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

[JAWS]

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.

English Captions helped me

I would turn them on anytime I thought things were getting deep.


Ultimately its just another damn time travel movie.. Where a lot of it was easy to see coming because... Well Time travel.. Its been done to death.

Spoiler

such as I figured he was fighting himself and that she saw herself jumping from the boat.

BUT man the film looked beautiful in 4k.

I liked it overall but it was made more complicated then it needed to be.

I liked it overall in a Sci Fi James Bond kind of way.. But it could have been better IMO.

Hey the whole if you touch your time travel self was from time cop wasn't it ?

 

[a-dev]

This guy is a genius And I haven't even seen Tenet yet.

 

[JAWS]

This guy is a genius And I haven't even seen Tenet yet.

That was awesome.. Summed up the movie pretty well....

I was thinking about it earlier today.. Yeah it is kinda that dumb.

 

[SwedishHeat]

If I ever have a chance to meet Nolan, I will definitely ask him how inverted people poop.

 

[BeefEaster]

That's exactly the kind of stuff I was talking about that made no sense about inversion.

Like if you break a sweat are you already sweaty and the sweat goes back in your pores? How would you be able to hear if the sound waves are traveling away from your ears and back to their source? If you drive a car does the gas tank fill back up with gas? Would you only be able to drive it to the point where the gas level was in regular time?

 

[Username]

That's exactly the kind of stuff I was talking about that made no sense about inversion.

Like if you break a sweat are you already sweaty and the sweat goes back in your pores? How would you be able to hear if the sound waves are traveling away from your ears and back to their source? If you drive a car does the gas tank fill back up with gas? Would you only be able to drive it to the point where the gas level was in regular time?

It only didn't make sense to you, but you said you didn't understand it and don't plan on watching it again.
Everything is reversed. Everything. Except your point of view.
You are travelling through time in reverse to everyone else(By the inversion portal machine). So you are moving through time forward from your point of view, but reversed from other people's point of view(People who aren't inverted). You go through the machine, and it inverts you. After that, until you find another inversion machine, you will keep travelling backwards through time from everyone else's point of view, but forward in your own.
So, from your point of view, you sweat as normal. But to people who aren't inverted, you will seem to sweat, eat, poop, pee, etc, in reverse. From a normal person, they will standing next to a puddle on the ground. You walk up, backwards, and start to draw the pee back into you. From your point view, you did it the normal way, but you were inverted.
A gun with rounds that have been inverted will "recall" rounds back into the magazine, and the holes in the wall made by the rounds will disappear. For the gun, it has been inverted, and it's still firing normally, but is reversed from your point of view.
It was all very cleverly thought through and cannot be divined totally from one watch.

 

[BeefEaster]

But in the movie when he's inverted and he steps in the puddle the splash happens in reverse before his foot hits the water even from his point of view.

I don't know why you're getting so defensive over the movie and singling me out. It doesn't make sense to a lot of people, not just me. It's like you're on the verge of throwing insults.

 

[Username]

But in the movie when he's inverted and he steps in the puddle the splash happens in reverse before his foot hits the water even from his point of view.

That's because HE is inverted. The splash works in reverse, even from his point of view because now he is the one working backwards in time. The world is not inverted, so it seems from his(and our) point of view, to work in reverse.

I don't know why you're getting so defensive over the movie and singling me out. It doesn't make sense to a lot of people, not just me. It's like you're on the verge of throwing insults.

Okay. We've got off on the wrong foot here.
I am not insulting you.
That's not my intention.
Although i don't know you, imagine me like a friend of yours, sitting in a chair across from you, telling you about this great movie that i enjoyed, and trying to share that enjoyment that you don't share.
If you are reading any kind of negativity in my posts, that's not my intention.
It just seems like you are saying the movie doesn't make sense. All i am saying is that it does make sense once you know the idea behind it.
You have said you don't get it. Okay. Fair enough. You said you don't fancy watching it again, but also say it doesn't make sense. It does, though. There are multiple layers in the movie, like every Nolan movie. It doesn't speak about the world we live in. It's an enclosed narrative that only really speaks about itself. It's a tall tale, told by one of the greatest tellers of tales we have.
If you were willing to give it another try, i expect you'd realise that it's a very tightly woven narrative, and they didn't leave anything to chance.
Please, don't think my poss are from a defensive point of view. We are just talking here. It's one of the problems with fora like this one(Or indeed, any text based messaging), is that you can't hear the person talking to you. If we were chatting, you'd realise i am totally calm, and not defensive, or trying to attack you.
We are just talking here.

 

[BeefEaster]

Thinking about how everything works just leads to more questions than answers for me.

