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I saw this. I think when the director of the film doesn't bother to give the main character a name they're letting you know what they're focused on. While Nolan has some issues, "showing you the same old poo poo" ain't one of them. The end of this movie ends with a ten-minute fight done forwards and backwards, and of course if you write TEN forwards and backwards you get TENET. That's pretty much this movie in a nutshell: wowing you with a clever idea you didn't see coming. In a way this movie is a lot like a magic trick (and I don't think it's coincidence that Nolan made the Prestige - I will wager he really loves magic). There are some people who think "magic" (as in the type that's practiced by magicians Penn and Teller) is a stupid waste, because it's not really magical, it's psychology and endless dexterity practice, ultimately tricks to fool rubes and kids. Whereas people like me think that makes the magic even MORE impressive, because it's fooling you in ways you (probably) can't anticipate because it simply does not occur to you that someone could be that good with their hands and that practiced in misdirection. I appreciate the novelty and the appearance of the trick more than the reality, and accept that it's not actually "real". Tenet is a magic trick. I do think that the movie could have done some things better. For instance, the entire car chase had me completely lose track of the Algorithm and not know where it had gone; I had to watch a Youtube to understand where the piece went (it turns out it was grabbed off-camera by a henchman, something that should probably be communicated to the audience). And of course there's the idea that inverse damage to object has been there from the beginning since it rolled off the assembly line is one that I spotted immediately and grappled with; apparently there's a throwaway line about how "the winds of entropy" will always flow in the correct direction and coupling that with the Protagonists stab wound (which only starts to bleed a few minutes before the act, or after it as the case may be) it can be hypothesized that regular objects struck by inverse rounds slowly "heal" themselves as the reverse entropy damage is overwhelmed by the "real" entropy. And that somebody from Tenet goes and collects all these inverse objects that are left lying around where they fall. I think that Nolan is keenly aware that he's created a movie with a closed-loop deterministic universe, where Sator can't walk through the turnstile and do anything different to what he just saw himself do. That's where all the faith talk and whatnot comes in. You gotta do what you gotta do. Anyway this movie is ultimately about showing cool time-reverse stuff and thinking through some implications of the tech its using. It is content to hand-wave others big time, and for me that's ok. The final battle is a good example of this. It doesn't work very well at all and primarily seems to be about people sprinting around shooting their guns at nothing - absolutely inept action photography. But then there's the shot of that building being blown up by both inverse and normal rockets simultaneously and that shot was one of the dopest action beats I've ever seen. For that kind of ridiculousness I'm willing to let the rest slide. Some people clearly won't.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:59
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I mean I got a lot more of the impact of that battle a second time. When I realized that Blue Team is coming in on the explosion that ends the movie and that I could see the Protag and Neill in the shot, that Neill shoots at himself in the jeep, that the entire world is predestinated and somebody has SCP-like cleanup crews that go around collecting inverted objects after battles, etc. And yes I watched it like 3 times and the amount of "jog around shooting at nothing" is just totally unacceptable; I don't care if it's supposed to be like that because "the characters are shooting their guns largely on faith" or w/e, IMO if somebody spends 200 million dollars and put a huge action scene in the movie their primary goal (again IMO) is to make a great action sequence that's clearly comprehensible and exciting. The "shooting at nothing" scenes undermine the legit thrilling poo poo like "almost getting sucked into a building shot with an inverted explosive" or "the bad guys are laying traps, and only the inverted dude knows about it and since it's already been triggered in his past he has to do something else" or even "fuckin hell how does anyone get shot by an inverted enemy since (from their perspective) the dudes are running backward away from them and will step BACK into cover to shoot at them and vice versa? Unless you're in a box they should never be a threat to each other, the only scary people should be people going the same direction you are" which would be absolutely sick, but they never show any of it. However like I said at the end of the day I got to see a building get absolutely time-hosed and it's hard to completely poo poo on such ambition.
Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 02:34
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GoutPatrol posted:I think the movie does a bad job of explaining that the red team's goal was going in there to fail/look like they failed, while Protag/Ives were going to succeed. See I understood this just fine. But it's literally one line of dialogue in a briefing. One more thing while I'm thinking about it: Neil's death is the only inconsistent thing in the movie if you give the film the benefit of the doubt on everything else (i.e. winds of entropy and clean-up crews). The reason I say this is because we are shown EXACTLY what happens when an inverted person is wounded by a non-inverted object. TP (The Protagonist) is injured on his arm by a non-inverted lockpick during his Freeport fight, and the symptoms are that he starts feeling sore in that arm a couple of days before, his clothes actually have a hole punched in them by the lockpick before he even suits up, and his wound opens up and starts bleeding a few minutes before he's stabbed. The film has just stated that an object's "natural entropy" overcomes the inverted entropy and in this case it appears true - TP is moving backwards so the damage that the foreign "normal" object does is mostly reversed within a few moments. (However, being shot by an inverted bullet while being in normal is a death sentence - not sure why). Anyway if you apply this to Neil, who is in the same general circumstance - an inverted individual shot by a regular bullet - how it should work is that a couple of days before the mission, he should be getting headaches, then a bullet hole would appear in his helmet as he ran down the tunnel, then the actual bullet hole would appear in his head and gradually worsen until he would collapse dead. So the question is, how did he manage to run down the tunnel and pick the lock when his head was literally splitting apart at the time? I don't think there's a good explanation beyond "Neil was really loving tough and could do it with his brains scrambled" which is a cop-out IMO. Snowman_McK posted:I think that's the frustrating bit: There are interesting and weird implications to the mechanics, like seeing a body, not being sure if it was killed forwards or backwards, double tapping to be sure, and bringing it back to life. Or the inverse, of seeing a dead comrade, only for them to spring back to life and help you in some way. or running across an empty landscape, only to suddenly realise that there was a building that will be destroyed there in a few moments, and so you run out of the area as its pulled back together. Even if the exact mechanics don't quite make sense, you could do way cooler stuff and at least create some great images. Yeah, I think that making the two teams these massive platoons was a gamble that didn't pay off. If you actually graph it out there's 8 possible interactions between combatants: Inverted combatant with inverted gun shoots regular combatant Inverted combatant with regular gun shoots regular combatant Inverted combatant with inverted gun shoots inverted combatant Inverted combatant with regular gun shoots inverted combatant Regular combatant with regular gun shoots inverted combatant Regular combatant with regular gun shoots regular combatant Regular combatant with regular gun shoots inverted combatant Regular combatant with inverted gun shoots regular combatant Regular combatant with inverted gun shoots inverted combatant All of these would really cool interactions to see and experience and like McCloud said you could have a lot of fun with "dead" guys popping up and dodging reverse rubble and having explosions suck people into their centers and poo poo. Another thing that I really really wanted to see was TP saying "get a grenade on that position!" and then the position exploding and a grenade flying back into one of his squaddies hands (regular combatants using inverted grenade). Just sick poo poo like that. Yes, it was very clever to see all the interactions between Neil and himself and TP but it's a drat time-rewind Call of Duty scene, let's see the time-rewind goods! Edit: I also want you all to know that I seriously considered making my first post "and see, this is why I can't discuss this with you people!" and then trying to make all my posts reverse, hoping that one of you would catch on and start writing potential "previous" posts to the posts that I had wrote. But this is a discussion forum and it doesn't seem like that gimmick would be very good for discussion. I really wanted to do it though. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 05:45
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Ironically enough if they just use the "winds of entropy" explanation they give, inverted rounds are the perfect assassination weapon. Let's say that you are killed by a headshot from an inverted gun. The bullet goes through your head back into the gun, and within a few hours the bullet hole and damage is gone, but you're still dead because your heart stopped for over 10 minutes. All the damage the bullet did to the environment is gone too. Now of course the flaw here is that if the bullet gets lodged in your noggin, well it's been there forever before that point hasn't it? Doesn't make sense. Have to have faith.RBX posted:Maybe he was playing dead now that I think about it. IDK the whole reverse bullet thing seems to throw people off and would be better if he left it out. Like the whole opera scene seems to only be there to have a "cool" set piece for the start, for trailers, and for the "mysteries" of the bullets and the man with the red string on his backpack. But all of that muddies things. I mean, there's an actual movie called Los ChronosCrimenes (aka TimeCrimes) that has a similar premise. A guy is looping through time. On his second loop he sees what he thinks is his wife die by falling off the roof of his house and realizes he can't actually change anything (deterministic universe). So in his third loop he goes back, dresses a lady he met earlier in his wife's clothes and cuts her hair to look like his wife's haircut, then pushes her off the roof. With a big sigh of relief he goes downstairs and hugs his wife. So yeah Neil could go back, put blanks in that guy's gun, put a red dye packet in his helmet, and fake his death because that's what the Protagonist saw and there's nothing stopping him from doing that. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 17:28
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Groovelord Neato posted:In Timecrimes wasn't it his wife never fell off the roof and it was always him pushing a woman he made up to look like his wife. Been a long while since I've seen it. Right, let me make that clear. In the second loop he sees what he, and we the audience, think is his wife (it's after dusk and fairly dark at the time). The reveal is that on the third loop he decides to kill an innocent woman to save his wife because he thinks that he HAS to see somebody who looks like his wife fall off the roof. But it was never actually his wife. The idea that he could Just Not Do Anything and his wife and the innocent woman will live doesn't occur to him, because he's totally bought into the deterministic universe that must be obeyed. He's operating on Tenet Faith.
