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For the director of a movie that looks like an ad for an expensive watch, you'd think Nolan would understand aspiration better.
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May 7, 2021 00:48
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Dalaram posted:Watched it twice on a plane. Disliked it, read some of the thread here, then watched it on the return flight and liked it better. At this point we don't need spoiler tags in this thread anymore. The point is to make the algorithm something that nobody can access ever. They want to prevent the future from ever using it. The thing with the algorithm drop isn't really explained well, but the idea is that its going to be put somewhere that it'll be sealed up by radiation or something and they won't be able to steal it back before the future can get it. As long as they hide it somewhere that nobody knows where it is, and then they get killed, then the future has no idea where it could be. They'd have to just look literally everywhere. Its not entirely clear if Neil knows he dies. Protagonist realizes it, and seems to try to tell Neil, but Neil either already knows or doesn't want to know. He knows he can't change it either way. He's fully accepted fatalism. They're time cultists living for the thing they believe in, religiously. There's no way to "speed up time" presented in the movie, no. We know from the laws of relativity that going very very fast would achieve this, or sitting nearby to a very very massive gravity well, like a black hole. But that's probably prohibitively difficult for the characters of the movie to pull off. So they're just spending months sleeping inside shipping containers. You just have to live out the inverted time in real-time, trying not to encounter anybody. This is why we see them hanging out in the ship, talking to each other, but not interacting with anybody else. Shipping containers are a pretty convenient way to seal them up while inverted, although it would also suck to live that way for a long time. Yeah basically just don't shoot your backward moving buddies, although you are correct that it may be easy to mistake which way an inverted soldier is moving on a battlefield and accidentally end up causing friendly fire. I imagine they would all be pretty well warned about trigger safety beforehand but still, an inverted battle would just be insane and most everybody would probably die. Yeah after the battle you can always sync up. Although it will mean that either Red team or Blue team is technically "older" than they were before relative to the other team. One team would have experienced more hours of life than the other team. The only reason not to have them revert and charge back in is because it already happened, and they already won. Everything is as it should be. But you're right, they *could* have done that. The entire battle of 40 soldiers could have been 20 protagonists against 20 protagonists.
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May 7, 2021 00:51
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Sir Kodiak posted:For the director of a movie that looks like an ad for an expensive watch, you'd think Nolan would understand aspiration better. https://www.hamiltonwatch.com/en-us/tenet
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May 7, 2021 00:55
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Remember how I mentioned Tenet was on HBO last night so I decided to watch it? Apparently yesterday was also the movie's premiere in HBO MAX. To commemorate it The Ringer's The Big Picture podcast did a live watch podcast Rifftrax-style. I may watch it again with the podcast commentary this weekend.
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May 7, 2021 03:44
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Zaphod42 posted:Snip Awesome, thanks. One question left unanswered though - Does Sator invert/uninvert ever, beyond the last scenes? And if he does, how does he catch up with Kat? If not, why is he going to the Turnstiles? To get gold drops?
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May 7, 2021 04:45
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sethsez posted:It's funny, Nolan's puzzle boxes used to serve as a backdrop for obsessed men following their fixations into increasingly dark and desperate places as part of their quest for self-identity and a feeling of security. You'd think Tenet's conceit would be perfect for that, but here we are. So Tenet is Nolan's movie about himself lol
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May 7, 2021 05:09
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Dalaram posted:One question left unanswered though - Does Sator invert/uninvert ever, beyond the last scenes? And if he does, how does he catch up with Kat? I think the idea of "catching up" is a mistake. If I invert at time X, and stay inverted for a day, then return to being non-inverted, I simply continue to exist in normal time passage. Once I reach the time when the "past me" was inverted in the first place, I'm two days older than I was when I experienced that. You can't help but "catch up" just by becoming normal and existing for a while.
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May 7, 2021 08:45
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Niel definitely knows he’s going to die, he’s recruited by TP/Tenet in the future because that was essentially his “test” to enter the organization even though from Neils perspective that was the end of his timeline. The whole thing is that all the core members of Tenet must have done something that indicated they were willing to die for their tenets. Even if future TP didn’t hint at this, Neil would have known that his last event was a one way trip because of the whole way turnstiles work- if you don’t see yourself inverted/reverted you know you’re taking a one way trip.
