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The point (in all these kind of "timelines are inviolate" media) is not that ~~the universe~~ self corrects or forces things, it's that the universe is deterministic, free will and time itself are illusions created by our brains. Neil doesn't choose to go get beers instead of inverting because that's not what he chose. Everything in his life up to that moment resulted in him choosing to invert and open the gate. In order to make a different choice he'd have to be a different person with a different past and future.
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Oct 4, 2021 21:55
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bawfuls posted:The point (in all these kind of "timelines are inviolate" media) is not that ~~the universe~~ self corrects or forces things, it's that the universe is deterministic, free will and time itself are illusions created by our brains. It might've helped me to see what happens when someone attempts to challenge their fate. I think that's what TP going back through the truck heist was supposed to be. They kinda warned him that he wasn't gonna change anything by doing it but he did it all the same. But warning him he wouldn't change anything isn't the same as them having said "look here's what happens, it'll happen no matter what you do" then he tries to act against it and fails. Now I'm thinking about what if he doesn't end the truck heist scene unconscious? Does he try to go back through it forwards for the second time? Is that what conflicts are in a war with time inverters? Just a huge mess of hundreds of copies of the same people running through the same conflict hundreds of times until everyone is dead?
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Oct 4, 2021 22:17
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Dren posted:It might've helped me to see what happens when someone attempts to challenge their fate. We're not shown, but we are told what this looks like: they don't appear in the proofing window and therefore never emerge from the turnstile if they're dumb enough to go into it. The machine is a filter for people who will try to change the past.
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Oct 4, 2021 22:22
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If something happened yesterday in your real life why don't you just change what you did? You can't, you can't change the past. Turns out you only pretend you can change the future because you always got to stand at the edge of it pretending you were doing things, take one step out of that and it all turns out it was all deterministic, the characters then play out telling each other a bunch of rationalizations that they totally could change things if they wanted but they just don't wanna. The story from the first second to the end of the universe is already set in stone, even with a bunch of back and forth (but the back and forth is also set in stone just as much, it also has to happen)
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Oct 4, 2021 23:54
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Dren posted:But if Team Blue tells Team Red something extremely actionable like "don't stand there or you die", Team Red guys have to say "What happened happened" then go stand there anyway? Am I getting it now? Because they saw them do the thing that didn’t make them blow up they tell them that. If they had died then they had provided the wrong information or something they couldn’t have prevented. Like if the Robert Pattinson character decided he was going to chicken out then he simply wouldn’t have been there dead in the first place.
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Oct 5, 2021 01:40
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Dren posted:I've seen the "something always happens to make the events play out the way they are supposed to" thing in other movies like The Time Machine (2002). But, at least in this movie, whether or not the universe self corrects is never tested. Everyone just goes with it or seems ignorant of it. For example, at the end Neil very deliberately gets into the inverter, goes to unlock the gate, and dies. It'd be awfully hard to write a way for ~~the universe~~ to self-correct that if he had listened to TP's objections and decided to go grab some beers. I mean like, say he doesn't do it. Which thing does ~~the universe~~ want to self-correct towards more, Neil's death or the disassembly of the algorithm? If it's the latter, the universe will find a way to unlock the gate and save TP without Neil having to get shot. I'm pretty sure the entropic wind or tides or whatever was near the beginning, possibly during the initial gun range scene. IIRC it was more that if a paradox occurs then one side (I think the "forward" one) will tend to win the reality clash. Mostly it's a way to avoid the deterministic universe outcome and also solve little things that weren't caught when the movie was made.