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Jan 11, 2021 17:41
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Ok, one more inconsistency: when the Protag rescues Kat from the inverted car going backwards toward the traffic jam he should have hit the accelerator to stop the vehicle, not the brakes. Assuming the reversing car is inverted (which it appears to be).
Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 20:36
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Well the issue there is that Timecrimes was made for pennies on the dollar compared to Triangle. So it's going to seem A LOT more mundane.
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Jan 11, 2021 23:39
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I confess I don't think either story is weirder than the other, although I cannot deny that Triangle is far more complex and has a cooler gimmick.
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Jan 12, 2021 01:28
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Yes, IIRC there are 3 loops but you only get to "experience" two through the protagonist. The third loop is her getting axe murdered by herself, I think. It's been a while, but at one point I remember sitting down and scribbling on a piece of paper - Looper was right about that one.
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Jan 12, 2021 22:02
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Shaocaholica posted:So just watched the movie. Tiny detail I'm sure isn't that important. During the opera house sequence one of the fragments is captured by Sator but its also simultaneously at Siberia where the other op is happening. I guess they just invert it and take it there? Correct. Enough inversions and you can literally be in 15 places at once.
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Apr 29, 2021 23:40
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The movie is hard to understand because inverted causality is simply not something the human mind can easily deal with. Here's the "inverted bullet" scene, where the cool scientist tells Protagonist how things work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MflGVbhI-s Couple of things I want to point out here: 1) The gun isn't inverted nor does it need to be. The firing pin will move forward and strike the primer no matter which way you "run the tape". It's the same way with fighting an inverted person - their punches and grabs are still imparting a force on the object they're interacting with even if things are reversed. Interestingly enough there's a paradox here: if you (a regular person) were fighting an inverted person, and from their point of view they threw an extremely hard punch into your chest but withdrew their arm veerrry slowly, what you would see as a non-inverted person is a guy punching at you veerry slowly and making contact an imparting a little tap, then quickly bringing their arm back to neutral. But from their point of view they absolutely crushed you with that punch and then slowly withdrew their arm. I'm not sure how the movie solves this paradox; there's a scene in the movie where the Protagonist is fighting the Inverted Man and is thrown away by a force that doesn't seem to originate from anywhere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWa0EGPgHrs&t=63s/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DDYIFFwg0M&t=63s) and you can see the confusion on his face. 2) The part where Protagonist holds his had over the inverted bullet and nothing happens before being told "you have to have dropped it" and then repeating the motion only this time making a pretend "drop it" motion, which causes the bullet to fly in his hand, is a key scene because it reveals that everything is pre-destined. Even though afterwards they talk about free will, it's a lie (and in fact the Protagonist and Neil have literally become Time Cultists by the end of the movie spouting off "whatever happened already happened."). You can see this also when the Protagonist first exits the Inversion chamber to get in his car and stop Sator; there's a muddy puddle on the ground that starts to ripple and deform a full few seconds before the Protagonist puts his foot in it. And yet, he puts his foot in it, surprised. What this means is that if you're inverted and you see some of your own footprints on the ground in front of you, that is by necessity where you are going to step. You cannot see the puddle start to ripple and say "ok well I'm not going to put my foot there, ha ha!" - then there's nothing to make the puddle ripple, so it wouldn't ripple, so you would have never thought that. Tenet is the Block Universe: The Movie. Everything is already done and decided and you can play it forward or backward like the scientist with her tape deck but it's totally deterministic. 3) The End is the Beginning is a big theme in the movie and repeats over and over. There are multiple sequences and multiple shots in the film where you can see the very same people that were going out of the scene running into it, or vice versa. The implication of the film is that the very first scene at the Opera House is simultaneously the very first and very last operation that Tenet is ever responsible for. 4) The movie has a couple of paradoxes in it even if you take everything in good faith and face value. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Apr 30, 2021 |
