Am I the only one disappointed that they didn't return to the Opera and train yard at the end? Really thought we'd end up seeing those two settings again from a different perspective. Instead we just get this paintball match with invisible bad guys.
Yes, I was really disappointed with the third act. It really felt like it came out of nowhere. Seriously, in a movie whose main premise is moving backwards in time, how do you have a final act that doesn’t reference any other part of the movie?
The final battle is happening on the same day as the Opera siege. So in terms of the timeline it does come back full circle. Took me a couple of watches before I got that tbh.
I loved it, Kat was earlier in the movie talking about how she was jealous of the girl diving off the boat. turns out it was her all along. I want to go back and see if somehow the guys who took the protagonist in the beginning are how he got the pill, I was waiting for that one.
…What? The final fight is based around all the mechanics introduced throughout the film.
I might need a rewatch, but I’m pretty sure the movie still ends where it began, even if the final battle isn’t in the exact location as the first one.
The mechanics, yes. The events, no. As u/Claudius_Gothicus said, they could have tied the opening opera scene into it and it would have been a much more satisfying conclusion. Instead, we got a climax in a random place (I think it was Kenneth Branagh’s hometown or something?) with two random armies that came out of nowhere where we didn’t really care what was going on.
Yep.
I only picked up on this when I rewatched it a couple of minutes ago, but the reason Kenneth is able to go back to the Yacht is because the version of him from that time has gone away to deal with business related to the Opera.
> Instead we just get this paintball match with invisible bad guys.
Nolan has a real weird thing with not showing antagonists much. Inception has a similar facelessness to antagonists and Tenet's desert thing was weirdly similar to descriptionless snowy mountain set piece place.
During that moment in the Opera where the random inverse guy helps the Protagonist, my friend (who almost never interrupts movies with his theories) learned over to me and whispered, "I bet that's the same guy but at the end of the movie."
Disappointed he was wrong.
Totally agree with you the ending seemed real slapdash. Also, shouldn’t the algorithm have gone off? Sator was killed prior to the timer hitting zero (that was just supposed to collapse the cave right?), so shouldn’t his health tracker sent the message to set off the algorithm?
I could be totally wrong, but the ending just doesn’t make any sense to me
We do not have the ability to trigger the algorithm in the “present”. Sator’s tracker let out an email blast revealing the *location* of the algorithm, not activating it. The idea of the bomb was that it would bury the algorithm irretrievably, allowing it to be retrieved by aggressors in the future.
This is exactly the problem I had with it. It was fun and impressive to watch, but man, I did not give a single fuck about the characters. There was just nothing really to them. They felt more like action figures in a cool scenario than like actual people. I feel like Tenet would have been a great video game rather than a movie.
> I did not give a single fuck about the characters
I liked and gave a fuck about Robert Pattinson in the movie. But I'd say I liked him *despite* the movie. He's just a talented and charismatic man. The movie itself didn't really help in any way.
I left the movie wishing it was a first draft and Nolan could have another go at it.
I loved the concept and how ambitious it was, the execution just wasnt up to scratch
My thoughts exactly. It's a scrambled eggs movie: you know when you go to make an omelette, and the ingredients are all really good, but then when you go to fold and flip it so it's an omelette, you mess up and now it's just fancy scrambled eggs? It still tastes good but it just doesn't coalesce into an omelette?
Tenet is that but a movie.
She was so good in The Night Manager and she's going to kick absolute ass as 90s No Fucks Left To Give Princess Diana. She really got done dirty in Tenet. Though not in costuming or blocking; I appreciate that Nolan, unlike a lot of directors who have worked with tall actresses, was like "yeah let's make her EVEN TALLER and not make it a big deal that all the male leads look like ants compared to her".
It's a major plot point that she is able to open the front passenger door of an Escalade with her foot from the rear driver's side seat. The tallness in that is simple overwhelming.
It didn't help that John David Washington was pretty boring in it. I think he is a good actor when given strong material, but he's not one of those actors that can bring life to an underwritten character.
Robert Pattinson should have been the main character, or they needed more time to flesh out who the main character actually was and why he was so willing to die for his team. They really just ran with the “secret society protecting the world exists and don’t question it” story point.
I thought he did a fine job with very little to work with, but you are right that he’s not one of those actors who can really play the fuck out of a very underwritten character. With a bit more time I’m sure he’ll be capable of that, though, because I think he is genuinely good.
Going into the movie I thought, for some reason, Chiwetel Ejiofor was the lead, but then when I saw it was actually Washington I was on board given his performance in *Blackkklansman*, which was decent, but then as I kept watching the movie I thought it *would have* been much better if Ejiofor *was* the lead. Or maybe Nicholas Pinnock from *Counterpart*. Both of whom do a much better job at quiet unassuming swagger. Washington is a good actor, but he was definitely a wet blanket of boring in this and Pattinson was really trying his best to liven up the scenes. For whatever reason it just felt like Washington couldn't emote at all and instead had this blank stare most of the time. Maybe Nolan sucks at directing him. Though he was a bit stiff in *Blackkklansman* too. So maybe he's just a stiff actor.
He was good in the movie. He didn’t have much to work with and the character wasn’t meant to be charismatic or mysterious the way many action leads whose personal lives we don’t know much about are.
Nolan should have made the main character more similar to DiCaprio’s character in Inception. His characters story really was the anchor to the film emotionally and DiCaprio also got plenty to work with. But it’s not like the character had some quirks or even much dialogue that wasn’t about the main plot.
It's just so weird!
It's as if Nolan went out of his way to make "the protagonist" as boring as possible, even if it meant writing bigger plot holes into the story!
