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I finally saw this and holy poo poo I loved every minute of it. I love how much isn't force-fed to the audience and you can actually think about things. (of course everybody is complaining that it was too confusing  )To me this was Primer, but with a big budget. Not that these are movie ruining for me, but I do have a couple questions of what are possibly plot holes? Its glossed over how someone in the future invents "the algorithm" and then kills themselves to hide it. But... they also hide it in the past? Why do that? Why not just shoot yourself instantly? Isn't that basically guaranteeing that you aren't actually hiding the algorithm at that point? Why even shoot yourself if you go back in time and hide the alg? Maybe I'm missing something there. Similarly, its taken for granted that if they take the pieces of the algorithm, hide them someplace nobody knows, and then kill themselves, that nobody will ever find the algorithm and now the world is safe. But couldn't someone always end up inverting themselves and going back to that exact moment when the protagonists grab the algorithm, before they go and hide it, and intercept it? Maybe this always happened so you can't change things now, they discuss in the middle about whether paradoxes are allowed or not and its just like  lets not take the chance?And why do the future people even need Branagh? Couldn't they just invert themselves and go back and get the pieces? Do they not have enough inverted oxygen to live that long or what? Seems The Protagonist spends a lot of time inverted in the end. Also I knew that Robert Pattinson was aware of more things (and was recruited by The Protagonist, later on) instantly, but I was hoping the guess was at one point he was moving backwards but had learned to speak in backwards-English all along to hide it or something clever like that. I was very very pleased that I instantly guessed the man with the mask at the Airport was The Protagonist in the future and was totally correct. Fighting with your future self is such a cool mind-gently caress, once you're in the future you know you can't kill your past self but you can't let them kill you either. Its already happened, but you still have to go through with it. Just wild stuff. 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. Its true, things like stepping on a piece of fallen building and then having it move backwards up into the building it exploded from, making you fly up into the air and nearly flipping you over, that's real clever. But much of the action scenes are just kinda shooting guns offscreen since its so hard to co-ordinate this stuff in both directions. Still, we get lots of cool things like the tower of the building having its bottom re-formed right as the top gets blown up, so its exploding in both directions of time at the same time, that's really cool and far out. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Jan 17, 2021 |
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Jan 17, 2021 07:01
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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. I agree. Also, while I really liked Mr. "This is cowboy poo poo!" constantly acting like time inversion was no big deal and you're a baby man for getting in his way, the fact that all of a sudden they have an entire platoon of dudes who are suited up and down with inverting time is a bit strange and surprising. Also don't you want to keep all this poo poo on the down-low if you're trying to prevent future people inverting time and causing paradoxes or ending the world or some poo poo? Its not implausible because with time inversion they effectively have forever to recruit their army, especially when you factor in the future Protagonist helping them do it in the past. And I do really love the idea of different people being recruited by future versions of each other and not even knowing who the person was that chronologically "started" it all. I've been thinking for awhile I'd love to see a plot about spies where everybody is talking to everybody else using code names, and a spy ends up getting an assignment to kill a target who he realizes is himself under another code-name, and then as he tries to peel back the layers and figure out who sent the order to have him killed he realizes that nobody actually is in charge and its all just an insane ouroboros of paranoia perpetuating itself. And this movie almost gets there. You could do some really wild things with the idea of a character meeting his own past and future self and not knowing which of them to trust, things like that. Tenet isn't a flawless movie but its drat inspiring. JazzFlight posted:Actually, you're right. When do those bullets appear there? Like, for instance, the bullets in the glass. When they installed the glass, did it already have bullets in it? Or the broken passenger sideview mirror on the car during the chase scene. I spotted it early, figuring it would be "repaired" by crashing into an inverted car later, but when was it broken in the first place? My problem with the side mirror is I spotted it right away and it bothers me that the Protagonist didn't spot it and realize something was coming. It could have been a cool "oh poo poo" moment. I guess there's not really much different he could do with that knowledge, so maybe he did see it? Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Jan 17, 2021 |
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Jan 17, 2021 07:20
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Ruffian Price posted:Also said this before, but the best part is how "temporal" is usually a trigger word for "speak English, man!" in movie scripts, but here, the Protagonist just continues the conversation. Amazing I kept waiting for the scene where everything would slow down and some Scientist Man would explain things with a chalkboard and that didn't happen and I really like it. I've seen that scene enough times thankyou.
