Christopher Nolan's Tenet (August 12th, 2020)

[BeefEaster]

Yeah, they're gonna have to bite the bullet soon.

Otherwise they're going to potentially be sitting on these releases for years.

 

[Captain Clown]

Tfw people want to see your next kino shot with IMAX cameras on their bloody television sets instead of braving a pandemic and going to the Theatre.

 

[spindrift]

Yup, i guess they dont want to make $20 a pop per home rental. Stupid is as stupid does- see you in 2021 tenant if anyone still cares about movie theaters then after over a year without them. I am actually surprised studios are banking on this, are they planning to bail out the movie theaters when they all go bankrupt? I highly doubt theaters will go back to what they were ever again. People arent going to care anymore- i personally dont miss the overpriced concession, the kids on thier phones, sticky floors, and when they do open up (if they even survive) on a more permanent basis the first time someone coughs the whole theater will clear out

The whole theater business will be decimated by next year. Nolan and company are going to have to figure out a reason for people to return...I don't think Tenet is the movie to do it...

 

[ShadowX81]

Just got out of seeing it at the drive through.

Without revealing anything, all I will say is boy that was confusing. Im going to be spending days trying to figure out what it is I just watched.

 

[Username]

Just got out of seeing it at the drive through.

Without revealing anything, all I will say is boy that was confusing. Im going to be spending days trying to figure out what it is I just watched.

No Spoilers Ahead From Me, Rest Assured. I Won't be discussing plot at all


It's quite a complex set of ideas.
My wife and i spent about two hours after the movie, discussing the story, and "getting it" straight in our heads. We went back again to watch it, in that "We know the plot, now we are watching purely for the visuals and to fill in blanks" that is de rigeur for a rewatch.
We are both huge Nolan fans, and i have watched Tenet reviews by people who seem not to have gotten it, or who got it, but thought it was convoluted.
It's fair comment. The movie is more complex in story than Memento, Inception and The Prestige.
That said, my Wife and i both reckon this is his masterpiece(I will always hold The Dark Knight Rises up the highest, for purely personal reasons), but this one is incredible.
I know quality when i see it. I saw it in Memento, i saw it in Batman Begins, The Prestige, and Inception. And this movie is no different.
It's complex. We all knew that was going to be the case. But it just means that Nolan *fully understands* that Cinema, modern Cinema, is not just a "one and done" immersion-and-walk away experience, but is akin to a fine glass of whiskey. Something you can savour again and again, as often as you like, or as occasionally as you like. And his works, always have more to offer. Each scene so brimming with details, and beautiful set-pieces that you can watch it again and again and still come away with more info.
I know that ten years from now, regardless of how man other movies he has helmed in the interim, i will be watching Tenet several times per year and still enjoying it.

 

[ShadowX81]

If you liked it than all the power to you, but personally I thought it was a mess of a maze that doesn't have much to say about anything other than it's own complexity. The more I think about it, the more plot holes seem to pop up. And the more of these massive plot holes pop up, the less "smart" it seems. How genius can something really be if it prides itself on a complexity that upon close inspection is held together with string and duct tape?

The most notable problems were:

Spoiler

The plot doesn't seem consistent on if inversion means you continue to live your life, just backwards through time where there will be two versions of you passing eachother; or if it means you are literally moving backwards through your own timeline. The former seems to apply in cases of characters, while the latter seems to apply to objects.

Also, there is an overly complicated heist sequence early on that takes up 30-45 minutes of the movie. Despite some fun camera tricks and payoffs later, it is mostly a pointless narrative detour that could have been removed entirely.

 

[Wor-Gar]

a mess of a maze that doesn't have much to say about anything other than it's own complexity.

I have this issue with many Nolan movies.

The opening sequence of TDKR is the perfect example: overly complex for what it needs to accomplish

 

[Username]

Just FYI, when you post with a spoiler tag, the spoiler part isn’t in spoilers in the preview email post, lol.

 

[Ehollywood]

Just watched this movie twice in a row at a Drive in. Pretty crazy concept

 

[Wor-Gar]

Available bluray in December.

 

[Zurdo95D]

Whoever thought that a Nolan would go on to create such a stream of amazing cinema!

 

[SwedishHeat]

Having watched it last night, I will say it was somewhat fun. I'm pretty sure I got it, but I do think it was needlessly complicated.