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May 7, 2021 17:37
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:So Tenet is Nolan's movie about himself lol NOLAN OLANO LANOL ANOLA NALON
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May 7, 2021 17:40
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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:Niel definitely knows he’s going to die, he’s recruited by TP/Tenet in the future because that was essentially his “test” to enter the organization even though from Neils perspective that was the end of his timeline. The whole thing is that all the core members of Tenet must have done something that indicated they were willing to die for their tenets. Even if future TP didn’t hint at this, Neil would have known that his last event was a one way trip because of the whole way turnstiles work- if you don’t see yourself inverted/reverted you know you’re taking a one way trip. If you don't see yourself through the proofing window, it means you won't emerge from the turnstile at all. It doesn't mean you're going to die after going through it at some later/earlier point. There wouldn't have been an instance where Neil didn't see himself through the window, even with his inevitable death.
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May 7, 2021 18:10
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Well unless you died right outside the turnstile, in which case: as you walked into the turnstile you would look through the "proofing window" and would see yourself rising like Lazarus from the fatal wound and walking backwards into the other side of the turnstile. Which is actually a pretty terrifying image and would make me want to not walk through the turnstile, which of course I could not choose to do. Bummer.
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May 7, 2021 18:20
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Oh duh yeah nv
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May 7, 2021 18:27
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it would of been interesting to see that final death from Neil's perspective, and give him some killer headaches or whatever while he's trying to work.
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May 8, 2021 07:05
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Android Apocalypse posted:I think people are confused/upset since Nolan's last 2 movies (Interstellar and Dunkirk) are relatively accurate in terms of science/history. Tenet is back to more Inception where the crux of the technology is not explained and now we have almost 30 pages of discourse over it. This would work better if Tenet didn't spend about 60% of its dialog trying to explain how everything is working anyway. Inception has exposition for the parts that directly matter for the story (and it sticks to those rules throughout), and everything else is just left to "it's magic science" and isn't explained at all. Inception has a clear idea of what needs to be explained and what doesn't, and it knows what needs to be set in stone and what can be a magical contrivance. Tenet, meanwhile, has no loving clue. The fact that Inception is grounded by understandable character emotions and motivations doesn't hurt, either.
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May 8, 2021 07:47
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I thought it was very interesting when they were planning the big plane crash distraction that Protagonist was studying a chart of the building, which happened to be a pentagon, and said something like "This Pentagon has to have something at the center...." Very uhh strange 9/11 connection? I dunno.
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May 8, 2021 08:11
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sethsez posted:This would work better if Tenet didn't spend about 60% of its dialog trying to explain how everything is working anyway. Inception has exposition for the parts that directly matter for the story (and it sticks to those rules throughout), and everything else is just left to "it's magic science" and isn't explained at all. Once it’s established that faith alone has a causal effect - e.g. that “remembering” an inverted event that hasn’t yet happened will cause it to happen - everything becomes magic. Or it may as well be; there are very few instances like when Protag stares at the flipped car, and you can see him remembering to crash that car. It’s also established that an inverted bullet strikes at two points in time simultaneously, that inverted objects can and do eventually ‘freeze’ in time and appear/vanish, that inversion is ‘contagious’, etc. You actually can map out nearly everything according to these rules, with enough effort, but there’s not much point. What’s actually going on in the film is simply that the protagonists are protecting the symbolic universe of meaning against “chaos”, and this is why they’re getting ‘meta’ with the film being about the construction of a narrative.
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May 8, 2021 11:53
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Martman posted:I thought it was very interesting when they were planning the big plane crash distraction that Protagonist was studying a chart of the building, which happened to be a pentagon, and said something like "This Pentagon has to have something at the center...." Now look up who George Tenet was....
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May 8, 2021 15:19
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This was a cool movie and I’m glad there’s movies like this, flaws and all. I’ll take an ambitious project that tries something unique or different or presents something new over yet another mediocre, low aiming standard movie or whatever. Give me another. That being said I didn’t understand too much, just went with what it presented, so I’ll have to watch it again. I appreciate all the conversations here too as it’s fun to read and get food for thought.
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May 8, 2021 16:58
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:What’s actually going on in the film is simply that the protagonists are protecting the symbolic universe of meaning against “chaos”, and this is why they’re getting ‘meta’ with the film being about the construction of a narrative. What struck me about Tenet is how enamored it is with the secret world of the rich, and that, of course, is what the protagonist(s) are protecting. It's basically a flat denial of the Marxist proposition that capitalism is historically contingent. In Tenet, these secret warehouses and private armies are actually incontrovertible cosmological constants!
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May 8, 2021 17:13
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Do the tax-dodging secret pre-customs art warehouses exist in our real world?