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Apr 30, 2021 22:22
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Shaocaholica posted:So if you’re inverted and have a daily driver eventually the gas tank is going to get so full you have to go to a gas station to extract all the fuel. No, if the car is inverted then what an inverted person sitting in it would see is a normal drive where the fuel gauge goes down as normal. Please note that, like the inverted oxygen that the inverted characters have to breathe, inverted cars need inverted gasoline. So they go to the inverted gas station to get their fuel. Everything looks normal to them as they drive into the past without a care in the world. If you were a regular person watching an inverted car drive around, it would be quite odd. You would see it driving backwards, sucking in carbon monoxide and turning it into gasoline. As the car drove backwards the fuel tank would continue to fill up, until it drove into an inverted gas station and unloaded that fuel into the station's underground gas tank. It would then drive away backwards again, sucking carbon monoxide out of the atmosphere and turning it into gas. Now you're saying "Well MMJS what's stopping me from uninverting that underground gas tank to make it plain old gasoline and putting it in my plain old car, thus technically using the same molecule of fuel twice in two different reactions" and the answer is: nothing. Except you're breaking causality, causing a paradox, and possibly ending the entire universe.
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May 1, 2021 02:46
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Any chemical reactions have to involve molecules of the same inversion, or they don't work.
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May 1, 2021 02:50
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gregday posted:So, the Protagonist stopping Sator’s inverted SUV by pressing his hand on the brake. That’s a legit plot hole right? The SUV us to have been inverted, since it unbroke the BMW’s mirror. But then from its perspective, how did it get started moving? It began moving down the highway when the protagonist took his hand off the brake? Yes, this is one of the movie's legit plotholes. He should have hit the accelerator. From the inverted car's perspective, it's sitting at the end of the road where the gunfight takes place, then the Protagonist hits the accelerator, and it starts careening down the road with Kat inside. Then the Protagonist reverses back into his regular car. Which of course means that the Protagonist is both the problem and the solution. I am pretty sure they just hand-waved it and had him hit the brake because otherwise it would be wildly confusing. Shaocaholica posted:Ok hear me out. What if you send your own peepee and poopoo through a turnstile. But just the excrement. You’re still normal. Is it like bullets? I'm going to take this seriously: in the blue room would be a crusty pile of poo poo that gradually got fresher and stinkier until you walked up and put your regular poo poo through the red side. Then it would disappear. edit: I was laughing when I wrote that, just FYI. Somebody needs to make a Tenet Poop Experiments Youtube video Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 03:01 on May 1, 2021 |
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May 1, 2021 02:58
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gregday posted:It does seem to me that as soon as Tenet (the organization) knew where it would be buried, that’s doom for Sator’s plan. Why wouldnt they be able to just dig it up any time before the future evil people do? IIRC it's down some 5 mile borehole or whatever, sealed by a nuke. I don't think presently we have the tech to get to it. It's a legit hanging thread though.
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May 1, 2021 03:15
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I can't deny that as somebody who watched this film 3 times and then watched a bunch of Youtube explainers, it's just a fact that there are logical inconsistencies in the movie. Like, for instance, an inverted person stabbed with a normal lockpick gets a normal wound (i.e. their wound occurs before the actual stabbing from their POV). However later in the movie an inverted guy is literally shot through the brain with a regular bullet and he doesn't appear to be suffering any effects of having a fuckin' hole in his head right before it happens! So you either explain these as "inconsistencies" or you give them the explanation, as SMG does, that stuff just randomly behaves inverted or not throughout the movie. I really like Tenet but it's just a fact that it doesn't (and perhaps couldn't) follow its own rules consistently. I really like the movie but this is extremely fair criticism of it. It's a clockwork timepiece that occasionally shudders and gives you the wrong time, but at least to me nobody has every attempted to make such a wack rear end premise work. I appreciate the design even if the gears seize up sometimes.
