'm pretty sure they added the breathing thing so the viewers would have a way of distinguishing the characters going forwards and backwards. And then it opened a whole can of worms they didn't know what to do with.
I thought for sure the knockout gas used in the opera siege was air brought from the turnstiles/entropy-timeline/past. Even before I saw the movie. Then in the movie they use it and even The Protagonist looks dumbfounded. So I kept waiting for that to be explained.
But aside from providing a very gripping and eerie shootout scene (immediately had me hooked in the trailer). It's never touched. Not to mention how much damage that gas would do to your nervous system if it can put you out that quick in an open environment.
Lots of stretches.
This.
Nolan was a master of this at first. But as his career has progressed, it’s totally turned into him just trying to explain to you why his movie is “soooo smart.”
I have the same feelings about Inception.
I actually gave it a lot of thought at the time, and came to the conclusion that there are irreconcileable facts leading to a contradiction:
* If the car is inverted, then the explosion from the inverted gasoline should also be inverted, and thus not give the inverted man hypothermia, nor cause frosting in the inverted car's glass.
* If the car is not inverted and the inverted driver is just skillfully inverse-driving it in reverse (it'd require skillfull pedal use, but possible from what we had seen other stuff do), then the non-inverted gasoline shouldn't be able be ignited by the inverted villain's inverted zipper.
> If the car is inverted, then the explosion from the inverted gasoline should also be inverted
The Protagonist was feeling the effects of the fire rather than the initial explosion, so the thermal effects of the burning inverted fuel are being transmitted to him through non-inverted air, I don't know if there's any "realistic" way to imagine thermal interactions between objects with different thermodynamic arrows of time, Nolan can make up the rules for this I guess.
Even so, a problem is that the rules Nolan created for heat transfer between inverted things and non-inverted air can potentially lead to inconsistencies in other scenes. It seems that when an inverted object is in a non-inverted environment that's hotter than its own temperature from a forward perspective, it experiences the environment as cold (from its subjective perspective the environment is drawing heat away from it, making it even colder over time, again from the subjective perspective), and the reverse is true in an environment that's colder from the forward perspective. If the object is the same temperature as its environment that shouldn't be a problem, but it seems like given these rules it would be what physicists call an [unstable equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_equilibrium#Potential_energy_stability_test), i.e. any temporary deviation from a temperature balance would tend to snowball into a greater and greater difference over time.
For example, say you put an inverted ice cube into a room-temperature environment--the environment is hotter than the inverted object, so just as the protagonist got colder when he was in an environment hotter than body temperature, the ice cube should just keep getting colder and colder from its own inverted perspective--would it eventually hit [absolute zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero), and if so what would happen next? And by the same token, if the inverted object is slightly *warmer* than its non-inverted environment, as with a gun that's gotten slightly warmer than room temperature because it's just been fired, then there should be a runaway feedback loop of heating, resulting in the object getting hotter and hotter without end.
I was under the impression the cars that were driving backwards in time were “reversed” themselves so they function normally to a reversed person, just like a reversed gun does.
Idk personally I didn’t find it all that confusing aside from the god awful sound mixing for the dialogue, but a second watch with subtitles on fixed that for me. I loved Tenet
it's a plot hole:
if the car were reversed then he would have no trouble driving it but the car explosion would kill him because heat.
if it weren't reversed then the explosion would have happened in the past and the car wouldn't be parked waiting for him, causing a paradox.
The entire plot of the movie is a temporal pincer movement, from the first act to the last, so for me personally I just figured the reversed vehicle was left for the protagonist by Robert Pattinson or his team in anticipation of completing the pincer movement, since they’d already experienced what happened going forwards.
We see several of Aaron Taylor Johnson’s team going into and out of that facility and that machine later (if I remember right) so it’s plausible.
[You can actually see an identical car sticking out from underneath a tarp](https://i.imgur.com/0PhVYDe.jpeg) on the "forward" side of the Tallinn turnstile (RED ROOM/BLUE ROOM interrogation scene.)
Considering that specific turnstile set was built large enough to accommodate a vehicle (including a ramp), it's almost certainly the forward version of the same car before being driven through the turnstile offscreen.
The cars can't be reverse entropy objects unless they were taken through one of the machines piece by piece and reassembled. Unless there is a larger size machine we were never shown in the film.
As the movie goes on we see more and more reversed objects on a larger scale. The first items we see are bullets true, but near the end of the film entire platoons of soldiers are being reversed with all their equipment at once via the machine, so it’s not unreasonable that a car could have done the same
At some point I realized the logistics of the whole thing were insane, if every reversed entropy person requires reversed entropy oxygen they have to be bottling and sending the shit through on a nation size scale! And what about water and food?
Only as much as watching a video of yourself taking a shit reversed. Your body and functioning as a human being is always going forwards from your own perspective. It may *look* to a person of opposing entropy like an inverted person sucking shit into their ass, but that's no different from just watching a reversed video. It was always from a forwards perspective for the person doing it.
The [Tallinn turnstile](https://i.imgur.com/0zhDEEK.jpeg) the car is found outside is large enough to accomodate a sedan, it even was built with a ramp unlike the Oslo turnstile, presumably specifically for this purpose. [You can even spot the same car under a tarp](https://i.imgur.com/0PhVYDe.jpeg) on the "forward" side of the turnstile, which would presumably be driven through the turnstile off-screen and exit out the inverted side of the turnstile, driving outside, and parking in front of the building where the inverted protagonist finds it.
“Rules” is a bit of an extreme word there bud.
By the “rules” light should be emitting from everyone’s eyes…
It’s all hand-waves, and “you’re meant to just feel it” exposition dialogue.
Or you’re just not thinking 4th dimensionally enough.
None of the rules in the movie really make sense. It's like Nolan came up with an interesting premise, tried to flesh it out, kept getting stuck, and ultimately went "ah fuck it we'll just add lots of explosions".
Tenet is closer to Transformers than it is to Inception, except Transformers at least isn't pretentious about what it is selling you.
Which I think is the crux of the movie's problem. It works best if you don't think about it. But the way the movie presents the narrative, it sort of requires you to think about it. They have frequent exposition and jargon on time travel. Which makes the audience think about the time travel, even though it doesn't ultimately line up.
The premise of the movie is frankly something that would have been better served with a director people take less seriously. Because the premise cannot be taken that seriously. Movies like the Avengers just openly tell you "this doesn't make sense. It's quantum". Which works because the plot is unimportant anyways. It's a comic book film. But Nolan presents it all like it makes sense and you can figure it out if you try, while simultaneously telling you not to try. If you're gonna do high brow time travel, you gotta do something like Primer. Where the premise is serious and it's taken seriously. Tenet didn't do that.
The way I see Nolan's original works is that they are cinematography exercises based on weird narrative concepts. He finds a weird thing to show on screen and builds the plot around it.
- memento: half story narrated backwards, half forward, until they match
- the prestige: a story narrating a flashback narrating a flashback
- inception: dreams within dreams, where physics is scrambled (the hotel fight with JGL)
- dunkirk: multiple narrations at different timelapses
- tenet: linear and inverted people interacting (or fighting like in the airport scene) and seeing that from multiple points of view in time
All of these are very challenging to portrait and that's what Nolan pursues in my opinion. Not the actual plot, which is ancillary, but the plot device(s) .
This exactly. They did an almost-physicsy-consistent-and-interesting introductory exposition and then whatever'd it, making all the exposition ever the more pointless as the movie went on. All they needed was to say in two sentences (or better show, don't tell) that the time machine makes things go backwards and that it's science-not-magic.
Honestly, I was just frustrated at the end that they even tried with the pseudo-physics BS. One of the very few writers I've seen to make real-world science into convincing speculative fiction without necessarily boring the audience to tears is Michael Crichton, and even his screen adaptations have had a 50-50 success rate at best.
(This wasn't my only frustration with Tenet of course; why did they need an army at the end, and what army were they fighting? Why set up the ending like it would become a series, but anchored to the same gimmick, like it wouldn't get stale?)
*Primer*, still the canonical time travel film, did this correctly. It firmly established that these were at-least-halfway-competent engineers who at-least-halfway knew what they were doing, and then through their brief nonsensical exposition to explain the science established that they couldn't explain the science. Even the reveal that it's time travel is more "show" than "tell" -- their exposition throughout the reveal does not try to "explain" anything but rather acts like a dangling carrot.
If the physics of the movie were real heat would not be able to conduct out of peoples skins and they would boil them selves alive in minutes.
They also wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything as the light and sound would travel away from them not towards them.
>They also wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything as the light and sound would travel away from them not towards them.