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Jan 17, 2021 18:42
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Ego-bot posted:So when the British woman tried to kill her Russian husband the first time on the catamaran, what the hell was that? She cut the rope, he falls 3 feet into the water which is supposed to kill him. Did I miss something there? I don't think she actually expected it to kill him, she was just very pissed off. Protagonist though needed to try to get on his good side so went back to pick him up just in case. I will say that going from "I'm going to cut your balls off and stuff them in your mouth" to "hey lets go sail a catamaran together!" happened WAY too fast. That was tonal whiplash. All because he mentioned the Opera House? I get that maybe Branagh is willing to talk to him after that point instead of killing him right away, but "hey lets go sailing so we can have a private conversation" is just goofy. I will give Christopher Nolan credit that overall the movie is gorgeous, excellent cinematography and just beautiful shot locations. Every scene there's something beautiful going on in the background to look at. But I think he decided that "a shot of sailing will look really cool" and didn't worry much about how to fit it into the plot there.
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Jan 17, 2021 21:04
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Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e if you haven't seen it btw
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Jan 17, 2021 23:35
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Anne Frank Funk posted:What is la jette in this analogy, mcrib? Nah that's 12 monkeys La Jette is a royale with cheese
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Jan 18, 2021 19:21
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sethsez posted:It's not necessarily that it's too confusing. In broad strokes, it's an action flick where a super-top-secret agent has to stop a scary Russian from using a doomsday device. The issue a lot of people have is the convolutions involved in telling that incredibly basic story. Figuring out the specifics doesn't lead to a greater understanding of character motivations, any questions of morality, or even any fun revelations in how cause and effect have been tweaked in interesting ways. Instead it mostly just leads to "oh, I guess that's how the car got there" and "okay I think I understand the big threat now." It feels like once you've figured out all the little bits that don't make immediate sense, you're just left with Timeline Has Fallen. I mean, yeah, most stories are heavily character driven; but not all need to be. Neil's character does have good development and a good arc along with the protagonist becoming himself, but I don't think every single story has to be the hero's journey, you know? Personally I think the concept itself is neato in the extreme and gets me excited and thinking in ways few movies do, and that in itself is perfectly satisfying for a story. I love Primer, but it also hand-waives a ton and basically just throws a few things in the air and hopes you come up with some clever conclusions. But I'm not saying the movie IS confusing; I said people complained it was. And they are. Look at twitter. I've seen many people saying exactly that verbatim, so you can't tell me they haven't said that. gregday posted:Doesn’t the existence of an inverted person imply that at some point they would have to revert (“correct”) again? If we’re seeing them, they are on their way back to the turnstile that they, from their POV merged from. But from our POV, where would they have come from? If not for the turnstile that they (from their POV) would go into to revert. Well, someone born in the future could invert in the future and exist in the now as an inverted person. But eventually they should revert, yeah. But this gets into the whole "can you cause a time paradox?" question, which Neil answers as basically "you probably can't but lets not find out in case it unmakes existence instead" The bullet holes I can jive with but WHERE ARE THE BULLET CASINGS? There should be casings on the floor that load themselves into the gun as you shoot, but I guess Christopher Nolan isn't a gun buff. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Feb 23, 2021 |
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Feb 22, 2021 03:59
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DeimosRising posted:Are you sure you’re thinking of primer, because it’s uh...not an action movie at all Brain fart, the second time I said Primer I meant to say Tenet. Tenet is more of an action movie compared to Primer. Primer is more of a thinking sci-fi drama.