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May 2, 2021 03:04
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:What’s telling is that nobody gives poo poo about the actual story of the film, which is literally just an average spy thriller about radioactive bullets - where several of the characters are clones for some reason, and they all periodically stop to review videotapes. The movie doesn't even bother to name the main character. It doesn't particularly care about the story either.
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May 3, 2021 18:32
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:Time to unsubscribe now that SMG has shown up... Loudly announcing to a bunch of strangers that you're taking your ball and going home is, for lack of a better word, pathetic. Get a brain callus and post through it you loving baby.
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May 3, 2021 20:21
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Likewise, the explanation of how Sator gets his money makes little sense unless we understand that he’s actually using the turnstile to duplicate gold and send it into the future. It’s logically impossible for him to remove anything from the “time capsules” if they’re directly from the future You can take the inverted gold from the future and turnstile it, now you have regular gold that you can do whatever the gently caress you want with. This doesn't detract at all from your point that there's zero indication what the hell is going on here, that unless the gold is flying back into your hand or the corpses are leaping up from the ground or the bullets are flying back into the gun there's just zero idea what's happening.
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May 5, 2021 02:39
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David D. Davidson posted:To me a big part of the problem is we're told "don't think, feel" but the writers didn't take their own advice and have fallen into the Zack Snyder trap of having thought about it too much and just pat themselves on the back for being so clever. This is pure projection, Snyder has done literally dozens of interviews where he cops to doing stuff because he thinks it looks cool and nothing else. In fact I daresay he might have been a better choice for this movie (and I don't actually think that's the case for most things) since all the visual stuff would have been amped up to the extreme and he would have had one of his little notebooks full of cool shots and visual tricks, and the plot would have been the same "don't think too hard about this" At the very least that last battle would have been something beyond "that building getting time-hosed".
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May 6, 2021 17:05
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You're right in that is how Nolan thinks it works, but by the rules of Tenet it doesn't actually work. SMG is right: the actual way, by the rules of Tenet, that the inverted gold drop would work is this: the turnstile would suddenly spit out two gold cases at the exact moment Sator would send an email that says "I need gold, please leave it behind the old oak tree", he would bury the inverted one (that's the one from the future) behind the old oak tree and keep the other. Or the turnstile could just spit out a couple of cases occasionally, Sator doesn't bury the inverted one until he knows where he found it. That's the thing about this time inversion stuff, to a forward observer inverted items that work with the turnstiles look totally random. Sir Kodiak is also right that Sator could invert himself and go "dig up" (which would look like burying it to someone in normal time) the inverted case and then walk into the turnstile holding it, which results in a perfectly normal Sator walking out with perfectly normal gold, and the inverted gold has "disappeared". Again to a forward observer this would look exactly like the turnstile randomly activating and two Sators walking out, the inverted one walking away backwards and "burying" the gold. But there is no way for the "empty case, close case, open case and it's full of inverted gold" technique works, because the minute you open the case and view the gold you're interacting with that gold's past and we know what the past was: it's been sitting in the ground untouched until you opened the case. Whoops! TIME PARADOX Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 18:21 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 18:10
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Double post while editing! My bad. .dab yM !gnitide elihw tsop elbuoD
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May 6, 2021 18:20
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gregday posted:I think I broke my brain thinking about the Blue team member that gets sealed up inside the wall at Stalsk-12. They come from a turnstile. If a normal person observed an inverted person (who never went back to normal) they would see them dead, then rise to life, then they would live their life in reverse until they walked back into the turnstile they originally used to invert. At the same time their "regular" self would have been living their life simultaneously and they would do so normally until they entered the turnstile. At this point both versions of the person would "vanish" and that would be that. The turnstyle would effectively be the end of their "future". If nobody saved that guy then there's a corpse in the wall that (from a normal perspective) slowly get fresher, until a rocket hits the wall and a living dude pops out of it and walks backwards into his blue shipping crate and flies away. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 20:15 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 20:03
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By the way just for interest's sake there's a classic SF story that SORT of plays by Tenet's rules by Ian Watson called the Very Slow Time Machine, I would be surprised if Nolan hadn't read it at some point. It won some awards IIRC and it's interesting, although thematically very far away from Tenet. It does feature people becoming Time Cultists but in a very different way.