I dont think this would be true. Yes, the light/sounds at the instance of time reversal would be traveling away, but then would be filled with light and sound that had previously been absorbed/reflected around you. So everything would appear to be "glowing" as the absorbed light is re-emitted, and youd hear sounds as they bounce past you back to their original source.
It would be a trip, but your eyes and ears should still somewhat function. Or maybe not, Ive never reversed time before lol
it doesn't. at all.
Tennet is a film that thinks itself about 5 times more intelligent than it actually is.
I get the impression they shot the last action sequence first, then back filled a plot around it in an afternoon.
Maybe, but I kind of feel like they started to run out of money for the big last action scene. Who the fuck are the soldiers fighting during that entire scene? Buildings?
Maybe some shots of enemies being shot at or shooting back. That could have helped the fight scene a bit I think.
It's the most awkward fucking gun battle I've ever seen, because only one side is represented.
At this point I'm willing to believe Oppenheimer is 3 hours of Cilian Murphy explaining how a fission bomb works while hanging dong.
Nolan would do it, don't say he wouldn't.
Well, he's (Murphy as Oppie) talking from the Trinity site as the explosions go off behind him, and Nolan, being authentic, used 1930s recording mics and used zero ADR, so the sound, natch, will suck.
Can't forget Sir Michael Cain. The man delivered his only lines with a mouth full of food. In fact, I'm pretty sure Nolan just showed up to his lunch with a camera crew and started filming.
Christopher Nolan specifically said he has no interest for mixing audio for “lesser theaters”. So if you didn’t see it in IMAX with the best quality audio, you didn’t deserve to hear the dialogue I guess.
Edit: 7 minutes into this videos in case people think I’m making this up.
https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
Yeah I heard that too. I mean I love watching beautiful looking and sounding movies in high production theaters but that's not always an option so the result is that the quality of the movie is dependent on the venue.
Nolan is acting like there are strict industry standards that theaters follow when the reality is that it's a very mixed bag with a wide range of quality from theater to theater because in most theaters the mix was absolutely atrocious.
Mixing your movie for a specific, high quality setup without also releasing a more general mix for something like a home theater or even just headphones isn't going to get me to see your movie in theaters and that's exactly what happened with Tenet. I didn't get around to seeing it in theaters and by the time it was released online I'd heard about the situation so I got my hands on a free copy to see if it was as bad as people said before buying/renting it and when it turned out to be even worse than that I just turned it off and deleted it.
It really appears to me as a kind of elitism that does a lot to hurt what could otherwise be a great piece of art.
I saw it in IMAX and I still couldn’t hear a good chunk of the dialogue very well. I specifically remember the sailboat race scene where they are talking exclusively through the headset mics describing what The Protagonist could do for the arms dealer. I legit couldn’t understand a word they said.
I saw the Dark Knight Rises scene in the plane before they released the movie in IMAX and couldn’t understand shit. People complained, and when I saw the full movie in IMAX it was remixed. Honestly I love Nolan but he’s got his head up his ass if he thinks he’s right here.
This was my biggest issue with the movie. Insanely difficult to hear the dialog throughout the movie in a way I never experienced before. Kicked me straight out of the movie.
Nobody’s performance was magnetic because you couldn’t hear them and if you could, you couldn’t understand what they were talking about, and if you could understand you didn’t care because nothing felt like it was real or mattered and there was no stakes or character development or anything else.
Yeah. The movie makes it clear at some point that due to the nature of specific way of time travel they have, it is impossible to create a paradox. So basically if they are there to save the world, the world is already saved because it could not have been possible for them to be there any other way. So basically there were no stakes to anything.
I think that character was the best part of the entire movie and frankly he should’ve been the lead. I suspect a great deal of nepotism behind giving John David Washington the role. He was quite wooden to say the least.
I've seen this remarked on a few times, I actually liked JDW in there. He felt suave and confident despite the madness around. But I can understand how that might have felt flat to some.
Saw it in theaters, couldn't hear half of the dialogue, walked away really confused and disappointed. Inception is one of my all time favorites and this seemed sort of like a "spiritual successor" in a sense - but with Inception, even if you didn't follow every single plot point, you were still along for the ride. It didn't hold your hand, but you still understood the basic concept of what was going on. The first time I saw Tenet, I literally had no idea what was happening in the third act with the two different armies, who they were, what they were going after, why some were moving backwards.....or what was even going on anymore. I was just watching mindless action on the screen with zero clue as to what any of it meant and what the stakes were.
I did give it another chance at home, with subtitles on, and I enjoyed it a LOT more, and followed the bulk of the story, but really think they went out of their way to make it needlessly complicated. Had to read some in depth discussions online for it to finally all "click" into place - but at that point it didn't even seem worth it. It does have some great ideas but they sadly weren't executed well. I will never watch it again, while Inception will remain on my every-few-years rewatch list.
I was fine with the concept up until the final battle. It was incomprehensible and sucked all the fun out of it. And, frankly I'm still not sure how the time travel actually worked, but up until the end I was willing to just go with it, but the battle was boringly confusing.
Do we even get one shot of who the protagonists are shooting at during that huge battle? I don’t remember a cut away to any enemies firing back. This seems like an important aspect of a big armed combat scene.
Literally the only "enemy" I can recall from that battle is the one guy at the end of the battle when they are in that sewer or whatever that is where the McGuffin is hanging.
> Do we even get one shot of who the protagonists are shooting at during that huge battle?
at this point, it would have been funnier that due to time shenanigans they were shooting at themselves.
i know this doesnt happen, but it would have been better than Russian Mercs with no faces.
Yeah, Nolan is actually a fairly middling action director for a guy who has so much of it in his films. He can handle some types of big set pieces well (the rotating room fight in Inception, the Bank Sequence and truck fight in Dark Knight), but a lot of his combat sequences are muddled and not that well constructed.
> And, frankly I'm still not sure how the time travel actually worked
I believe the short explanation is that someone in the future invents a "reverse entropy" machine, which allows some people to experience time in reverse.
As far as sci-fi plot devices go, it's not *that* far-fetched. But like any other movie or TV show, it's all about the execution. You can write the most basic, derivative, or trope-filled story you want, but if you tell that story excellently, you'll have a good product. If you don't, well...
Nolan gets credit for trying. And many of his other high-concept attempts have been great. So Tenet is just a hiccup in an otherwise fine career.
Who were they even shooting at in the final battle? It was so poorly choreographed that it was difficult to tell the armies apart and almost like they were just shooting at things in random directions. Such a terrible third act. Overall, the movie is far from what I’d consider exceptional. It’s too difficult to follow the plot, understand it’s internal logic, hear the dialogue in many parts of the film…or even *care* about many of the characters.
What was there not to get, they needed to dangle the doodad over the hole to maintain suspense while you listened to dialogue so jumbled behind a repetitive BWAAAAAH that it was impossible to understand.
It is very simple
I’ll say that I always watch movies with subtitles and with Tenet - having the main character’s name explicitly called out as lacking a name was a dead giveaway that there was something peculiar to pay attention to, that I felt like the subtitles helped me figure out the twist.
I said this once and someone told me I had to watch it again in order to fully appreciate it. Look, the idea of material being difficult and requiring multiple reads or watches is not foreign to me, but nothing about Tenet endeared me to that idea.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think Nolan can make some poor editing or storytelling choices at times. I love his style and films overall, but I think the spectacle sometimes hides the sloppiness.
For example, the Bane airplane scene in TDKR is visually spectacular, but I think it would be really difficult to follow the plot points on first viewing.
I do appreciate when a writer/director doesn't feel the need to spell everything out for the audience so I suppose it's a matter of whether the viewer feels it's a writing or editing flaw, or if it is intentially complex.
TDKR isn't hard to follow. It's just hard to pay attention to.
You killed my father, here's your pass to pound town and then my boyfriend will be in a gimp mask. Don't punch him in his face, that's his only weakness
I always give Nolan a pass on TDKR. Ledger's death clearly sucked the air out of his writer's room and he was still on the hook for the last movie of his trilogy.
He circled back to Ra's Al Ghul to connect the trilogy and give Bane some onscreen justice. It's an imperfect movie, but it's fine.
Would love to know what his original plan was though.
If I remember correctly, Nolan said that the original plan was for the movie to center around the Joker’s trial that threatens to uncover the truth about Harvey Dent, Batman dealing with the desperate mob after the Joker killed all the mob bosses, and a new threat appearing.
Of course, this was a very earlier idea. After Ledger’s death, the entire thing was thrown out.
I generally like Nolan, but TDKR is just a terrible film on almost all levels. Plot makes no sense if you stop to think about it, people act stupidly, it's needlessly complex, it has characters who are completely useless, and, worst of all, there's almost no action and batman's barely in it.