I think the comments about the dialogue being hard to understand were valid. When so much of the movie takes place through exposition, you MUST ensure the dialogue is easy to understand ... it was not. I am going to watch it again with subtitles on, to ensure I can understand the dialogue.

I am glad I didn't know anything about the plot though. It was enjoyable watching it all play out.

 

[Username]

Having watched it last night, I will say it was somewhat fun. I'm pretty sure I got it, but I do think it was needlessly complicated.

I think the comments about the dialogue being hard to understand were valid. When so much of the movie takes place through exposition, you MUST ensure the dialogue is easy to understand ... it was not. I am going to watch it again with subtitles on, to ensure I can understand the dialogue.

I am glad I didn't know anything about the plot though. It was enjoyable watching it all play out.

Yeah. My wife and I are planning a rewatch now that it’s available.

 

[moose]

This by far was his worst but he has been trending down since Dark Knight Dark knight Rises had parts that were dragging but still it's an adaptation.

But as far as his own concept with exception of inception it's gone ridiculous. This latest attempt was horrible so much explaining and it only made things worse.

WB can do with out him he is finished there anyway.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

 

[BeefEaster]

I watched this earlier on streaming and I had an extremely hard time following the story.

I'd heard complaints about this but thought it was just because peopoe weren't paying close enough attention but the problem goes far beyond that

I had to rewind the movie several times to listen to dialogue again because I thought I missed something but eventually I just gave up and let the movie play because not only was it hard to follow but the whole thing with the inverted objects and people made no sense.

It's like Nolan had an idea that he dreamnt about but wasn't quite able to to make it in to a logical story that worked for a movie.

 

[Username]

I watched this earlier on streaming and I had an extremely hard time following the story.

I'd heard complaints about this but thought it was just because peopoe weren't paying close enough attention but the problem goes far beyond that

I had to rewind the movie several times to listen to dialogue again because I thought I missed something but eventually I just gave up and let the movie play because not only was it hard to follow but the whole thing with the inverted objects and people made no sense.

It's like Nolan had an idea that he dreamnt about but wasn't quite able to to make it in to a logical story that worked for a movie.

I won't insult you, but i will state that you just can't appreciate(Or fully dismiss) a Nolan movie in one sitting, surely?
I will grant you that the problem of the slightly indistinctly-mixed dialogue did have my wife and i scratching our heads the first watch.
There hasn't been a movie Nolan made that didn't require a minimum of two watches to fully appreciate the nuance of the story, and i will state that as fact. Some of his movies i get new details from every single re-watch. I will state that the movie is internally consistent, and my wife and i have watched it half a dozen times, two of those times with the subtitles turned on, just to get the full flavour of the dialogue we might have missed previously. I won't be an apologist for the awful audio mixing job done on this movie. But it *was* released in 2020, so that has to get them a little slack, eh?
Just in case anyone who is reading this thread hasn't seen it, spoilers below the line(And yes, i know there's a spoiler tab, lol):


SPOILERS BEYOND!

The reveal of the time inversion not only hints at a secondary layer of the movie, but i implicitly implies it. There are so many scenes where you are not only watching for what's going on in normal time, but in the background, implied or not, there's something also happening inverted. It demands a rewatch with all the facts in hand to be able to comprehend the entirety of the plot.

SPOILERS OVER!

So, all i would say is you can't judge it on one watch. You have to give it a minimum of three watches to see most of what he puts in a frame. I don't mean all at once, of course. One watch might just confuse you. His movies do that. But on each subsequent rewatch, you'll get more and more. And i think that was always his intention. It was just a shame 2020 came along and stopped people from extensive rewatches of the movie in theatres, where it was meant to be watched.

 

[BeefEaster]

I didn't really care for it so I have no desire to rewatch it.

 

[generalszabo]

This film made me feel stupid in a good way. Some parts of it were ingenious and I wish I had nolan's mind

 

[matticus]

I thought it was a very thought provoking film. Thankfully I was aware of some of the theories being thrown around and can see the normal movie-goer being overwhelmed. But it seemed to be edited pretty tight for the first half of the movie. Odd to see the main character not being blown away by time actually being inverted! Lol! Wonder how the film might look when ran backwards?

 

[darthviper107]

We were watching it again, the dialog is definitely an issue, the way it's edited the cuts are very quick and stream of lines is just constant. The main issue though is that there's a ton of unnecessary details that don't matter to the plot and just make things difficult to follow.