The concept is interesting but the story that goes along with it is overly complicated seemingly for the sake of it in my opinion.

 

[Username]

Thinking about how everything works just leads to more questions than answers for me.

The concept is interesting but the story that goes along with it is overly complicated seemingly for the sake of it in my opinion.

That's fair comment.
Most movies only exist as a story for the sake of it. A little whirlwind ride you take and immerse yourself in the narrative.

 

[The Clown Prince of Crime]

If I ever have a chance to meet Nolan, I will definitely ask him how inverted people poop.

The poop turns into food?

 

[SwedishHeat]

The poop turns into food?

I mean, logically ... the only way to do it would be spitting poop out of your mouth.

 

[SwedishHeat]

I am reminded of the Rick and Morty copypasta

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Rick's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Rick & Morty truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Rick's existential catchphrase "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Dan Harmon's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them. ��

And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Morty tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid ��

 

[Username]

I mean, logically ... the only way to do it would be spitting poop out of your mouth.

If that’s how you poop, I feel sorry for you. There’s no need to work anything out. An inverted person poops the same as everyone else. But they are inverted, so if you were to witness this event, the poop would slither back up their bum, and be turned into food, which they would regurgitate back onto a plate.

 

[Otomofan]

If you love Micheal Bay movies with them explosions n' monster trucks, but think they were always missing about 150% Christopher Nolan inhaling the stench of his own "genius" farts, then THIS is the movie for you!!!

 

[ShadowX81]

If that’s how you poop, I feel sorry for you. There’s no need to work anything out. An inverted person poops the same as everyone else. But they are inverted, so if you were to witness this event, the poop would slither back up their bum, and be turned into food, which they would regurgitate back onto a plate.

What happens to that food afterwards then? Say that person ate an apple. Would this inverted apple rot away as a normal apple would, or shrink before turning back into a seed? How would it shrink to what it started from if it didn't have the tree it came from to "reverse-grow" on?

 

[Username]

What happens to that food afterwards then? Say that person ate an apple. Would this inverted apple rot away as a normal apple would, or shrink before turning back into a seed? How would it shrink to what it started from if it didn't have the tree it came from to "reverse-grow" on?

It would go through the same journey a normal apple would but in reverse. It’s not that hard to fathom out. It’s entropy. Or reverse entropy. The only way it slightly differs from what we see normally is that it’s reversed from a normal point of view. If the protagonist was inverted and spent five years this way, to an outside observer, he would seem to be doing everything in reverse. From his point of view he would be moving normally. All of this is either moving forward in time normally, or moving backwards in time(As before, with you moving normally, albeit back in time, but from a non inverted witness point of view you’d seem to be moving backwards). There’s nothing that can’t be reasoned out by imagining it forwards or backwards.

 

[ShadowX81]

It would go through the same journey a normal apple would but in reverse. It’s not that hard to fathom out. It’s entropy. Or reverse entropy. The only way it slightly differs from what we see normally is that it’s reversed from a normal point of view. If the protagonist was inverted and spent five years this way, to an outside observer, he would seem to be doing everything in reverse. From his point of view he would be moving normally. All of this is either moving forward in time normally, or moving backwards in time(As before, with you moving normally, albeit back in time, but from a non inverted witness point of view you’d seem to be moving backwards). There’s nothing that can’t be reasoned out by imagining it forwards or backwards.

Where it completely falls apart though is when that object or person's development inherently relies on another object or person that is in the reverse order of whichever track it is currently on. As in the case with the apple at some point needing a tree to come from. Or a person aging in reverse eventually needing a womb to be in.

The movie also switches back and forth on if inversion actually makes it possible to alter the past or if "whatever happened happened". Naturally the very concept of inversion pretty much locks it into the latter, with people meeting inverted humans early in the movie which turn out to be themselves inverted later on. However the very premise of the plot is based around people in the future attempting to destroy the world by sending a bomb or something back in time, and at the end a woman manages to kill her husband in the past, even though earlier in the movie remembers witnessing one element of an assassination that hasn't happened at all yet from her point of view.

 

[Otomofan]

Yeah. It was a dumb movie dressed up in a tuxedo. Still dumb though.

All time travel movies are dumb. At some point or another, logic collapses. It simply doesn't work.

 

[generalszabo]

Yeah. It was a dumb movie dressed up in a tuxedo. Still dumb though.

All time travel movies are dumb. At some point or another, logic collapses. It simply doesn't work.

I don't agree that it was dumb, it was actually very clever. However, I agree that any film that tries to do a time travel story fails as it just doesn't make sense. My favourites are time loops where an event is destined to happen over and over, it just doesn't work in our reality