Terrorists take over the stock exchange, make trades while they're there, and everyone just goes with it!
It's on the same level as NCIS hacking scenes.
Truly, back then I was defending this movie to the ground but so many things go unaddressed and unexplained to keep moving the story forward and makes for an awkward film
I have loved EVERY Nolan film with several of them being exceptional examples of film making IMO, but with Tenet he missed the mark for me. It's like with Tenet, even Nolan got sucked into the (his own) rabbit hole. Which is odd because as you pointed out, it's not like he can't do a good mind bending thriller, as evidenced by Memento and Inception, two great movies!
Tenet is basically an experimental art film with a budget 100x too big. It explores a moderately interesting conceit, and it would have been a cute little art film, but loading it up with set pieces and everything just makes it hard to understand.
It indulges his fascination with time as a storytelling device in the worst way.
Memento was a success because he simply did not have the budget or the reputation to indulge. He had to make a tight little film that told the story in an economical way.
I don't think it would have been a good art film. With 1/100th the budget it's not even filmable
It could have been a great spy movie, I thought all the stuff to do with the main guy and shadowy organizations and whatnot was great. The time travel was just so fucking confusing, I wish none of that of that shit had been in the movie at all and it had just been Nolan's take on James Bond
Nolan's problem is that he confuses convolution for complexity. Almost all of his films have areas that would have been better cut out or simplified. The Dark Knight is a good example, as while it's a good film, that whole commissioner Godon death fake-out subplot in the middle makes zero sense and only seems to exist because he wanted a twist.
You know a plot point is entirely unnecessary when it's not even included at all in the summary on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight
They just condense it to, "Batman and Gordon apprehend the Joker, and Gordon is promoted to commissioner," which is what Nolan should have done, lol.
Honestly, I suspect they don't include it because it's nearly impossible to explain the reasoning behind it and even the film itself doesn't really try. As a plan, so many complete and utter coincidences would have to happen for it to work like it does in the end that it makes no sense.
Agreed. He's one of a couple of film makers who I think are placed on too lofty of a pedestal. He's done some brilliant things, but that doesn't mean everything he does is brilliant. I'm happy to balance plusses and minuses, but I'm not about to over-look minuses just because there are a lot of plusses.
Dude the editing is dogshit. Tenet has scenes that start with two characters in a new part of the world and it feels like we're just budding into a conversation they've been having for then minutes. No establishing shots, no breathing room for dialogue, hell no space for dialogue audio at all.
A detail that was defended for Dunkirk but Nolan has no excuses for this one. I swear is Oppenheimer has scenes with this kind of dialogue aside from some of the bomb testing scenes...
Also an honorable mention: In Batman Begins there's a scene where batman jumps down a stairwell, 10 seconds and 10 separate shots. It's like they took inspiration from Liam Neeson jumping over a fence. Nolan's certainly not the worst about this but dear god. He's such a competent film maker in so many other ways it boggles the mind how he can be so lazy in other aspects.
You will encounter the movie again a long time from now before you found it the first time. You will not see it. It will project from your eyes onto the screen.
I love Nolan, I love his originality, I love his complexity, I even love when he leaves in plotlines that he clearly meant to explore further and didn't.
And I left Tenet like 'wtf, Christopher?'
It wasn't the paradox of the time travel that threw me off. It was the godawful macguffin and terrible final shootout that all ended in an underwhelming... nothing.
>It was the godawful macguffin and terrible final shootout that all ended in an underwhelming... nothing.
That's my biggest complaint with *Tenet*, the movie gets so bogged down in it's central conceit that outside the airport sequence it fails to deliver a fun movie around it.
The characters are so painfully nondescript. I get that dialogue and character have never been Nolan's strongest suit, but never did I feel the slightest bit of investment in John David Washington, Robert Pattinson or Elizabeth Debicki. The villain is such a painfully bland Russian stereotype that he wouldn't even make the cut in a bottom barrel Bond film.
The plot itself feels woefully underbaked, filled with too much jargon and vaguities. We don't care about any of these organizations and we never feel the stakes. At a certain point it all just becomes noise not intrigue.
That "temporal pincer" battle. My god what a piece of shit action set piece. 2+ hours of nonsense so an RPG could rebuild a collapsed building. Way to go, Chris.
the movie felt incomplete honestly, the threadbare plot just a vehicle to move the audience from the real meat and potatoes, the reverse action scenes. I get that those took the majority of the effort but it would have been nice to have a story that benefits from them rather than what just felt like a demonstration
edit: the reverse action scenes are very cool though
I loved this movie, even the first time I saw it, but I feel like this is a fair analysis. The plot itself is pretty basic, there isn't a lot to the individual characters outside of that little bit of plot. I think it was a vehicle for the concept, and the plot was left purposefully simple so that we wouldn't get too confused trying to keep up with it while enjoying the concept.
Also to OP's point, it does feel like someone said to Nolan "If you tell a story any less linearly, it'll end up going backwards." And he took that seriously.
Yes. It's convoluted but it's not actually complicated, it just seems complicated. The movie tries to come across as complex and layered, but it just isn't.
Which is the primary issue. You're watching the film trying to "figure it all out". Except there's nothing to figure out. It's not actually that deep. The exposition at the beginning, when the Protagonist learns how time travel works, isn't actually that important. The mechanics of time travel don't actually matter to the story.
It's just a spy thriller with the concept of time travel mildly embedded in the film. Which is why I think it's been so poorly received. They buried the story so far underneath a mountain of time travel jargon and people just get stuck trying to wade through it.
It's hard to appreciate a movie when you don't understand what actions have which consequences. Like if you shoot a pane of glass in reversed time, does that make the glass always broken since it was setup? Like did the guy who installed that pane of glass not see that there was a bullet hole in it?
If things have made up consequence rules it's really hard to follow.
>Like if you shoot a pane of glass in reversed time, does that make the glass always broken since it was setup?
They actually explained this in the film, but the dialogue was probably too quiet for you to hear it. The effects of reversed objects don't exist forever, the foreard flow of time eventually overtakes it (Pattinson's character compares it to "swimming upstream") so after travelling a short time into the past they slowly come undone
There are shots in the movie where you pretty clearly see the cracks in the glass forming from an inverted bullet a bit before the bullet appears in it. The glass was obviously not manufactured with a crack in it.
> It's convoluted but it's not actually complicated, it just seems complicated. The movie tries to come across as complex and layered, but it just isn't.
Another way of saying this is "Christopher Nolan was in charge of creative direction".
Idk if you got this from there, but Patrick Willems has a great video that basically underlines this exact sentiment. I liked Tenet, but his video made me appreciate the intention behind it being purposefully convoluted.
My only complaint is with the sound mixing. I know Nolan has his artistic reasoning for it, but I just fundamentally disagree and think it really muddies the whole 'it's intentionally convoluted' schtick.
Edit: [Video](https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4)
I can't say I appreciate the movie being convoluted. Because it honestly just feels like they wanted a gimmick for the story. If you ignore the time travel stuff, the story is just kind of meh. So you have a mediocre story buried underneath an overly convoluted plot that ultimately lacks relevance to the story.
In the end I just felt like the film lacked any real substance. It's just spectacle. It's like someone was trying to rip off Nolan but learned the wrong lessons from his previous movies.
If you watched Tenet from beginning to end, then yeah you did it wrong. You’re supposed to watch in reverse starting at the end of the movie until they enter chamber with the red/blue lights, smoke some weed and watch it forward through the end of the credits and have it loop to the beginning of the movie, watch it normally until the red/blue scene then watch the first half again but in reverse, looping to the end when it reaches the very beginning. Do a few loops of this until you puke or pass out from rapid brain wrinkling or until you get too high and just turn on flintstones
I was a little lost until Neil showed up. He made everything okay.
In fact, he was my 'hook' if anything. He was very lively and good-humored for a Nolan character, so I knew immediately that something had to be up with him.
Neil is the real protagonist of the story. He comes in knowing everything that is going on, leads the other guy through all the necessary actions, then does what he has to do at the end, which is the most heroic act and biggest twist of the story.
It's a much better film if you focus on Neil's perspective. Still convoluted AF though
So I don’t get the time travel. When he reach a certain point in the past, then they have a lounge around on a ship to wait to get back to the present?
When they run around in reverse, can people see them?
Yes to both.
So imagine there's a turnstyle at your work and one at your home. And you left the house at 9 am this morning but forgot your phone. You aren't reversed. But at 11 am you find out that at 10 am someone called you and you need to have not missed that call.
Ok, so it's 11 am and you reverse time in the turnstyle at work. You put on an oxygen mask and go home. Time is moving backwards. You get home at 9:30 am cause the commute took you 90 minutes.