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May 8, 2021 20:29
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evobatman posted:Do the tax-dodging secret pre-customs art warehouses exist in our real world? Absolutely yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_economic_zone?wprov=sfti1
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May 8, 2021 20:53
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CineD needs a pictures thread like CSPAM has... edit: not my horrible grammar
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May 8, 2021 21:52
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I love Interstellar (also Inception and TDKR) but Tenet is also pretty high up there for Nolan soundtracks.
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May 8, 2021 22:10
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watched this a couple of times on demand now with subtitles. First time I didn't like it much, second time I liked it both more and less, which is appropriate I guess. Inception I felt was a movie that I could enjoy on first viewing. The cackhanded drama scenes with Sator and Ivanka just seem worse and worse on repeated viewing. Like truly awful. Debicki reminds me too much of Trump to be able to take her very seriously, and the movie kind of depends on really feeling for her as Tenet does. If you look at the way the camera just dotes on her in their first scene together and the look on his face, he appears to be just completely smitten but I was not. Then a lot of the emotional weight of the finale revolves around her and Sator having each traveled back in time to the day their love died and talking again, so drat Nolan it hurts, but then you get this terrible dialogue and honestly bad acting from both of them. The structure of the movie was more satisfying on second viewing, which makes sense because it is similar to Back to the Future 2 and Avengers: Endgame where the time heist character is revisiting earlier scenes in disguise. But with BTTF and Endgame, the first time through is in one movie and the revisiting happens in a sequel. In Tenet its all in one movie so you kind of have to rewatch to get the full effect. Watching with subtitles and rewind definitely helps comprehensibility because some stuff happens very fast where maybe lingering on it would have helped. Also Tenet and Ives have a very key exchange setting up the finale while both wearing oxygen masks, that must have been hard to follow in the theater. The movie has a bunch of handwaving for why they dont tell Tenet anything until later, but honestly they might as well just turn and wink at the audience and say 'and it sets up a nice surprise for YOU, too...' when they do it. The most egregious example however has nothing to do with the shadow war or spycraft. Debicki decides to unburden herself to this man she doesnt know at all about all her problems with her husband in a ludicrous scene. However, she neglects to mention that her husband is dying of inoperable cancer, and she in fact lays out the scenario very much as if he's perfectly healthy and she's trapped indefinitely in this situation. Why? well I guess it sets up a good way to resolve things later but I dont really get why the character would do it. Overall I give it a meh, maybe a B. It functions well enough on the Bond level of being pretty and having a lot of flash clothes and boats and stuff. John David Washington is handsome. Cafe Barbarian fucked around with this message at 22:38 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 22:35
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GoutPatrol posted:it would of been interesting to see that final death from Neil's perspective, and give him some killer headaches or whatever while he's trying to work. Neil has the most exciting journey by far in the finale but its kind of hard to follow because he is masked and gets lost in groups of identical mooks a lot. I think though that although he says he has to go back to pick the lock and get shot, there's no indication that he's going to do it right then. He has to go hide his piece of the Al Gorethym and it looks like he's going to get on a helicopter with the other armbands. So who knows, he might have all kinds of adventures before he goes back there to die. That would explain why he doesnt have a headache or any wound developing yet.
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May 8, 2021 22:45
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sethsez posted:This would work better if Tenet didn't spend about 60% of its dialog trying to explain how everything is working anyway. Inception has exposition for the parts that directly matter for the story (and it sticks to those rules throughout), and everything else is just left to "it's magic science" and isn't explained at all. The problem with this is that even with that 60% dialogue being dedicated to explaining wtf is going on, you still had the vast majority of mainstream audiences going "wtf I didn't understand anything in that movie" Where the catch with Inception being "you go into somebody's dreams" is just much much easier for the common layman to grok. If you don't understand the inverse-entropy concept, the drama of the film fails. So you have to make sure the audience gets it. But even then its not enough for lots of people.
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May 9, 2021 00:42
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Cafe Barbarian posted:The movie has a bunch of handwaving for why they dont tell Tenet anything until later, but honestly they might as well just turn and wink at the audience and say 'and it sets up a nice surprise for YOU, too...' when they do it. The most egregious example however has nothing to do with the shadow war or spycraft. Debicki decides to unburden herself to this man she doesnt know at all about all her problems with her husband in a ludicrous scene. However, she neglects to mention that her husband is dying of inoperable cancer, and she in fact lays out the scenario very much as if he's perfectly healthy and she's trapped indefinitely in this situation. Why? well I guess it sets up a good way to resolve things later but I dont really get why the character would do it. Yeah, that's a fair call. I could see her being so desperate that she asks The Protagonist for help even though she doesn't really know him or trust him, and that way if he dies in the attempt then hey whatever no big deal, at least you tried to save yourself and your child. But the fact that Sator has a terminal illness does mean she could just wait him out. Its not a hard conflict but it does seem a bit convenient to the point of being contrived.