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Feb 23, 2021 06:22
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Shaocaholica posted:Ok and the Indian lady what's her deal? I don't recall them explaining why/how she knows the things she knows or her motivations. Also the way they meet seems so coincidental. Some bullets at the lab were made with metals that probably come from a region of India therefore this specific arms dealer must be a key character in this convoluted time travel plot? That gets settled with no exposition in like 2 cuts. The Indian Lady is hired by the Protagonist when he's inverted in the future, so its like she's a proxy so the Protagonist can tell his past self what to do. Re-watching the film, I think its almost an intentional red-herring. They go to the arms dealer lady because that's where the bullets come from. But that doesn't really matter in the end. What matters is that they went to her, so then later on he knows he'll go to her, so then he goes back in time and talks to her before he meets her for the first time, and tells her what to do. But because of the way time is consistent, that means the first time he meets her she was already working for him... Same with Neil.
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Apr 30, 2021 08:16
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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. If its a normal car you're just driving it backwards. If its an inverted car then you just fill it up with gas as normal it just empties in reverse. The only question is if you'd have to use inverted gas or not.
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May 1, 2021 02:47
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Any chemical reactions have to involve molecules of the same inversion, or they don't work. Yeah but the air molecules / carbon monoxide molecules wouldn't be inverted. But beyond that, the *particles* all would (potentially be), inverted gas, inverted air, inverted monoxide, but that could still react together inside a non-inverted combustion chamber, right? Or the other way around, an inverted combustion chamber with non-inverted gas, non-inverted air, etc.? I think in theory it could work? But you'd probably need to adjust the timing of the camshaft and the gearing of the transmission to be reversed...
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May 1, 2021 02:52
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Groovelord Neato posted:I'd love Nolan to explain why the Algorithm being buried is an instant game over. I'm one of those weirdos that very much enjoyed the movie but that makes no sense. As someone who really loves the film, the Algorithm being a physical thing makes no sense. The person who invented it in the future "hiding it in the past' makes no sense. However, you can somewhat resolve that by getting into what SuperMechagodzilla and I were talking about a second ago. The actual plot of Tenet is almost a contrived red herring that doesn't really matter? At the end of the day all that really matters is that the protagonist decides to believe in time and make Tenet end by sacrificing himself, and he does that because he did it, and he did it because he does it. Everything else, the whole conflict, is basically inconsequential to that ultimate truth. There may not actually be an "algorithm" at all but more just the concept of it, a sort of Roko's Basilisk of time.
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May 1, 2021 03:11
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Yeah, it *mostly* works and is really fun and cool but ultimately doesn't really totally go all the way to working.
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May 2, 2021 04:08
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Groovelord Neato posted:The motive of the future people is great but it should've been more than a throwaway line. DeimosRising posted:What do you like about it, seems real stupid to me I do like the idea of there being a faction that doesn't even exist yet but exists in the future which is your opponent, and you don't really know much about them as a result but you still have to fight them. Fear of the unknown and all that, gives me like Three-Body Problem vibes. Some cool sci-fi concepts there. Like I mentioned before, its like a less dumb version of Roko's Basilisk.
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May 3, 2021 23:55
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Ultimately its a movie about The Protagonist and a time spiral that collapses in on itself and has him deleting himself from history to prevent things from exploding the world. A story about using a time machine to try to butterfly effect the world to prevent a world-ending catastrophe is just a completely different story. But yeah as with a lot of things if you think about the future people's motivations too much it doesn't seem to add up. The best way to resolve it is to say that like how The Protagonist and Neil are total Time Cultists, the people of the future are also Time Cultists but its a fatalistic cult.
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May 4, 2021 00:26
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sethsez posted:Yeah, the bigger problem is that this is all there is. It's an extremely mechanical plot with gently caress-all in the way of human interest beyond Protag and RPats being buddies, so all you're left with are the mechanics (and the never-ending exposition explaining them), which as stated are only satisfying under a very specific level of magnification and quickly fall off if you pay too little or too much attention. Yeah. I don't think that inherently makes it a bad film, it has incredibly cinematography while having some inspiring sci-fi concepts and some good action. Plenty of movies don't even do good action. But its like, it almost feels like they tried to keep the story from having characters. The Protagonist not having a name is cute for the story and mechanics, but also is symbolic of how little we know about him and how little of a human being he really is. Ultimately TENET is a mouse-trap and the people are simply levers or cogs in the machine.