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Oct 5, 2021 05:56
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Dren posted:It might've helped me to see what happens when someone attempts to challenge their fate. It might have helped if we had more exposition. Preferably on a really windy day or beside a running train, maybe with the soundtrack blaring
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Oct 10, 2021 18:32
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You can't challenge your fate. Right after the Protagonist inverts he walks outside and sees a puddle start to ripple. With a confused look he steps in it and the ripples center on his foot and then disappear. At no point could he see the ripples and say "gently caress you Universe, I ain't gonna step there" anymore than I can leap off a cliff and say "gently caress you Universe, I ain't gonna fall"
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Oct 10, 2021 18:44
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:You can't challenge your fate. Right after the Protagonist inverts he walks outside and sees a puddle start to ripple. With a confused look he steps in it and the ripples center on his foot and then disappear. At no point could he see the ripples and say "gently caress you Universe, I ain't gonna step there" anymore than I can leap off a cliff and say "gently caress you Universe, I ain't gonna fall" I like to think of it more that if he wanted to not do that he wouldn’t have decided to do it in the first place and thus it’s impossible to end up in that paradox situation where you know you’re doing to do something you don’t want to do. If you do end up in that situation then you know something will happen that will change your mind. But both are true.
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Oct 10, 2021 20:07
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In theory, you could just think real hard, shatter both of your legs and then leap up a cliff where they would reform
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Oct 10, 2021 20:22
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Is this the film that finally broke off a giant chunk of relentlessly didactic Nolan fans and cast them into the ether? I've seen all of Nolan's films but I haven't been all that interested in them since maybe 07-08, and man I really love watching this one. Not because I see new things every time or whatever, but rather because I just forget about time entirely. I can project whatever I want onto this big, dumb, and extremely cynical 400 million dollar b-movie and it makes me happy as a loving clam.
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Oct 18, 2021 10:38
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For some reason I have watched the opening opera scene many, many times. The soundtrack and cinematography just really grabs me. I enjoy the rest of the movie, too, but the opening is so strong for me.
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Nov 6, 2021 14:31
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The opening scene has relentless pacing, I love it.
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Nov 6, 2021 16:17
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When John Tenet is loving booking it back and forth, for some reason I just find that very compelling.
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Nov 6, 2021 16:29
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Yeah Washington is very fun to watch, dude's just very kinetic. It kind of feels like he would've hit the mainstream had Tenet not bombed, though I was looking at his film history and his first credit was on Malcolm X along with his dad 
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Nov 6, 2021 16:35
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What a coincidence this thread popped back up to the top of my bookmarks, considering what happened during soundtrack collaborator Travis Scott's concert today.
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Nov 7, 2021 08:34
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You mean the pincer maneuver?
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Nov 7, 2021 20:26
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:I can project whatever I want onto this big, dumb, and extremely cynical 400 million dollar b-movie and it makes me happy as a loving clam. I just watched this movie and I have to agree with this part of the post. Nolan is really good at making dumb movies for smart people or smart movies for dumb people. I don't care I just loving love all of his movies, they are just so much fun. Also helps that I have just read some of the Xeelee sequence as there are some interesting ideas in there that should influence these time fuckery movies.
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Aug 29, 2022 22:22
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Props to the one guy on Youtube still making explainer videos on Tenet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvFVLYRNmsM
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Jan 26, 2023 20:08
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I finally watched this; it is by some margin Nolan's worst movie. Absolutely none of the parts that went into making it stuck their landing. I'll stick with Memento and The Prestige being his peak and hope Oppenheimer is a return to form.
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Jan 26, 2023 20:24
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My big problem with Tenet is that it's just not exciting. At all. Big-budget action is happening, real 747s are being crashed, mass battles are going on with time-fuckery causing buildings to explode and implode... and it's just utterly loving inert, all energy drained from it. Turns out "What if we do an action scene, but then do it again backwards?  " isn't the mind-blowing trick Nolan thought it would be.
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Jan 26, 2023 21:03
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Payndz posted:My big problem with Tenet is that it's just not exciting. At all. Big-budget action is happening, real 747s are being crashed, mass battles are going on with time-fuckery causing buildings to explode and implode... and it's just utterly loving inert, all energy drained from it. This is all the more true and jarring specifically because the opening scene is an almost perfect action movie sequence.
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Jan 26, 2023 22:50
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There's just no energy, everyone seems half asleep. I can't believe how much duller it is than (possibly his best film) Interstellar, which has like eight things happen in 3 hours.
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Jan 27, 2023 03:16
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It's my favorite Nolan film, but I don't care for him normally.