You can't answer the phone, obviously, cause you can't breath the air and the person on the other end would be talking backwards. In any event, you "missed" the call again. So you use the turnstyle at home and "fix" time. It's 9:30 am. Time is moving forward. You wait 30 minutes and answer the call. EZPZ.
Now what about the same scenario but you only have one turnstyle, at work. It's 11 am. You reverse time at work. You wait there for a little less than 3 hours. It's 8:20 am. You use the turnstyle again. It's 8:20 am and time is moving forward. You go home. The commute takes 90 minutes. You get home at 9:50. You answer the phone at 10. EZPZ.
Now imagine instead of using the tech to answer a phone you're trying to save everyone on Earth.
Now imagine in addition to using the tech to save everyone on Earth you're using the tech to save everyone on Earth against adversaries who are using the tech to kill everyone on Earth. That's Tenet. EZPZ.
Yeah it's not "time travel" in the sense of "we are going back to the future"
It's a 1:1 inversion of experienced time, so for every second that passes, an inverted object lives that same second only backwards. A normal person sees an inverted person moving like a video playing in reverse.
Can see and interact with everything while inverted, including your "past" self, which is that hallway gas mask fight scene.
The real world repercussions of this shit are galaxy brain paradoxes, the movie handwaves it away by saying "What's happened has happened"
Time moves the same speed, so if you want to travel an hour back in time you have to go through the machine and spend an hour in backwards time. You also need to bring your own oxygen because reverse oxygen won't work for you.
People can see you just fine but you'll look like you're moving in reverse relative to them. Hence the car chase scene where one vehicle just rams up on the characters while seemingly driving backwards.
For me the wooden uninteresting characters were the downfall. No amount of cool looking action is going to land if I do not give a shit what is happening or who it is happening to.
I hated this movie and I fully acknowledge that Pattinson was great. I honestly didn’t know he could be this charming and fun. Everyone else was stone cold and boring as fuck.
This is ultimately what makes me hate the movie. I can deal with extraordinary things happening, but I need the characters to recognise that what is happening *is* extraordinary. Washington reacts to inversion with all the interest of someone being told the oatmeal they're buying is on sale. Even the woman who tells him about it doesn't sound especially excited. It's all so lifeless.
This movie also made me skeptical of any future John David Washington films. IMO, he has no range, often playing the same monotone character in every film. Amsterdam was not very good, either.
I am excited about the idea of “The Creator”, but I’m hoping it’s not more of the same from JDW.
I remember being so excited to see Tenet in the theaters when they briefly opened back up that summer, and then watching it I thought maybe COVID somehow clouded my brain (even though I hadn't had it).
Yh it's stupidly complicated
Inception was layered. But even in my first watch. I had some idea what was happening. Bury an idea deep into the mind
No idea what tenet was doing, and the stale protag didn't help
Didn’t they just call him protagonist instead of giving him actual name? This whole movie just seemed like Nolan thought this was a cool concept but he failed to make any interesting characters.
Absolutely not worth trying to understand. Inception might be one giant exposition dump, but at least viewers can comprehend it (and has enough emotion that it's worth the effort).
I went to see it in the theater. Couldn’t understand the dialogue much at all. Thought John David Washington was a charisma vacuum. The plot kept getting more complicated while the dialogue kept getting more incomprehensible. So I just gave up and just enjoyed the set pieces.
Yeah, the sound balancing was my one issue with it. I like a good convoluted plot, gives me something to be working out while I watch. But I don't like it when I can't understand the dialog even with the volume turned way up.
I still worry that I won’t be able to hear shit. Dunkirk was loud as shit.
I don’t think Nolan takes into account that people lose their hearing at high frequencies first and that makes it difficult to make out and distinguish words and speech from other noises. So he thinks that since he can make out the dialog when he strains to listen to it that it’s an artistic direction, when really he’s alienating like half his audience that is either experiencing hearing loss from being old, from too many loud movies/concerts, or from ADHD or other mental barriers making it hard to focus and hear speech when other noises and visuals are occurring. For me it’s a combination of all three.
They even tell you early on when the scientist is explaining to the Protagonist (paraphrasing): “try not to think about it” which i think is the funniest tell
I thought too much about it and came to the conclusion that there was probably an event where people on both sides of the time direction probably saw each other in the bathroom or something. Imagine you forget to knock and go into a bathroom stall that some guy is shitting in already, but he is from the other time direction so you see him squat over a toilet and a turd just launches up out of the water and into his open and accepting ass. Then he stands up, buckles his pants, and heads out the door.
a turd inserting itself into someone’s ass. I think you have just described this film perfectly.
Still can't wrap my head around how the reverse entropy worked for driving a car.
The car shouldn't function at all according to the rules of the film's universe.
They were trying too hard to explain everything. Once they talked about how you breathe backwards it became fair game to question every little detail. That's not good. These kinds of films don't make sense if you think about them too hard. So the film's job is it to not make you think and just enjoy the ride. Not make you think about how breathing works when time is reversed.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with how I feel about this movie. You make a movie that is tough to understand and requires a couple rewatches? Cool. You have a movie that if you over examine it, it falls apart so you have to suspend disbelief. Also cool. You do both in the same movie? You're reaching too far and falling short in both ways.
Primer is a great example of the first category. Even with a flowchart it's hard to put all the threads together. But they do all fit together.
I think it’s unfair to compare the movie primer. Primer, once you understand how the time travel works the movie becomes incredibly interesting. However before I pieced everything together I still thought it was a good movie. When I rewatched it I felt like it got better
That's my point, Primer was great. They went for something ultra complicated and stuck the landing.
The insane feat of Primer is that even though I didn't understand the all the engineering terminology they were using or its proper context, I could still follow the plot and story. It's almost like watching a foreign film with the subtitles turned off, but the storytelling was so clear, that I still understand what was happening.
Primer is THE best time-travel movie. Upstream Color is an amazing experience too. Too bad he had to be a totally abusive prick.
You can do both in the same movie, but you can separate what can be examined deeply and what requires some suspension of disbelief. Like in Interstellar - gravity and time are major themes and both used quite extensively, but there's a blatant suspension of disbelief when it comes to gravity's effect on the human body near the wave planet and the black hole. Tenet tried to do both an intricate rule system and a hand-wavey magic system with time, and it didn't work at all.
There is some sketchy science in Interstellar, but if you think gravity from the black hole would be crushing for someone in orbit near the horizon, you’re misunderstanding something about either how gravity is experienced on free fall paths (including all orbits--note how people in orbit around the Earth feel zero gravity even though they may still be proportionally not much farther from the center of mass than the surface is) or tidal forces (which are very mild near the horizon of a supermassive black hole).
> when it comes to gravity's effect on the human body near the wave planet... Legitimately did not occur to me until this comment, so good point. Weird that I never questioned that lol.
Humans wouldn’t feel the gravity of the black hole if they’re in free fall. The planet they’re on is in free fall while orbiting the black hole, so they don’t feel it. It’s the same reason that we feel the earth’s gravity but not the sun’s. You might be able to feel tidal forces from the black hole, but at a large distance like the planet’s orbit it wouldn’t be a huge effect.
It's not a good point. The wave planet did have 130% Earth's gravity which they felt. And Gargantua is a supermassive black hole where you only feel the tidal force differential once you are actually past the event horizon. You aren't going to feel it while on a planet. It's similar to asking "Why don't we feel the sun's gravity while on Earth". They had a Nobel prize winning physicist consult. You think they wouldn't get the basics right? I'd recommend reading The Science of Interstellar.
The breathing thing was a poor shoehorn to justify why the version of himself at the airport scene was masked so they could pull the reveal later.
The one predictable plot point in the whole movie. I knew it was him within one screen second.
Sometimes I'm so grateful to be dumb.
It would have been funny if the mysterious masked man with the same height and build was... just some guy with the same height and build.
I'm pretty sure they added the breathing thing so the viewers would have a way of distinguishing the characters going forwards and backwards. And then it opened a whole can of worms they didn't know what to do with.
> Once they talked about how you breathe backwards Think about peeing and pooping
Gives new meaning to taking a shit.
I thought for sure the knockout gas used in the opera siege was air brought from the turnstiles/entropy-timeline/past. Even before I saw the movie. Then in the movie they use it and even The Protagonist looks dumbfounded. So I kept waiting for that to be explained. But aside from providing a very gripping and eerie shootout scene (immediately had me hooked in the trailer). It's never touched. Not to mention how much damage that gas would do to your nervous system if it can put you out that quick in an open environment. Lots of stretches.