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May 6, 2021 04:48
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Snowman_McK posted:It's why Bill and Ted's 'just remember to put that there later...ah, here it is' makes at least as much sense. That's probably my favorite moment in Bill and Ted and they're fun films. Which just makes me think of all the more complex causality bullshit we could have gotten into. Like imagine if you're doing a Temporal Pincer Attack and you have the team that's inverted tell you which soldiers they saw who had bullet holes and which didn't, and then you'd know not to shoot at the ones who didn't get shot to save time. (Course, is that because you missed them, or because you told yourself not to shoot those soldiers in the first place???)
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May 6, 2021 04:52
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Snowman_McK posted:I think they could have pulled off a much more interesting temporal pincer attack with a much smaller scene. Make it involve maybe ten people on either side, or even total. Bigger isn't better if you don't have bigger ideas. Or, if you want it to be big, at least give us some cool imagery: people springing back to life as bullets are sucked out of them, or getting hit by inverted bullets and dying in a strange, backwards motion. Double tapping a body, only to bring it back to life and have it shoot at the team going the other way. A fight where you had like 4 people on one side and 4 people on another side, with 2 inverted on each team, would probably carry more weight than having 20 people. Being able to recognize faces would make things way more interesting. Of course, it'd probably be prohibitively difficult / expensive to choreograph and film that kind of fight sequence, the one where the Protagonist fights himself is already pretty bonkers. Like imagine if inverted Protagonist and non-inverted Neil were fist-fighting with some 3rd bad-guy, and they were trying to synchronize their attacks while being temporally inverted with each other. Protag sees Neil's fist coming out of the bad guy's face, and then Neil gets flung up in the air. Protag realizes he needs to "catch" Neil (actually toss him) in order to make this work. etc. etc.
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May 6, 2021 05:22
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Hand Knit posted:They would have to rebury the backwards-travelling capsule in a different location, otherwise you'd have the forwards-travelling capsule and backwards-travelling capsule occupying the same space at the times in between the shipment. This also means that every future-to-past or past-to-future shipment has to use a different area. And, if i remember correctly, we do see something like this at the abandoned nuclear site where Sator's mooks are constantly digging up new areas. The capsule isn't backwards travelling. Only the gold is. That's the trick. The problem (as mentioned earlier) with it is that if the gold is travelling backwards, Sator should just... have the gold already. If you send the gold back in time to Sator, the gold keeps going back in time. So as mentioned, it would have to suddenly spawn inside a turnstile and he'd have two copies of it or something weird like that. We know the gold is inverted though because we see Sator "drop" the gold upwards into his hand. But if he "spends" inverted gold it'll cause all kinds of problems. So you have to re-invert the inverted gold back to normal to spend it. Hm. I guess that works though? This is all too loving complicated lol. I may need to draw a picture to think this through... gregday posted:This created a new paradoxical question: if inverted people never revert, then from the forward perspective, where do they “come from”? That’s probably a question that arises from linear thinking and as the movie suggests I should just not think about it. Yeah, exactly. I think the idea is "they can't", because they necessarily MUST have already re-inverted sometime. Since everything is all happening at once and already has happened, it has to be logically consistent, and paradoxes just can't happen. But yeah its weird. The protagonist and Neil intentionally hand wave this as "we don't really know but we think it works this way" which is for the best. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 19:07
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted: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 Except, here's where it gets weird. What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT. This then means the gold is no longer sitting in the box, so Past Sator sees no gold. I think that actually works? Its weird because from the perspective of the future people, the email was always sent, so it seems like the gold should be there from the start. But if Sator later takes the gold out after sending the email, then it would make sense why the gold wouldn't be there until he sends the email. Its one of those things where its like "This happens because you already did it" more than "this happens because of necessary cause and effect", like how the protag can try to "drop/catch" the bullet, and it doesn't move, but then he tries again and it does. He has to have already done it. You just have to keep thinking about things happening at the same time in both directions, which is ultra confusing. An inverted object can still be manipulated in space by non-inverted objects, and vise versa. That's what makes everything so loving weird and complicated. If it was only inverted objects interacting with inverted objects and only normal objects with normal objects it'd be way simpler, but that's the crux of it.