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Jan 27, 2023 03:45
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:You can't challenge your fate. Right after the Protagonist inverts he walks outside and sees a puddle start to ripple. With a confused look he steps in it and the ripples center on his foot and then disappear. At no point could he see the ripples and say "gently caress you Universe, I ain't gonna step there" anymore than I can leap off a cliff and say "gently caress you Universe, I ain't gonna fall" That could be interesting in a different movie. However, in this movie, John Tenet just needs to think backwardsly while backwards to stop the ripples. The ripples will then simply reverse themselves and cease, in the same way that the backwards bullet holes unrepair themselves.
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Jan 27, 2023 04:56
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well why not posted:There's just no energy, everyone seems half asleep. I can't believe how much duller it is than (possibly his best film) Interstellar, which has like eight things happen in 3 hours. It's crazy how this is true even in the big setpiece fight with the pincer maneuver, with things exploding all over the place and such. How does such an action sequence feel so listless?
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Jan 27, 2023 07:01
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The backwards running is plainly put, stupid. Not stupid enough to be fun, either. It's just regular stupid.
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Jan 27, 2023 12:10
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There is existential terror in the film for sure and it registers in the sort of alien gooseflesh way, like, watching a car drive backwards at you menacingly is both hilarious and deeply unsettling, but it isn't a movie where the actual mechanism of anything should be thought about for very long, the sort of intensified continuity of its construction is kind of hardwired to obliterate the viewer with transparent rationalizations that raise eyebrows. If the film were anthropomorphized it would despise the viewer for bringing any critical faculties into the experience, but would also get rather little satisfaction from providing the free thrill of say a Michael Bay film. In the end, it's a gonzo piece of accidental mega dollar sci-fi camp that radiates the anxieties of a post-war 50s film noir mindset which is also somehow contemporaneous with our present. It was directed by an insane narcissist dullard control freak who was working through his misgivings about the contradictions of global hegemony in real time for an audience of nobody, messy tantrum like. Whether or not in-universe narrative devices/contrivances are internally consistent or 'possible' in any way is not all that important, however, the symbolic interpretation and political implications of the movie's schizoid attitude are pretty interesting in the abstract when talking about smooth spaces, free economic zones, the occulted state, and the affect of counterinsurgency policy on the identity/function of the nation state. In a dismantled time-capsule sense, it really works as an experience. Outside of that critical interpretation it's as rote and void of radical provocation as every other movie he's made. But the soundtrack rips too hard for it to be ignored.
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Jan 27, 2023 12:22
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I think Nolan knew that you had to be oppressed by this movie on a giant screen for it to work and that's why he was extra mad about COVID. This stuff hits you hard in IMAX and is just cute-funny at home
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Jan 27, 2023 13:38
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well why not posted:There's just no energy, everyone seems half asleep. I can't believe how much duller it is than (possibly his best film) Interstellar, which has like eight things happen in 3 hours. I don't know about its production but it felt like there was some weird shift in what direction they wanted to take the movie in and that they didn't fully tidy it all up. It kind of reminded me of Lynch Dune (which I do love) where like 95% of the dialogue is exposition. Like at first the protagonist goes to the lab and they show him the reversed material and stuff and it's spoken of almost as if this is a thing someone can personally learn to control and master over individual stuff. But then later the nature of the threat/how the stuff works changes completely and you need the two way time tunnel thing to get poo poo going. The big battle at the end was really boring and stupid to me too. I mean I understand why it was happening the way it was but like, impressive lack of entertainment that. It's a LITTLE greater than the sum of its parts though, overall I dug it and BeanpolePeckerwood posted:the symbolic interpretation and political implications of the movie's schizoid attitude are pretty interesting in the abstract when talking about smooth spaces, free economic zones, the occulted state, and the affect of counterinsurgency policy on the identity/function of the nation state. In a dismantled time-capsule sense, it really works as an experience. Pretty much this