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May 9, 2021 00:46
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Zaphod42 posted:The problem with this is that even with that 60% dialogue being dedicated to explaining wtf is going on, you still had the vast majority of mainstream audiences going "wtf I didn't understand anything in that movie" This isn't because things aren't explained enough, it's because things are explained too much, some of those explanations are just flat-out discredited by what actually happens on screen, about half of those explanations happen behind masks and under blaring music, and it fails to make clear distinctions between when characters are guessing how something works and when they know how something works. It over-talks itself into a corner when it probably should have just stopped at "don't think about it, just feel it" and gotten on with the action. Beyond that, it has the same problem as a lot of other Nolan movies where the passage of time and and traversal of space aren't communicated well by the editing. That was almost a benefit for Inception, giving it a more dream-like feel, but for obvious reasons it's a pretty big drawback here. The overall arc of the movie is pretty drat simple, but it goes out of its way to pile on as many convolutions and barriers as possible. I don't blame anyone for being confused, and the solution is not more explanations.
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May 9, 2021 05:44
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sethsez posted:This isn't because things aren't explained enough, it's because things are explained too much, some of those explanations are just flat-out discredited by what actually happens on screen, about half of those explanations happen behind masks and under blaring music, and it fails to make clear distinctions between when characters are guessing how something works and when they know how something works. It over-talks itself into a corner when it probably should have just stopped at "don't think about it, just feel it" and gotten on with the action. I'm not saying it worked or that doing more of the same would help, but I don't agree that just ripping it out would be vastly better. People would still be stuck. What it really needs is a different approach, finding more visual ways or symbols to communicate the concepts. But I see why they tried to explain things, not explaining it would have been just as bad even if a lot of what they did didn't work for most people.
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May 9, 2021 06:00
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So the lady that teaches P about the bullets... She's like "nobody knows where all this stuff is coming from". Does she not know about the turnstyles and everything? Seems rude not to tell her, if her job is to do science on all that stuff. Or are we meant to think that the Time Squad that back P up are from the future and them charging into the movie is the earliest in time they've ever come back?
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May 9, 2021 07:02
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GigaPeon posted:So the lady that teaches P about the bullets... She's like "nobody knows where all this stuff is coming from". Does she not know about the turnstyles and everything? Seems rude not to tell her, if her job is to do science on all that stuff. Or are we meant to think that the Time Squad that back P up are from the future and them charging into the movie is the earliest in time they've ever come back? The opening opera sequence includes P and a future version of P, and that takes place before the science lady sequence, so they've definitely travelled before that point. And Tenet isn't like BTTF or Primer, there's no multiverses. Its just a single timeline that was always constant, so if they travel to the past, they were always in the past. I assume she doesn't know about the turnstiles, you wouldn't tell anybody any more than you have to. If they know too much you'll have to kill them to close all the loops. A lot of the people are just there to say a single thing to the P because future P set it up so they would, they're just human proxies. Like the guy who tells him the word "Tenet" in the first place; we never see that guy again and he has no idea what else is going on. But the point is even if you know turnstiles exist or will exist, if you're getting something inverted then by definition it comes from the future, since it hasn't happened yet you don't know who will do it. All that said, honestly that dialogue almost feels like it comes from an earlier draft of the script, but was left in because it sounded cool. It almost implies that there's some kind of entropy war going on in the future, and we're getting the future-war shrapnel in the past. That's a wicked cool idea. Just finding future bullets and being like "oh poo poo, the more of these bullets we find the more hosed up the future is getting", that's wild. But... in the end that's not really the focus of the story. Its about the future sending plans back to Sator so he can complete the algorithm and unmake time and reality. So if there's some armed conflict going on in the future it doesn't really matter so much. Although in general I do like hints and teases that there's more going on than we know about.
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May 9, 2021 09:24
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Zaphod42 posted:The opening opera sequence includes P and a future version of P Eh? Where’s the future P in this scene?
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May 9, 2021 13:58
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gregday posted:Eh? Where’s the future P in this scene? It doesn't. He's wrong.