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May 6, 2021 19:16
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pospysyl posted:Here's the issue: what if Present Sator closes the box and opens it a minute later. Logically, there should be a gold bar there; in the inverted timeline Sator hasn't taken it out yet. Can Sator get unlimited gold in this way? Yeah, in theory just trying to touch the inverted gold bar should probably cause some matter/antimatter explosion that collapses the entire known universe. It still doesn't quite work yeah... like the second after you take the gold the gold is still there? To make it really work you'd need to be inverted when you collect the gold and then un-invert with the gold, but then how could Sator get it in the first place. Shits a confusing mess. (but fun)
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May 6, 2021 19:51
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Nope, because Sator cannot take any gold out of the box. He can only put gold into the box. Uh.... why??
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May 6, 2021 21:18
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted: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. This is where the overlapping inverted and non-inverted objects get weird. The gold is travelling backwards from the future. Future people put it in the box. At some point, Sator removes it from the box. That's perfectly consistent with its backwards travelling life. Then, it is not in the box in the further past, and Sator doesn't see it. The problem is you need to invert the gold while its still inverted, so like I said before the real solution is to collect the gold while you are inverted, then un-invert yourself while you have the gold with you. If you're travelling backwards synced with the gold when you dig it up, it works okay, right? The only real problem is how does a non-inverted person remove the gold, given that it will take them non-zero amounts of time to do so. The method where the turnstile spits out 2 pieces of gold works, but its not the only solution, and it requires more "something from nothing" than the scenario I'm talking about, which is closer to what the movie presents things as being.
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May 6, 2021 21:25
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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. We are assuming that too, that has nothing to do with the problem being discussed. This is all for a single drop, one single transmission of gold.
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May 6, 2021 21:26
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Because, from Sator’s perspective, the box is always empty until he puts the gold into it. You are responding to some completely different context than the conversation I was having and the post you quoted. We're talking about Sator receiving gold from the future, not sending gold into the future. You're on an entirely different page. I understand how the time travel works read my last 3 posts. You don't need to waste time on a sandwich metaphor.
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May 6, 2021 21:38
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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. Eh, Interstellar's monologue about "Love is the only thing that transcends time and space" basically invalidates everything else in it.
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May 6, 2021 22:24
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:"What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT." This is an entirely pointless semantic argument that adds nothing functionally to the conversation, so I'm really confused what you think you're saying. Yes, okay, from the gold's perspective Sator puts the gold in. But from Sator's perspective he takes it out. That changes nothing. Yes, any conversation with inverted time can be phrased multiple ways based on the time perspective you're looking at. Arguing like one of those perspectives is "right" and the others are "wrong" is nonsense and pointless. Either you understand what I'm saying or you don't. You clearly do. So why argue semantics? But Sator absolutely does take the gold out, from his non-inverted perspective. That's what we're talking about, and you haven't added anything mechanically to that discussion.
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May 6, 2021 22:27
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Hand Knit posted:I think this goes back to the point where changing thing is technically compossible but logically impossible, so for one reason or another it just doesn't happen. After all, if all times are equally real, then it was always the case that things were a certain way at T1. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Tenet is the block universe. It's 100% deterministic. That's another semantic argument, because it depends what you mean by saying it is or isn't deterministic. I think Hand Knit would agree with you that its deterministic in that sense, but I think they're saying that since the past has to have "happened" simultaneously with the future, its not "determinism" in the classical sense which involves a cause-effect chain, but rather a single instantaneous state of the universe at inception.