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Jan 28, 2023 20:34
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Just saw this last week and can't stop thinking about how angry it made me. It feels like a parody of a Christopher Nolan film made by someone who hates him. It's the "cold unfeeling overly expository" criticism cranked to the max. There is basically one real character, Neil, and all of his character development happens after the movie when he meets the Protagonist. There is so much mechanical density being explained at all times and it's all there to set up a scene of someone walking backwards or a car flipping upwards. It's like someone saw Inception and thought "Okay but what if you spent even more time explaining the premise, and did even less with it." The entire movie challenges you to engage with the concept of pathways through time and predestination and what's happened happened, but at no point does it engage with this stuff in any thoughtful level. We never see characters wrestle with this or make choices (or fail to make choices). They all just go through the motions of an extremely mid-tier James Bond knockoff. The only time any of this feels like it has any payoff is the final scene when Neil heads back towards his past-death, which was genuinely moving and operating on a completely different level than the rest of the film. For the entire first half of the movie, the extremely jarring transitions and the fact that every character was just flatly repeating exposition at each other in an increasingly ridiculous way had me thinking that there was some trick going on, like we were going to learn these scenes were out of order during time jumps and that's why they're so abrupt and jarring. No, the film eventually reveals it's tricks but those early scenes really are happening in chronological order, the protagonist really is just a generic super spy with no interiority or personality who teleports around the world as the plot demands (and after the movie becomes a time wizard who recruits himself after pulling out his own teeth). Inception had similar jarring editing but that was in service to the dreamlike vibe that's crucial to the movie's central premise. I hate this movie so much. Tender Bender fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 08:18
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Ultimately it's just a problem of characterization. Inception and Tenet both belong to genres high on never-ending expository nonsense (heist flick and espionage, respectively), but while Cobb assembles a delightful motley crew, John Tenet is a tremendously dull super spy. The plots of these things are essentially just extravagant lorem ipsum to hang suave and compelling characters on, and Tenet didn't really give anyone other than Pattinson the opportunity to make that happen.
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Jan 29, 2023 09:59
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Still can't get over Neil's very first scene. He's acting almost drunk, on first watch I thought he was an inverted person who learned to speak backwards (of course they later explain that he wouldn't be able to breathe). There has to be a reason he was directed that way and outside of extreme fatigue after going back in time several months my only explanation would be similar to those early lab scenes that got forgotten later on, an abandoned idea
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Jan 29, 2023 10:14
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wouldn't the inverted cars also need inverted air and gasoline
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Jan 29, 2023 10:23
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Tender Bender posted:Just saw this last week and can't stop thinking about how angry it made me. It feels like a parody of a Christopher Nolan film made by someone who hates him. It's the "cold unfeeling overly expository" criticism cranked to the max. There is basically one real character, Neil, and all of his character development happens after the movie when he meets the Protagonist. There is so much mechanical density being explained at all times and it's all there to set up a scene of someone walking backwards or a car flipping upwards. It's like someone saw Inception and thought "Okay but what if you spent even more time explaining the premise, and did even less with it." This is all his movies, op. sethsez posted:Ultimately it's just a problem of characterization. Inception and Tenet both belong to genres high on never-ending expository nonsense (heist flick and espionage, respectively), but while Cobb assembles a delightful motley crew, John Tenet is a tremendously dull super spy. The plots of these things are essentially just extravagant lorem ipsum to hang suave and compelling characters on, and Tenet didn't really give anyone other than Pattinson the opportunity to make that happen. An accurate depiction of the CIA, they are huge assholes just like everyone in this film. John Tenet from the future destroys the future to save its past. It's oddly fitting. Mister Speaker posted:wouldn't the inverted cars also need inverted air and gasoline Not if you live in a B Movie!