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May 9, 2021 16:22
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sethsez posted:This isn't because things aren't explained enough, it's because things are explained too much, some of those explanations are just flat-out discredited by what actually happens on screen, about half of those explanations happen behind masks and under blaring music, and it fails to make clear distinctions between when characters are guessing how something works and when they know how something works. It over-talks itself into a corner when it probably should have just stopped at "don't think about it, just feel it" and gotten on with the action. At the same time, making a movie that's like 40% reverse photography - rapidly intercut with regular footage - turns out to be a pretty bad idea. Like, I appreciate the experimental nature of it, but it basically just demonstrates why filmmakers don't do it.  This roughly charts the one minute of screen-time where Protag gets shot at by Inverted Protag. It traces the inversion level of: -Protag -Inverted Protag -Inverted Gun -Inverted Bullet -Window Point A is where the first/last bullet strikes the window. Although you can note that the window changes inversion twice, making things rather weird, I've also crucially left out the fact that part of both characters are randomly inverting. Parts of their bodies, parts of their minds, etc. Those can't even be charted. The chart also only shows events from a single 'normal' POV, and you would have to heavily rearrange it to understand Inverted Protag's POV (due to the "turnstile"). SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:09 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 21:03
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gregday posted:Eh? Where’s the future P in this scene? Neil is there, right? I figured P was there with him. Its not explicitly shown but it figures. I guess he could have sent Neil alone 
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May 9, 2021 22:37
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Zaphod42 posted:Neil is there, right? I figured P was there with him. Its not explicitly shown but it figures. I guess he could have sent Neil alone i was watching the opera set piece again last night at 3am because what is this reality and i had to pull up a pdf of the script. that whole bit is actually quite dense with all its machinations. we have; 1. Ukrainian swat 2. American imbeds pretending to be Ukrainian swat 3. Ukrainian muscle working with the Americans, ''ours'', 4. Private Russian mercenaries, who are also hiding in the Ukrainian swat. its actually unclear if they are aware of tenet/the-time-war, because knowledge divided. 5. the peeps hired to stage the attack on the opera, who may or may not be directly the private Russian mercenaries but are most likely hired locals who are unaware of the Russians plot 6. the 'cheap seats', whose potential deaths are just a smokescreen for the fancy dressed man who has 'almost made contact', most likely with uhhh Sator's group of arm dealers. at the very end of the scene, when the algorithm and the american imbeds escapes through the sewers, a cia imbed is pretending to be the fancy man, along with P, run back into the van to not raise the suspicion of faction 3, the Ukrainian muscle hired by the cia. but they are already comprised and were going to shoot the fancy man anyway. but then there is a secondary twist where this same faction is actually working for the cia all along and, when the events occured as they did, staged a culling of the cia field agents as P's initiation test at the train yard. It's one of my favourite set pieces of the film, very tightly scripted and sets up the tone of the film. and it does the thing that nolan does well where it just glosses over a bunch of stupid complicated backstabbing so you can just turn off your brain and enjoy it but all the action is still corresponding to actual factional motivations. i don't know, maybe this is just enjoyable to write about and is full of holes too so sorry about that. i will say my favourite silly moment of the film is when the peeps attacking the opera start overtly smashing up the classical instruments. its so showy and kinda makes sense considering its meant to be noisy and intimidating but its not really a proper attack. [url]=//www.app.studiobinder.com/company/580e85847e7982164664e844/collab/607884f033edb830eca88d51/projects/6050e6a7379a887a0cff1dbf/document/6050e6b1aa39734c2aacbf61]tenet script[/url]
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May 10, 2021 06:07
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Bloodless. Nolan is the most bloodless director of all time. Obviously figuratively but the scene where Protag takes cover amongst all the unconscious bodies in the opera house. Those bodies are absolutely shredded with bullets. But there is not a single drop of blood.
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May 10, 2021 20:07
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Nolan most consistently commits the sin of waffling on firearms. My opinion is that firearms in movies need to be portrayed in 1 of 2 ways: 1. brutally realistic, with appropriate consequences and sound, they should be terrifying (like HEAT or Way of the Gun). 2. Action movie unrealistic and cool where its so obviously not real that you can just enjoy it as pure cinema (like The Matrix, John Wick, Crank, HK cinema) Nolan manages to have boringly realistic gun handling with none of the consequences, like everyone is shooting a bunch of airsoft guns. I think it sets the wrong tone.
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May 10, 2021 21:07
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Way of the Gun was awesome, plus it’s the only movie that does realistic injured gun handling stuff. All of Nolan’s shootouts have way too much gunfire, few consequences, happen way too close and too little cover. Strangely all the car accidents seem to have weight. SMEGMA_MAIL fucked around with this message at 23:57 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 23:52
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The semi truck flip in TDK was the most impressive effect I have seen in a movie theater.
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May 11, 2021 01:18
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