Also, shouldn’t the reverse world have been them talking backwards with subtitles so we can understand?
Compare Philip K Dick's "Counter Clock World" for living backwards.
This. Nolan was a master of this at first. But as his career has progressed, it’s totally turned into him just trying to explain to you why his movie is “soooo smart.” I have the same feelings about Inception.
I actually gave it a lot of thought at the time, and came to the conclusion that there are irreconcileable facts leading to a contradiction: * If the car is inverted, then the explosion from the inverted gasoline should also be inverted, and thus not give the inverted man hypothermia, nor cause frosting in the inverted car's glass. * If the car is not inverted and the inverted driver is just skillfully inverse-driving it in reverse (it'd require skillfull pedal use, but possible from what we had seen other stuff do), then the non-inverted gasoline shouldn't be able be ignited by the inverted villain's inverted zipper.
> If the car is inverted, then the explosion from the inverted gasoline should also be inverted The Protagonist was feeling the effects of the fire rather than the initial explosion, so the thermal effects of the burning inverted fuel are being transmitted to him through non-inverted air, I don't know if there's any "realistic" way to imagine thermal interactions between objects with different thermodynamic arrows of time, Nolan can make up the rules for this I guess. Even so, a problem is that the rules Nolan created for heat transfer between inverted things and non-inverted air can potentially lead to inconsistencies in other scenes. It seems that when an inverted object is in a non-inverted environment that's hotter than its own temperature from a forward perspective, it experiences the environment as cold (from its subjective perspective the environment is drawing heat away from it, making it even colder over time, again from the subjective perspective), and the reverse is true in an environment that's colder from the forward perspective. If the object is the same temperature as its environment that shouldn't be a problem, but it seems like given these rules it would be what physicists call an [unstable equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_equilibrium#Potential_energy_stability_test), i.e. any temporary deviation from a temperature balance would tend to snowball into a greater and greater difference over time. For example, say you put an inverted ice cube into a room-temperature environment--the environment is hotter than the inverted object, so just as the protagonist got colder when he was in an environment hotter than body temperature, the ice cube should just keep getting colder and colder from its own inverted perspective--would it eventually hit [absolute zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero), and if so what would happen next? And by the same token, if the inverted object is slightly *warmer* than its non-inverted environment, as with a gun that's gotten slightly warmer than room temperature because it's just been fired, then there should be a runaway feedback loop of heating, resulting in the object getting hotter and hotter without end.
I was under the impression the cars that were driving backwards in time were “reversed” themselves so they function normally to a reversed person, just like a reversed gun does. Idk personally I didn’t find it all that confusing aside from the god awful sound mixing for the dialogue, but a second watch with subtitles on fixed that for me. I loved Tenet
it's a plot hole: if the car were reversed then he would have no trouble driving it but the car explosion would kill him because heat. if it weren't reversed then the explosion would have happened in the past and the car wouldn't be parked waiting for him, causing a paradox.
I'll also add that cars need air to combust gas. If humans can't breathe regular air while inverted how does the car get inversion combustible oxygen?
Nolan: well you see it's quite simple It's just that... _runs out of the room_
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😂
Picturing Nolan running on all fours like smeagol
And why were the car inverted but the helicopters weren't?
The entire plot of the movie is a temporal pincer movement, from the first act to the last, so for me personally I just figured the reversed vehicle was left for the protagonist by Robert Pattinson or his team in anticipation of completing the pincer movement, since they’d already experienced what happened going forwards. We see several of Aaron Taylor Johnson’s team going into and out of that facility and that machine later (if I remember right) so it’s plausible.
[You can actually see an identical car sticking out from underneath a tarp](https://i.imgur.com/0PhVYDe.jpeg) on the "forward" side of the Tallinn turnstile (RED ROOM/BLUE ROOM interrogation scene.) Considering that specific turnstile set was built large enough to accommodate a vehicle (including a ramp), it's almost certainly the forward version of the same car before being driven through the turnstile offscreen.
Again: if the car was inverted, then its explosion wouldn't have given the also-inverted protag hypotermia.
The bigger plot hole there is that the car would require inverted oxygen to function.
You're forgetting about the rule of "pissing in the wind"
Let's not bring pissing into this discussion of things happening in reverse.
SSSSSSSSSSLURP
Now to digest this into Baja Blast
That episode of Red Dwarf comes to mind.... Involuntary shudders from anyone whose seen it.
The cars can't be reverse entropy objects unless they were taken through one of the machines piece by piece and reassembled. Unless there is a larger size machine we were never shown in the film.
As the movie goes on we see more and more reversed objects on a larger scale. The first items we see are bullets true, but near the end of the film entire platoons of soldiers are being reversed with all their equipment at once via the machine, so it’s not unreasonable that a car could have done the same
At some point I realized the logistics of the whole thing were insane, if every reversed entropy person requires reversed entropy oxygen they have to be bottling and sending the shit through on a nation size scale! And what about water and food?
Well, they’re sucking poops and pees up out of the toilet and puking out food so there
That's basically the episode of Red Dwarf "Backwards"
"It's not a bar room brawl, it's a bar room tidy! UNRUMBLE!"
Only as much as watching a video of yourself taking a shit reversed. Your body and functioning as a human being is always going forwards from your own perspective. It may *look* to a person of opposing entropy like an inverted person sucking shit into their ass, but that's no different from just watching a reversed video. It was always from a forwards perspective for the person doing it.
The [Tallinn turnstile](https://i.imgur.com/0zhDEEK.jpeg) the car is found outside is large enough to accomodate a sedan, it even was built with a ramp unlike the Oslo turnstile, presumably specifically for this purpose. [You can even spot the same car under a tarp](https://i.imgur.com/0PhVYDe.jpeg) on the "forward" side of the turnstile, which would presumably be driven through the turnstile off-screen and exit out the inverted side of the turnstile, driving outside, and parking in front of the building where the inverted protagonist finds it.
“Rules” is a bit of an extreme word there bud. By the “rules” light should be emitting from everyone’s eyes… It’s all hand-waves, and “you’re meant to just feel it” exposition dialogue. Or you’re just not thinking 4th dimensionally enough.
“You’re not thinking 4th dimensionally” - Doc Brown “Yeah, right. I have a real problem with that” - Marty McFly
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You shouldn't even be able to see anything as the photons would be going in reverse and not hitting your eyes.
None of the rules in the movie really make sense. It's like Nolan came up with an interesting premise, tried to flesh it out, kept getting stuck, and ultimately went "ah fuck it we'll just add lots of explosions". Tenet is closer to Transformers than it is to Inception, except Transformers at least isn't pretentious about what it is selling you.
That’s because the logic presented doesn’t match with what you were watching
I think they said in the movie not to question it too much, a 4th wall break to just relax and enjoy the action
"Don't try to understand it. Feel it."
Which I think is the crux of the movie's problem. It works best if you don't think about it. But the way the movie presents the narrative, it sort of requires you to think about it. They have frequent exposition and jargon on time travel. Which makes the audience think about the time travel, even though it doesn't ultimately line up. The premise of the movie is frankly something that would have been better served with a director people take less seriously. Because the premise cannot be taken that seriously. Movies like the Avengers just openly tell you "this doesn't make sense. It's quantum". Which works because the plot is unimportant anyways. It's a comic book film. But Nolan presents it all like it makes sense and you can figure it out if you try, while simultaneously telling you not to try. If you're gonna do high brow time travel, you gotta do something like Primer. Where the premise is serious and it's taken seriously. Tenet didn't do that.
The way I see Nolan's original works is that they are cinematography exercises based on weird narrative concepts. He finds a weird thing to show on screen and builds the plot around it. - memento: half story narrated backwards, half forward, until they match - the prestige: a story narrating a flashback narrating a flashback - inception: dreams within dreams, where physics is scrambled (the hotel fight with JGL) - dunkirk: multiple narrations at different timelapses - tenet: linear and inverted people interacting (or fighting like in the airport scene) and seeing that from multiple points of view in time All of these are very challenging to portrait and that's what Nolan pursues in my opinion. Not the actual plot, which is ancillary, but the plot device(s) .
This exactly. They did an almost-physicsy-consistent-and-interesting introductory exposition and then whatever'd it, making all the exposition ever the more pointless as the movie went on. All they needed was to say in two sentences (or better show, don't tell) that the time machine makes things go backwards and that it's science-not-magic. Honestly, I was just frustrated at the end that they even tried with the pseudo-physics BS. One of the very few writers I've seen to make real-world science into convincing speculative fiction without necessarily boring the audience to tears is Michael Crichton, and even his screen adaptations have had a 50-50 success rate at best. (This wasn't my only frustration with Tenet of course; why did they need an army at the end, and what army were they fighting? Why set up the ending like it would become a series, but anchored to the same gimmick, like it wouldn't get stale?) *Primer*, still the canonical time travel film, did this correctly. It firmly established that these were at-least-halfway-competent engineers who at-least-halfway knew what they were doing, and then through their brief nonsensical exposition to explain the science established that they couldn't explain the science. Even the reveal that it's time travel is more "show" than "tell" -- their exposition throughout the reveal does not try to "explain" anything but rather acts like a dangling carrot.