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Jan 29, 2023 11:03
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I liked the opening sequence heaps and also how many moving parts/factions there were in it. I feel like the film peaks at the complex motorway highjinks, and the second half is poor. My favourite piece of dumb detail is how the main character does pull ups because pullup is a palimdrome. I feel the second half would have really benefited from just going off the wall pretentious silly 4D chess incoherent plot and motives and make it really incomprehensible without a Charlie conspiracy wall YouTuber having to explain it and even they get it all wrong, gently caress it, and have the dialog all backwards the whole dang film 🕺
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Jan 29, 2023 11:42
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The opening sequence was pretty good, at least it grabs your attention very effectively the first time you watch the movie, but it really easily falls apart on rewatch and in retrospect is as dumb as the rest of the film. They pump in this 'knockout gas' that successfully puts to sleep literally every person in their seat, just a gentle nap for several hundred extras in formal wear. And then they proceed to have a gun battle amongst the unconscious people. It's just lazy in its use of 'super spy' tropes. Neil shows up and saves P and then just dips outta there, and it's done in a way that leaves you like "huh", it's clearly meant to be some super-secret spy poo poo that grabs you but it's done so un-interestingly that I pretty much forgot about it entirely. Not to mention the fact that the knockout gas is clearly supposed to be a reference to the Russian theatre siege in 2002 (where like 130 hostages died from the gas), which is pretty gross. Lampsacus posted:. My favourite piece of dumb detail is how the main character does pull ups because pullup is a palimdrome. Those were chin-ups though
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Jan 29, 2023 12:05
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Mister Speaker posted:Not to mention the fact that the knockout gas is clearly supposed to be a reference to the Russian theatre siege in 2002 (where like 130 hostages died from the gas), which is pretty gross. Crashing a plane into a Pentagon-inspired building and blaming it on terrorists was clearly inspired by 9/11 where 3000 people died, and Sator’s backstory drew from Chernobyl where at least a few thousand died. I’m curious, did you think those were gross too? I genuinely mean that without snark, I’m curious what it was about drawing from that particular real life event seemed beyond the pale.
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Jan 29, 2023 12:37
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Sator wasn't a Chernobyl liquidator. He was cleaning up a bomb test site or something like that. And I didn't really see the plane thing as as big a deal because A: they didn't kill anyone, just damaged some art, and B: the plane basically just taxied into it, instead of taking off and crashing into it. A bit of a different message, IMO. That's a valid question though, and I'm still sort of wondering why I didn't see that at least similarly tasteless. I guess the knockout gas stuff is particularly gross to me because in real life that was a callously botched police operation that needlessly overdosed 130 people on carfentanil, but in the film it's depicted as an effective and safe way to save the day. Also the gunfighting in the theatre just rubbed me the wrong way, like there's no way some of those sleeping civilians didn't catch stray bullets and get dead. But I suppose being mad about the gas is kind of silly, sure, because it's functionally the same as seeing your spy protagonist silently judo chop a guard unconscious but he wakes up later and is fine, which happens all the time in movies.
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Jan 29, 2023 13:36
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:This is all his movies, op. Yeah but in, say, The Prestige, the "reward" for puzzling through the movie's machinations is seeing the added layers to scenes throughout the film, and greater understanding of the characters and what they're willing to do. In Tenet, the "reward" is that you have a vague understanding of how inverse physics work so that if you found yourself inverted you would know maybe how to drive a car backwards. It's always apparent when someone is inverted and with the exception of the Oslo mask reveal nothing surprising is ever done with this. You can spend hours discussing the time mechanics so you can say "Oh okay, that's how the gold gets in the time capsule [still uncertain]", but it's all so hollow. The technical act of filming the inverted stuff is impressive, but it seems to have been so challenging that it was at the expense of making the resulting scenes either incredibly bland and straightforward (most of the film) or nearly incomprehensible (the macguffin swap in the car chase). The reveal that the Protagonist becomes the Future Protagonist, a character we never see or meet who is pulling all the strings, could be interesting, except that the Protagonist is the most thinly sketched character imaginable. After 2 hours and 40 minutes watching a movie largely from his perspective, I could not tell you a single thing he thinks or wants besides "Complete the mission" and "help the pretty blonde lady". His evolution into the leader of Tenet means nothing to me because I don't know who he was to begin with. The nicest thing I can say about Tenet is that it allowed me to enjoy this video, which was overall a more satisfying and engaging experience than watching the movie (sound on): https://twitter.com/ConnorNyhan/status/1614157723817611266?t=0QusIWbKWAQuP554AT-aog&s=19 Tender Bender fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 16:17
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