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May 6, 2021 20:48
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The answer is actually clean-up squads, sent by an unknown entity. Possibly Doctor Who. They send people back inverted to pick up all the corpses, guns, and other crap that's lying around after these inverted invents, because as we've definitely proven it's not possible for a normal person to interact with an inverted object outside of a handful of very specific ways. So: We are to infer the damage to normal objects by inverted objects "heals" itself over time, unless the damage is done to normal living objects, in which case the "time radiation" causes the wound to be fatal. Of course, if you're inverted and stabbed by a lockpick in the arm, there is no "time radiation" (despite this being functionally an identical situation of a person being wounded by an inverted object, although in this case the polarities are switched) and instead you experience a wound that heals faster than normal but appears before you are stabbed. At the moment of stabbing it heals itself, sort of how the windows "uncrack" as the bullets fly backwards through them. I really am coming around to SMG's take that it's not possible to actually truly understand what's happening here. Zaphod42 posted:Uh.... why?? If he takes inverted gold out of the box he's taken it out in the gold's past. But we know definitively that the gold's past was it sitting in a case in the ground, so it's a TIME PARADOX. It can't come out of the case in it's own past, as we know it was there the entire time. The method where the turnstile just randomly spits out a pair of gold cases and he buries one does not violate causality. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 21:22 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 21:18
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gregday posted:Why are people assuming that there’s only one time capsule and dead drop location? I assumed every time Sator and the future exchange materials it’s in a new location with a different capsule. The problem is not that a non-inverted person can't interact with an inverted object. The problem is that an inverted object's past is a normal person's future, and that if you know the past you can't change it - it's totally deterministic So if you see an inverted gold bar on a table in a room, you're free to walk in and pick it up just fine. If you see an inverted gold bar in a room with a post-it note stuck to it that says "MMJS put this here in 2041" and you walk into the room and pick it up, then the only logical explanation is that either a) it's not actually an inverted gold bar or b) the note is lying, because clearly it hasn't been sitting there for 20 years. In fact from the perspective of the gold bar you put it there and then walked out of the room backwards! Another way to look at this is that if I were a regular person standing in a room with a turnstile and suddenly the turnstile activates and spits out an inverted SMG and a regular SMG there is nothing on Earth or Heaven that I will be able to do to prevent inverted SMG from entering that turnstile. I couldn't trip him or physically force him away from walking (backwards) into it because that's SMG's past, my future, and SMG's past definitively ends with them entering that turnstile. If I were somehow able to prevent them from entering the turnstile it's a TIME PARADOX.
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May 6, 2021 22:07
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Hand Knit posted:There isn't actually a problem here. Sure it's improbably and implausible and narratively contrived that people don't interfere. But logically it works just fine. (And, as a side note, this isn't actually determinism that we're talking about. In fact, we're kind of trying to reconcile 4D time travel with a lack of determinism.) Tenet is the block universe. It's 100% deterministic. The key scene for understanding this is when the Protagonist first inverts, he sees a puddle starts to ripple before he steps in it. He nonetheless steps in it, in the exact place where it was rippling. He could never have "chosen" not to step in the puddle. gregday posted:If you were inverted would it be possible to rob a jewelry store? I've thought through it and I believe the answer is no. The issue here is that the un-inverted jewelry can only be in one place and must go back to the store at the end of the sequence (since the thieves are inverted, then from our "normal" perspective they are putting the jewelry back in the store and walking out backwards - from their perspective they are taking it and leaving normally). Much like our inverted gold, this knowledge of the jewelry's final location - in the store for sale - means that our inverted thieves can't do anything that wouldn't result in that outcome. My original thought was that the thieves could sell the gold to a fence, which the jewelry store buys the gold from - but that would require the gold to be in two places at once - in the inverted thieves possession, AND at the store being displayed for sale. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:31 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 22:29
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Best example I can think of to illustrate Tenet's causality at the moment is if I were wanting to frame a house, I would say "I should go through a turnstile 80 times, once an hour, so that I have 40 helpers" and then immediately a bus would pull up and out would pour 40 versions of me, each two hours older than the last, who could help. (there's also 40 inverted versions of me, presumably hanging around in a blue-lit room reading Harper's Weekly and taking a nap or something). All 40 versions would have experienced an hour of helping 39 other versions of me frame a house. Tenet's time travel does not allow for a world where one version experienced having no helpers, one version experienced having one helper, one version experienced having two helpers, etc. There's also the idea that I think "I should go through a turnstile 80 times, once an hour, so that I have 40 helpers" and only 38 show up, with the 38th guy saying "oh I honestly am getting too tired to help". It's not deterministic in the way that stuff HAS to happen how I think it should. Subjectively I'm going to live out 80 hours of life going back to the same spot in a bus and helping frame a house and then going back into a turnstile to do it again, but in real time 40 time clones are going to show up and help each other for an hour. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:44 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 22:41