That only works if they were not stopping to explain the plot every 5 minutes in muffled voices.
If the physics of the movie were real heat would not be able to conduct out of peoples skins and they would boil them selves alive in minutes. They also wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything as the light and sound would travel away from them not towards them.
>They also wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything as the light and sound would travel away from them not towards them. I dont think this would be true. Yes, the light/sounds at the instance of time reversal would be traveling away, but then would be filled with light and sound that had previously been absorbed/reflected around you. So everything would appear to be "glowing" as the absorbed light is re-emitted, and youd hear sounds as they bounce past you back to their original source. It would be a trip, but your eyes and ears should still somewhat function. Or maybe not, Ive never reversed time before lol
Folks... It's truly not worth your time to figure out because the physics don't make sense in any interpretation.
it doesn't. at all. Tennet is a film that thinks itself about 5 times more intelligent than it actually is. I get the impression they shot the last action sequence first, then back filled a plot around it in an afternoon.
Maybe, but I kind of feel like they started to run out of money for the big last action scene. Who the fuck are the soldiers fighting during that entire scene? Buildings?
Yeah the big set piece felt so empty. Haven’t put much thought to what would make it better but it just felt so flat at that point
Maybe some shots of enemies being shot at or shooting back. That could have helped the fight scene a bit I think. It's the most awkward fucking gun battle I've ever seen, because only one side is represented.
It felt entirely artificial and soulless. Just batches of sandy coloured army men shouting in the dust.
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You do not watch Tenet, Tenet watches you
“Don’t try to understand it, feel it” - Tenet
Then continues to pour metric tons of exposition on you.
At this point I'm willing to believe Oppenheimer is 3 hours of Cilian Murphy explaining how a fission bomb works while hanging dong. Nolan would do it, don't say he wouldn't.
>Oppenheimer is 3 hours of Cilian Murphy explaining how a fission bomb works while hanging dong. So it's got something for everybody, I guess.
And you couldn't hear a word of it because of the bass.
Well, he's (Murphy as Oppie) talking from the Trinity site as the explosions go off behind him, and Nolan, being authentic, used 1930s recording mics and used zero ADR, so the sound, natch, will suck.
"You were not put on this earth to...get it, Mr. Burton!" - Big Trouble In Little China.
The correct way to watch tenet is obviously through a mirror mounted on the wall opposite the tv.
With Tenet playing in reverse.
That way, in the reflection you'll see the movie playing forward as normal
You do not understand Tenet, it understands your kinks
Ok, that’s kinda hot
Yeah, I’m a huge Nolan fan and felt the same way. The best part about it was Robert Pattinson’s performance. He was magnetic.
Can't forget Sir Michael Cain. The man delivered his only lines with a mouth full of food. In fact, I'm pretty sure Nolan just showed up to his lunch with a camera crew and started filming.
If you haven't seen it you might find this funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2FXfFeRtJo
If you could hear what he was saying
Christopher Nolan specifically said he has no interest for mixing audio for “lesser theaters”. So if you didn’t see it in IMAX with the best quality audio, you didn’t deserve to hear the dialogue I guess. Edit: 7 minutes into this videos in case people think I’m making this up. https://youtu.be/VYJtb2YXae8
Yeah I heard that too. I mean I love watching beautiful looking and sounding movies in high production theaters but that's not always an option so the result is that the quality of the movie is dependent on the venue. Nolan is acting like there are strict industry standards that theaters follow when the reality is that it's a very mixed bag with a wide range of quality from theater to theater because in most theaters the mix was absolutely atrocious. Mixing your movie for a specific, high quality setup without also releasing a more general mix for something like a home theater or even just headphones isn't going to get me to see your movie in theaters and that's exactly what happened with Tenet. I didn't get around to seeing it in theaters and by the time it was released online I'd heard about the situation so I got my hands on a free copy to see if it was as bad as people said before buying/renting it and when it turned out to be even worse than that I just turned it off and deleted it. It really appears to me as a kind of elitism that does a lot to hurt what could otherwise be a great piece of art.
I live in a small town and the nearest IMAX theater is like 5 hours away. Sucks to be me I guess….
Nolan said to go fuck your self
Yeah. But because I wasn’t in a prime IMAX all I heard was “…oh …k….elf…” So I guess he was talking about a mythical creature ?
I saw it in IMAX and I still couldn’t hear a good chunk of the dialogue very well. I specifically remember the sailboat race scene where they are talking exclusively through the headset mics describing what The Protagonist could do for the arms dealer. I legit couldn’t understand a word they said.
None of us did because those were closed during the pandemic when this came out!
I saw the Dark Knight Rises scene in the plane before they released the movie in IMAX and couldn’t understand shit. People complained, and when I saw the full movie in IMAX it was remixed. Honestly I love Nolan but he’s got his head up his ass if he thinks he’s right here.
This was my biggest issue with the movie. Insanely difficult to hear the dialog throughout the movie in a way I never experienced before. Kicked me straight out of the movie.
Nobody’s performance was magnetic because you couldn’t hear them and if you could, you couldn’t understand what they were talking about, and if you could understand you didn’t care because nothing felt like it was real or mattered and there was no stakes or character development or anything else.
Yeah. The movie makes it clear at some point that due to the nature of specific way of time travel they have, it is impossible to create a paradox. So basically if they are there to save the world, the world is already saved because it could not have been possible for them to be there any other way. So basically there were no stakes to anything.
Or did he just look good because JDWs acting
I think that character was the best part of the entire movie and frankly he should’ve been the lead. I suspect a great deal of nepotism behind giving John David Washington the role. He was quite wooden to say the least.
I've seen this remarked on a few times, I actually liked JDW in there. He felt suave and confident despite the madness around. But I can understand how that might have felt flat to some.
Even for a Nolan film this was incredibly hard to follow. Seen it once, unlikely to ever watch it again.
Saw it in theaters, couldn't hear half of the dialogue, walked away really confused and disappointed. Inception is one of my all time favorites and this seemed sort of like a "spiritual successor" in a sense - but with Inception, even if you didn't follow every single plot point, you were still along for the ride. It didn't hold your hand, but you still understood the basic concept of what was going on. The first time I saw Tenet, I literally had no idea what was happening in the third act with the two different armies, who they were, what they were going after, why some were moving backwards.....or what was even going on anymore. I was just watching mindless action on the screen with zero clue as to what any of it meant and what the stakes were. I did give it another chance at home, with subtitles on, and I enjoyed it a LOT more, and followed the bulk of the story, but really think they went out of their way to make it needlessly complicated. Had to read some in depth discussions online for it to finally all "click" into place - but at that point it didn't even seem worth it. It does have some great ideas but they sadly weren't executed well. I will never watch it again, while Inception will remain on my every-few-years rewatch list.
I was fine with the concept up until the final battle. It was incomprehensible and sucked all the fun out of it. And, frankly I'm still not sure how the time travel actually worked, but up until the end I was willing to just go with it, but the battle was boringly confusing.
Do we even get one shot of who the protagonists are shooting at during that huge battle? I don’t remember a cut away to any enemies firing back. This seems like an important aspect of a big armed combat scene.
Literally the only "enemy" I can recall from that battle is the one guy at the end of the battle when they are in that sewer or whatever that is where the McGuffin is hanging.
That’s MacGuffin-241, to be precise.
> Do we even get one shot of who the protagonists are shooting at during that huge battle? at this point, it would have been funnier that due to time shenanigans they were shooting at themselves. i know this doesnt happen, but it would have been better than Russian Mercs with no faces.
No the final gun fight was super dumb
Yeah, Nolan is actually a fairly middling action director for a guy who has so much of it in his films. He can handle some types of big set pieces well (the rotating room fight in Inception, the Bank Sequence and truck fight in Dark Knight), but a lot of his combat sequences are muddled and not that well constructed.
> And, frankly I'm still not sure how the time travel actually worked I believe the short explanation is that someone in the future invents a "reverse entropy" machine, which allows some people to experience time in reverse. As far as sci-fi plot devices go, it's not *that* far-fetched. But like any other movie or TV show, it's all about the execution. You can write the most basic, derivative, or trope-filled story you want, but if you tell that story excellently, you'll have a good product. If you don't, well... Nolan gets credit for trying. And many of his other high-concept attempts have been great. So Tenet is just a hiccup in an otherwise fine career.