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May 6, 2021 22:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:But he doesn't. From a normal perspective, he is putting gold in. See this is what I meant when I said you're having a completely different conversation than the rest of the thread. No, we are talking about the future sending gold back in time to Sator. He is going from a state of not having gold to having gold by gaining the gold that was sent to him from the future. Any observer would describe that as taking gold out.
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May 6, 2021 22:32
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Hand Knit posted:The necessity which happens in Tenet is (by and large, there's obviously a lot of funkiness) of this second type. He steps in the puddle at time T because he stepped in the puddle at time T. There's no 'first pass' or 'second pass' by which things could be different. There's only one time T, and the way things were at that time is just the way things are at that time.And this is compatible with free will. P chose to step in the puddle at time T. It's not like time T ever stopped existing or was revisited. What happened at time T is 'timelessly true' — it's just a coordinate in time like your room is a coordinate in space. Right, basically TENET exists in the same universe type as Watchmen's Manhattan. Everything is always happening, simultaneously, all at once. Time is an illusion, everything is a frozen moment. They all are happening and will happen and have happened. As you say, there's no "first pass". It all just IS. All at once. It always was and always will be. So there can't be paradoxes. But it means that anything that would be a paradox, you didn't do. You can't do. Hand Knit posted:So what about the car? I mean, to start, we're probably going to have to attribute a lot of how the car works to movie magic. Like, if inverted fire is cold instead of hot, what exactly is happening with the car's engine? Well, it depends upon if the car is inverted, if the driver is inverted, if the fuel is inverted, if the spark plugs are inverted, etc. etc. Clearly Nolan didn't think too hard about how cars work. The big problem being that cars are aspirated, they breathe air from the environment. That air wouldn't be inverted. So that means you can't use inverted gasoline. So then you have a car that sucks up heat instead of producing it? Yeah its weird. I guess you could maybe get away with having inverted gas in an inverted engine with normal air and using hand wave of "temporal friction" or whatever to say the air gets inverted by contact. But otherwise all inverted cars would have to be carrying MASSIVE air tanks, to the point where they may not even be able to drive.
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May 7, 2021 00:43
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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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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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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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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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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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Boris Galerkin posted:I disagree because the time capsule isn’t going backwards in time, only the gold is. This is canonically NOT how TENET works. There is no "now you put the gold in the box and now it goes backwards so its there for Sator" In TENET rules there are no alternate timelines. Everything is always happening simultaneously. If someone in the future would EVER put a gold bar in the box, then its already in the box.
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May 11, 2021 19:18
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted: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. As I said before, there IS a solution to this. You just HAVE to collect the gold while you're inverted. If you collect the gold while inverted, you continue to take the gold with you backwards through time. You can then pass through a turnstile, returning yourself to non-inversion, and also returning the gold to non-inversion. There is no paradox in this, but the movie never even remotely suggests that Sator is inverted when collecting gold and even in fact says the opposite, so it contradicts itself.
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May 11, 2021 19:20
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Boris Galerkin posted:I’m still not sure I follow. The problem is if you collect the gold while non-inverted then you're travelling into the future, so the literal second you pick up the gold you have contradicted the gold's own past. You would be unable to ever grab the gold, because the gold "already" wasn't moving.
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May 11, 2021 19:21
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gregday posted:We see forward Sator interact with inverted gold on the ship when the helicopter arrives with it. He un-drops it into his hand. That's not quite the same situation. An object moving backwards could be inverse dropped by forward Sator. The whole problem here is the gold is originating from the future, travelling backwards through a box. If the gold's trajectory through space and time is different, that isn't an issue. That's no different than Protagonist un-dropping a bullet. Although there's still a lot of ignored logistics questions about where the bullets and gold are coming from that would have to be resolved, but in theory they *could* be resolved if you took the right steps preivously.
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May 11, 2021 19:26
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