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Hand Knit posted:Altogether then, P could have chosen not to step in the puddle. But he didn't. First, thanks for engaging with me. I'm having a lot of fun discussing this with you guys. So, to the point of the puddle: I do believe that he could not. The movie says "either way you made it happen" when showing the video tape, but it's lying. If the effect comes before the cause, the cause must occur, ergo there is no choice and no free will. Think about driving the inverted car. In order to "start" it you would walk up and get in and depress the brake, then push the start button. From the inverted car's perspective, you just stopped the car, turned the car off, got out, and walked away (backwards). Now you're ready to drive, so you put the car in reverse and release the brake. From your perspective, the car would start rolling gently forward. From the car's perspective, it was rolling gently backwards, and you hit the brake to stop it. Now it's time to drive the car. At this point all the inputs would be reversed and you will feel the effects of your driving before you actually performed the action. You would feel the suspension start to lean in the direction you were going to turn before you turned. And at no point could you feel the car start to accelerate (which meant that you were braking) and say "oh I'm going to step on the accelerator instead, I'm going to turn the wheel in the opposite direction from which the car's frame is leaning". That's simply not possible to do without a TIME PARADOX. That's why I say there's no free will. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:57 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 22:55
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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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The problem with the gold "appearing" in the case is that in every other interaction we see, the Tenet setting operates as a "block universe" where if someone goes back they had always been back there. It is not a "time loop" or "time line" movie, there's one timeline and everything in it happened all at once. So seeing an empty case, closing the case, then opening the case to find gold violates one of the settings own rules. edit: quote:A couple of folks have pointed out that you can't just dig a crateful of inverted gold out of the ground and try and sell it. For one thing, nobody's gonna buy a gold bar that does backflips off of tables and refuses to melt when you put it in an furnace. But more importantly, the gold has to be in the ground tomorrow and the day after and the day after, every day until it's put into the ground by future people. Digging it up and walking away with it in your pocket would violate its own past history.
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May 11, 2021 18:27
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Boris Galerkin posted:Once 2021 Sator digs up the gold, he just needs to invert it again so that it starts moving forward in time. Unless Sator is also inverted he can't interact with the gold, because his future is the gold's past and we know that the gold's past is sitting in the case for 100 years with nobody touching it. If Sator was inverted then he could dig up the gold (which looks like burying it to us "normal" folk) and take it to the turnstile to normalize it. What this looks like to a normal observer is that you're standing at a turnstile, it suddenly activates, and a normal Sator walks out with normal gold out of the red side and does whatever. The blue side inverted Sator walks out of the turnstile backwards and takes the gold and buries it. This actually works just fine by the rules of Tenet's causality. But under no circumstances could a regular old Sator just dig up inverted gold from the future and uninvert it because it breaks causality. When you deal with inverted objects you are dealing with the item's past even though it's your future. So if the past is defined for that object then you can't do anything to the object to break it's past. And we know that the past of the inverted gold is sitting in a case in the ground, so you can't remove it. edit: Zaphod42 I agree with you completely, I've said this. You could also just have a pair of suitcases appear out of a turnstile and "regular" Sator buries the inverted blue one and spends the red one. But there's no way the scene they show in the movie works with the rules they display in the movie. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:29 on May 11, 2021 |
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May 11, 2021 19:20
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gregday posted:Any time an object is inverted it’s “traveling backwards from the future”. I’m not seeing how it’s different whether it’s in a box. It's not that it's in a box. It's that you know it's past. Think of an inverted gold bar in an inverted timelock safe. The safe counts down 100 years, then you can open it. Except, of course, the safe will never count down. From your normal perspective the safe will only count up. You will never receive the gold. Now you're saying "ah but I got there 120 years in the past. The lock won't start counting up for 20 years. I just take the gold." Ok. So now the gold isn't in the safe in its past anymore. So there's nothing in the safe when the lock arms, so the gold couldn't be there when you took it. This is the time paradox that Zaphod and I are discussing. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:34 on May 11, 2021 |