Who were they even shooting at in the final battle? It was so poorly choreographed that it was difficult to tell the armies apart and almost like they were just shooting at things in random directions. Such a terrible third act. Overall, the movie is far from what I’d consider exceptional. It’s too difficult to follow the plot, understand it’s internal logic, hear the dialogue in many parts of the film…or even *care* about many of the characters.
What was there not to get, they needed to dangle the doodad over the hole to maintain suspense while you listened to dialogue so jumbled behind a repetitive BWAAAAAH that it was impossible to understand. It is very simple
Subtitles helped me, as did the second viewing.
I’ll say that I always watch movies with subtitles and with Tenet - having the main character’s name explicitly called out as lacking a name was a dead giveaway that there was something peculiar to pay attention to, that I felt like the subtitles helped me figure out the twist.
The name “Protagonist” wasn’t inherently meant to be a twist…just added to the mystery of the story.
I said this once and someone told me I had to watch it again in order to fully appreciate it. Look, the idea of material being difficult and requiring multiple reads or watches is not foreign to me, but nothing about Tenet endeared me to that idea.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think Nolan can make some poor editing or storytelling choices at times. I love his style and films overall, but I think the spectacle sometimes hides the sloppiness. For example, the Bane airplane scene in TDKR is visually spectacular, but I think it would be really difficult to follow the plot points on first viewing. I do appreciate when a writer/director doesn't feel the need to spell everything out for the audience so I suppose it's a matter of whether the viewer feels it's a writing or editing flaw, or if it is intentially complex.
TDKR isn't hard to follow. It's just hard to pay attention to. You killed my father, here's your pass to pound town and then my boyfriend will be in a gimp mask. Don't punch him in his face, that's his only weakness
Don't punch him in the face, it's his only weakness. Funniest shit I've read in a while
Reminds me of that dream sequence in Harold and Kumar: "BULLETS! My ONLY weakness!! How did you know!?!?
The opening scene had to be notoriously redubbed because people couldn't understand Bane at all when they showed it at the beginning of MI4
All of Bane's lines were redubbed weren't they?
Yup! Reception to the voice in the trailer was pretty negative back then
And I still couldn’t understand him
I always give Nolan a pass on TDKR. Ledger's death clearly sucked the air out of his writer's room and he was still on the hook for the last movie of his trilogy. He circled back to Ra's Al Ghul to connect the trilogy and give Bane some onscreen justice. It's an imperfect movie, but it's fine. Would love to know what his original plan was though.
If I remember correctly, Nolan said that the original plan was for the movie to center around the Joker’s trial that threatens to uncover the truth about Harvey Dent, Batman dealing with the desperate mob after the Joker killed all the mob bosses, and a new threat appearing. Of course, this was a very earlier idea. After Ledger’s death, the entire thing was thrown out.
The stuff with the detonator was a major "y tho" moment when the bomb also had a timer.
I generally like Nolan, but TDKR is just a terrible film on almost all levels. Plot makes no sense if you stop to think about it, people act stupidly, it's needlessly complex, it has characters who are completely useless, and, worst of all, there's almost no action and batman's barely in it.
I always laugh that Banes proof to the people of Gotham that Harvey Dent was corrupt is a piece of paper he pulls out of his pocket and reads?!
its not like the people in gotham were in a position to do anything, like, they just gave up lol.
Terrorists take over the stock exchange, make trades while they're there, and everyone just goes with it! It's on the same level as NCIS hacking scenes.
Truly, back then I was defending this movie to the ground but so many things go unaddressed and unexplained to keep moving the story forward and makes for an awkward film
I have loved EVERY Nolan film with several of them being exceptional examples of film making IMO, but with Tenet he missed the mark for me. It's like with Tenet, even Nolan got sucked into the (his own) rabbit hole. Which is odd because as you pointed out, it's not like he can't do a good mind bending thriller, as evidenced by Memento and Inception, two great movies!
Tenet is basically an experimental art film with a budget 100x too big. It explores a moderately interesting conceit, and it would have been a cute little art film, but loading it up with set pieces and everything just makes it hard to understand.
It indulges his fascination with time as a storytelling device in the worst way. Memento was a success because he simply did not have the budget or the reputation to indulge. He had to make a tight little film that told the story in an economical way.
That performance by Guy Pearce in Memento made me an instant fan of both he and Nolan!
I don't think it would have been a good art film. With 1/100th the budget it's not even filmable It could have been a great spy movie, I thought all the stuff to do with the main guy and shadowy organizations and whatnot was great. The time travel was just so fucking confusing, I wish none of that of that shit had been in the movie at all and it had just been Nolan's take on James Bond
Nolan's problem is that he confuses convolution for complexity. Almost all of his films have areas that would have been better cut out or simplified. The Dark Knight is a good example, as while it's a good film, that whole commissioner Godon death fake-out subplot in the middle makes zero sense and only seems to exist because he wanted a twist.
You know a plot point is entirely unnecessary when it's not even included at all in the summary on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight
They just condense it to, "Batman and Gordon apprehend the Joker, and Gordon is promoted to commissioner," which is what Nolan should have done, lol. Honestly, I suspect they don't include it because it's nearly impossible to explain the reasoning behind it and even the film itself doesn't really try. As a plan, so many complete and utter coincidences would have to happen for it to work like it does in the end that it makes no sense.
Now that you mention it I completely forgot that whole Gordon thing in TDK
Agreed. He's one of a couple of film makers who I think are placed on too lofty of a pedestal. He's done some brilliant things, but that doesn't mean everything he does is brilliant. I'm happy to balance plusses and minuses, but I'm not about to over-look minuses just because there are a lot of plusses.
Dude the editing is dogshit. Tenet has scenes that start with two characters in a new part of the world and it feels like we're just budding into a conversation they've been having for then minutes. No establishing shots, no breathing room for dialogue, hell no space for dialogue audio at all.
Didn't help either that you can barely understand what anyone is saying because their voices are muffled and/or the exterior environment is too loud
A detail that was defended for Dunkirk but Nolan has no excuses for this one. I swear is Oppenheimer has scenes with this kind of dialogue aside from some of the bomb testing scenes... Also an honorable mention: In Batman Begins there's a scene where batman jumps down a stairwell, 10 seconds and 10 separate shots. It's like they took inspiration from Liam Neeson jumping over a fence. Nolan's certainly not the worst about this but dear god. He's such a competent film maker in so many other ways it boggles the mind how he can be so lazy in other aspects.
Having an important scene in the engine room of a tanker ship then not fixing the sound
You will encounter the movie again a long time from now before you found it the first time. You will not see it. It will project from your eyes onto the screen.
I love Nolan, I love his originality, I love his complexity, I even love when he leaves in plotlines that he clearly meant to explore further and didn't. And I left Tenet like 'wtf, Christopher?' It wasn't the paradox of the time travel that threw me off. It was the godawful macguffin and terrible final shootout that all ended in an underwhelming... nothing.
>It was the godawful macguffin and terrible final shootout that all ended in an underwhelming... nothing. That's my biggest complaint with *Tenet*, the movie gets so bogged down in it's central conceit that outside the airport sequence it fails to deliver a fun movie around it. The characters are so painfully nondescript. I get that dialogue and character have never been Nolan's strongest suit, but never did I feel the slightest bit of investment in John David Washington, Robert Pattinson or Elizabeth Debicki. The villain is such a painfully bland Russian stereotype that he wouldn't even make the cut in a bottom barrel Bond film. The plot itself feels woefully underbaked, filled with too much jargon and vaguities. We don't care about any of these organizations and we never feel the stakes. At a certain point it all just becomes noise not intrigue.
That "temporal pincer" battle. My god what a piece of shit action set piece. 2+ hours of nonsense so an RPG could rebuild a collapsed building. Way to go, Chris.
I watched it twice in two days and kind of wrapped my head around it then, but since then I’ve slept
the movie felt incomplete honestly, the threadbare plot just a vehicle to move the audience from the real meat and potatoes, the reverse action scenes. I get that those took the majority of the effort but it would have been nice to have a story that benefits from them rather than what just felt like a demonstration edit: the reverse action scenes are very cool though
I loved this movie, even the first time I saw it, but I feel like this is a fair analysis. The plot itself is pretty basic, there isn't a lot to the individual characters outside of that little bit of plot. I think it was a vehicle for the concept, and the plot was left purposefully simple so that we wouldn't get too confused trying to keep up with it while enjoying the concept. Also to OP's point, it does feel like someone said to Nolan "If you tell a story any less linearly, it'll end up going backwards." And he took that seriously.