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May 11, 2021 19:32
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Literally the only thing good about Tenet is the time-gently caress stuff and the clockwork engineering they did on some of the scenes to make it work (the Inverted Man fight). If we don't have that, we really don't have anything. gregday posted:Maybe my brain is completely broken at this point, but I just don’t see how inverting gold and sending it into the past in a time capsule is any different than how inverted bullets get (un)shot. The issue is not the bullets, the issue is definitively knowing the past of an object. If you knew the inverted bullet was in the wall for 20 years you couldn't pick up the gun at year 10 and shoot it. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:37 on May 11, 2021 |
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May 11, 2021 19:35
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gregday posted:This brings up another paradox the movie rules create. If you, in normal forward time, see an inverted person walking around backwards, doing backwards things, it sort of implies that at some point they must have reverted, because otherwise they'd have no 'starting point' to come from, for your POV. Sure, eventually they'll back into a turnstile, but where did they originate? There was the "past" version of them walking around normally at the same time doing whatever they wanted to do. This is what they meant in the movie when, after the Tenet team busts in and rescues the Protagonist after he sees Kat shot through the proofing window, they say that Sator "escaped into the past". From the perspective of someone experiencing regular time, watching someone walk into a turnstile to be inverted means that they have no future. As in, they would appear to just walk in at the same time the inverted version of themselves walked backwards into the inverted side, and they would vanish. They did not actually disappear, but have merely been existing inverted in your past. Likewise, an inverted person using the turnstile effectively has no past. Again, from our "normal" perspective, the turnstile would appear to activate on its own and out would pop a regular version and an inverted version. The inverted version would walk away backwards and do whatever they did up until it entered the turnstile the first time. The regular version would just live their life normally. Nothing is created or destroyed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAg2cvR9OwE&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zBotcenHb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItL_kEXMtXM
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May 11, 2021 20:32
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gregday posted:Thanks, that's a more eloquent way to put it. Thinking about this movie is like doing math. I actually have a lot of fun with these scenarios and goofing around with the idea of this movie. It's a fascinating idea and famously, Feynman diagrams that describe quantum interactions have no directional time component in them, they can be run either way. What frustrates me is that even though they clearly did a lot of work and came up with some fascinating scenarios (the Inverted Man sequence is an all-timer to me) they also dropped the ball in really strange ways. I think my next post is going to be talking about Kat's Cell Phone and the two ways that you could send yourself information from the future.
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May 11, 2021 20:46
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Neo Rasa posted:When does the scene where P meets the scientist take place? I don't think they ever say. Again the entire feeling of that scene is a sort of free-form exercise in the movie's central conceit, but it ends with them telling you not to worry about it. Very frustrating.
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May 11, 2021 21:21
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Rare triple post in the wild. Love it. So the two ways you could send yourself information from the future in Tenet: 1) The boring way: You have a regular notepad. You write down something noteworthy on it as well as the day it occurs. You invert it and leave it somewhere along with your name and the day and time you left it written in it. At some point in the past someone from Tenet reads the notepad (they don't need to be inverted) and sees whatever is written on it. Now they know the noteworthy event and as a bonus, where it came from. How they dispose of the inverted notepad is irrelevant. 2) The cool way: Your turnstile activates and there is a notepad on either side. You take the "normal" version and destroy it. You keep the inverted version. Inside the inverted notepad is a noteworthy event and a date. After the event occurs, you trace over the letters in the notebook and they disappear. You then buy a notepad of the same type you've been using. You put the inverted notepad and the new notepad in a turnstile and activate it. They disappear into the past. Note that you can do that with a cell phone or anything else, it basically works the same way. Notepad is easiest to understand though. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:25 on May 11, 2021 |
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May 11, 2021 22:20
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That post is the real Prestige! 
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May 12, 2021 21:21
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Of course this means, like, that a character can just decide “I was in charge all along” and it will become true until something contradicts it. Tenet is an elaborate riff on Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.
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May 13, 2021 15:53
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