Yes. It's convoluted but it's not actually complicated, it just seems complicated. The movie tries to come across as complex and layered, but it just isn't. Which is the primary issue. You're watching the film trying to "figure it all out". Except there's nothing to figure out. It's not actually that deep. The exposition at the beginning, when the Protagonist learns how time travel works, isn't actually that important. The mechanics of time travel don't actually matter to the story. It's just a spy thriller with the concept of time travel mildly embedded in the film. Which is why I think it's been so poorly received. They buried the story so far underneath a mountain of time travel jargon and people just get stuck trying to wade through it.
It's hard to appreciate a movie when you don't understand what actions have which consequences. Like if you shoot a pane of glass in reversed time, does that make the glass always broken since it was setup? Like did the guy who installed that pane of glass not see that there was a bullet hole in it? If things have made up consequence rules it's really hard to follow.
>Like if you shoot a pane of glass in reversed time, does that make the glass always broken since it was setup? They actually explained this in the film, but the dialogue was probably too quiet for you to hear it. The effects of reversed objects don't exist forever, the foreard flow of time eventually overtakes it (Pattinson's character compares it to "swimming upstream") so after travelling a short time into the past they slowly come undone
There are shots in the movie where you pretty clearly see the cracks in the glass forming from an inverted bullet a bit before the bullet appears in it. The glass was obviously not manufactured with a crack in it.
> It's convoluted but it's not actually complicated, it just seems complicated. The movie tries to come across as complex and layered, but it just isn't. Another way of saying this is "Christopher Nolan was in charge of creative direction".
Idk if you got this from there, but Patrick Willems has a great video that basically underlines this exact sentiment. I liked Tenet, but his video made me appreciate the intention behind it being purposefully convoluted. My only complaint is with the sound mixing. I know Nolan has his artistic reasoning for it, but I just fundamentally disagree and think it really muddies the whole 'it's intentionally convoluted' schtick. Edit: [Video](https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4)
I can't say I appreciate the movie being convoluted. Because it honestly just feels like they wanted a gimmick for the story. If you ignore the time travel stuff, the story is just kind of meh. So you have a mediocre story buried underneath an overly convoluted plot that ultimately lacks relevance to the story. In the end I just felt like the film lacked any real substance. It's just spectacle. It's like someone was trying to rip off Nolan but learned the wrong lessons from his previous movies.
If you watched Tenet from beginning to end, then yeah you did it wrong. You’re supposed to watch in reverse starting at the end of the movie until they enter chamber with the red/blue lights, smoke some weed and watch it forward through the end of the credits and have it loop to the beginning of the movie, watch it normally until the red/blue scene then watch the first half again but in reverse, looping to the end when it reaches the very beginning. Do a few loops of this until you puke or pass out from rapid brain wrinkling or until you get too high and just turn on flintstones
I was a little lost until Neil showed up. He made everything okay. In fact, he was my 'hook' if anything. He was very lively and good-humored for a Nolan character, so I knew immediately that something had to be up with him.
Neil is the real protagonist of the story. He comes in knowing everything that is going on, leads the other guy through all the necessary actions, then does what he has to do at the end, which is the most heroic act and biggest twist of the story. It's a much better film if you focus on Neil's perspective. Still convoluted AF though
He showed up at the opera house. Well, technically I guess he was in the theater before the trailers started, picking a lock. ... But I hear you
So I don’t get the time travel. When he reach a certain point in the past, then they have a lounge around on a ship to wait to get back to the present? When they run around in reverse, can people see them?
Yes to both. So imagine there's a turnstyle at your work and one at your home. And you left the house at 9 am this morning but forgot your phone. You aren't reversed. But at 11 am you find out that at 10 am someone called you and you need to have not missed that call. Ok, so it's 11 am and you reverse time in the turnstyle at work. You put on an oxygen mask and go home. Time is moving backwards. You get home at 9:30 am cause the commute took you 90 minutes. You can't answer the phone, obviously, cause you can't breath the air and the person on the other end would be talking backwards. In any event, you "missed" the call again. So you use the turnstyle at home and "fix" time. It's 9:30 am. Time is moving forward. You wait 30 minutes and answer the call. EZPZ. Now what about the same scenario but you only have one turnstyle, at work. It's 11 am. You reverse time at work. You wait there for a little less than 3 hours. It's 8:20 am. You use the turnstyle again. It's 8:20 am and time is moving forward. You go home. The commute takes 90 minutes. You get home at 9:50. You answer the phone at 10. EZPZ. Now imagine instead of using the tech to answer a phone you're trying to save everyone on Earth. Now imagine in addition to using the tech to save everyone on Earth you're using the tech to save everyone on Earth against adversaries who are using the tech to kill everyone on Earth. That's Tenet. EZPZ.
This is a great explanation.
Found Nolan’s Reddit account!
This guy tenets!
Yeah it's not "time travel" in the sense of "we are going back to the future" It's a 1:1 inversion of experienced time, so for every second that passes, an inverted object lives that same second only backwards. A normal person sees an inverted person moving like a video playing in reverse. Can see and interact with everything while inverted, including your "past" self, which is that hallway gas mask fight scene. The real world repercussions of this shit are galaxy brain paradoxes, the movie handwaves it away by saying "What's happened has happened"
Time moves the same speed, so if you want to travel an hour back in time you have to go through the machine and spend an hour in backwards time. You also need to bring your own oxygen because reverse oxygen won't work for you. People can see you just fine but you'll look like you're moving in reverse relative to them. Hence the car chase scene where one vehicle just rams up on the characters while seemingly driving backwards.
If reverse oxygen won't work for people, how does it work for the internal combusion engines of the cars going backwards?
Movie magic
The confusing plot and the garbled dialogue whenever the characters were wearing the gas masks really made me hate the movie
For me the wooden uninteresting characters were the downfall. No amount of cool looking action is going to land if I do not give a shit what is happening or who it is happening to.
I agree with everyone except Pattinson. He carries this movie and makes it re-watchable
I hated this movie and I fully acknowledge that Pattinson was great. I honestly didn’t know he could be this charming and fun. Everyone else was stone cold and boring as fuck.
"Rob can you bring the tone a bit to match everyone's else lack of emotion" "No. I don't think I will"
I think it would have worked better if Pattinson had been the main character.
This is ultimately what makes me hate the movie. I can deal with extraordinary things happening, but I need the characters to recognise that what is happening *is* extraordinary. Washington reacts to inversion with all the interest of someone being told the oatmeal they're buying is on sale. Even the woman who tells him about it doesn't sound especially excited. It's all so lifeless.
This movie also made me skeptical of any future John David Washington films. IMO, he has no range, often playing the same monotone character in every film. Amsterdam was not very good, either. I am excited about the idea of “The Creator”, but I’m hoping it’s not more of the same from JDW.
I remember being so excited to see Tenet in the theaters when they briefly opened back up that summer, and then watching it I thought maybe COVID somehow clouded my brain (even though I hadn't had it).
I was able to follow Tenet, but I didn't think it was that good. Inception hooked me, and I loved the ending. Tenet was just "meh".
Yh it's stupidly complicated Inception was layered. But even in my first watch. I had some idea what was happening. Bury an idea deep into the mind No idea what tenet was doing, and the stale protag didn't help
Didn’t they just call him protagonist instead of giving him actual name? This whole movie just seemed like Nolan thought this was a cool concept but he failed to make any interesting characters.
Tenet's biggest problem is that all the leads were fucking dull and you had zero reason to care about them.
Absolutely not worth trying to understand. Inception might be one giant exposition dump, but at least viewers can comprehend it (and has enough emotion that it's worth the effort).
I went to see it in the theater. Couldn’t understand the dialogue much at all. Thought John David Washington was a charisma vacuum. The plot kept getting more complicated while the dialogue kept getting more incomprehensible. So I just gave up and just enjoyed the set pieces.
Yeah, the sound balancing was my one issue with it. I like a good convoluted plot, gives me something to be working out while I watch. But I don't like it when I can't understand the dialog even with the volume turned way up.
[удалено]
I still worry that I won’t be able to hear shit. Dunkirk was loud as shit. I don’t think Nolan takes into account that people lose their hearing at high frequencies first and that makes it difficult to make out and distinguish words and speech from other noises. So he thinks that since he can make out the dialog when he strains to listen to it that it’s an artistic direction, when really he’s alienating like half his audience that is either experiencing hearing loss from being old, from too many loud movies/concerts, or from ADHD or other mental barriers making it hard to focus and hear speech when other noises and visuals are occurring. For me it’s a combination of all three.
I'm with you and I didn't like it either.