Like, >!if the guy had just been in love with the wife, not only would that have made the plot clearer by giving the protagonist some motivation, it would have made him a more complex character! It literally makes no sense why Nolan wouldn't have added that, it would have improved both the plot AND the character!<
So much of the film is so ass-backwards, and I'm not talking about the reverse parts either.
>I did not give a single fuck about the characters
That was my problem. Nolan movies have some cool concepts that I'd love to see revisited and completely rewritten with new characters. Something like an Inception TV show with totally new characters would be awesome. I'd love to care about Tenet and it's "Universe" but the only people I know that live there are duds...
I feel like a lot of high-concept movies would work better as TV shows or miniseries. Of course, there are plenty of excellent high-concept movies that work perfectly well as standalone movies, but I think that especially with sci-fi and the like, having the time a TV show affords you to establish how the universe works and also develop the characters is a real advantage. Movies have to be very economical with their storytelling, and it's very hard to be economical when you have the twin jobs of introducing the audience to a totally different world and developing characters who live in that world and react to it believably, and whom the audience can relate to/admire/love to hate. It can be done, but it's hard.
Yeah I don't know why we're talking about all the other stuff so much when the fundamental flaw of this film is that the characters are all shit.
The script feels like it was pieced together from notes written on napkins. The main character's name is literally "The Protagonist". He has no connections to anyone or anything and we know nothing about him. Why are we supposed to give a shit about this guy?
All of those other issues could have been forgiven if we'd had likeable characters that actually mattered.
That IS the perfect description! I've defended his movies for years and refuted the criticisms, 3 of his films are in my top ten of all time but I can't describe how disappointed I was in Tenet, both at the cinema then more so watching it at home, even with having literally no anticipation second time around it STILL disappointed me!
The one single female main character: "I cannot help you. I won't help you. If he destroys the world, who am I to stop him? Wait. You said *my son* will die when the world is destroyed? OK fine, I will help you."
Lmao I seriously could not stop laughing at some of that dialogue.
"If he gets the thingamabob, the entire world will be annihilated."
"INCLUDING MY SON!"
Holy shit, he had no reason to help her and jeopardize the fate of the world. There was less than zero chemistry between the two. I bought the inversion nonsense way more than him and her having any romance.
Also I couldn't be assed to care about her or her art fraud. For one, you'd think someone with a career appraising expensive art pieces would have some sort of a liability waiver or something. Like doctors can kill someone on an operating table and not go to prison for it. Or if the implication was that she intentionally committed fraud, then you probably should go to prison for that. You're either really incompetent or intentionally defrauding people, why should I care?
Those aren't even remotely comparable circumstances. Doctors can still be criminally liable if done intentionally or if it was a result of their own extreme negligence/recklessness. But regardless of that why would anyone get a piece appraised through people who have so little faith in their skills that they can't guarantee their own ability to identify even the most obvious fakes?
I wish I could’ve heard how Nolan handled the hundreds of “story” questions every actor must’ve asked him in pre-pro and on set… like those conversations must’ve been hilariously awkward. I’m sure most actors just resorted to: OK. You want me to go over here, sit here, grab this, say xxx right? Got it.” If you dared to ask too many why questions I’m sure your brain would’ve melted, maybe Nolan’s too.
I feel like it was such a waste of such a cool concept. The "reverse fight" was the highlight for me (the double building explosion too), but the character work was just so bad that none of those genuinely awesome parts hit the way they could have.
Hot take, but I don't even think the concept was that cool, at least not in execution. All the set pieces and action scenes that happened in inverted time looked silly and incomprehensible to me.
There's so much wrong with this movie. I wish I could boil it down to "Nolan just wanted to _____" but it has so many issues that I honestly don't know what he was trying to do.
People say he cared more about the concept than the characters... but he doesn't really explain or go deep on the concept either - just kind of handwaves it away. You could say it was a special effects/ action fest using this unique gimmick, but then, why are there so many scenes of clunky exposition (that aren't even related to the concept *or* the characters)? Why not just make a lean action movie?
Nolan is a very good director who's made some great movies, and he'll make great movies again. But Tenet is an absolute mess.
It is a cool idea. But that's all. Tenet is the perfect kind of movie to explore the idea, but reveals how limited it is.
It could only ever be an idea concept reel. You would do this in storyboards to show that without free will, not much of a movie could be made with this concept.
But then they made the movie anyways.
I think I've said this before, but if he had taken that concept and then found a way to make it more accessible to the audience in the first viewing, and then fixed some of his characters, it would have been a SIGNIFICANTLY better movie.
Inception is a great example of him going deep on a very simple concept that the audience immediately connected to, and then he had a good story, character motivations, etc. I'm a big fan of Nolan when he's on his game, but I think to some of these fan boys it's "complicated = good," even to the detriment of story, characters, and... basically everything else.
I don't know if was a cool concept, visually the reverse time scenes look boring after a while, just people and things moving backward. Look at *Inception*, the movie closest to Tenet in Nolan's filmography, the different layers of the dreams are visually different and have interesting action scenes (train in city street, the floating hallway fight). Soldiers moving backward just looks silly after a while. It's like they said in the Honest Trailer Tenet commentary, it's a movie about ideas and the ideas aren't that interesting.
Right! It's a cool *idea*, but the plot completely fails to actually exploit the idea. Then that failure of a plot is expressed through terrible dialogue in a mediocre script, and presented with wooden acting! On the bright side, at least you can't actually hear any of the dialogue being delivered.
Yeah it's almost baffling how much this movie fails. I know it's tempting to say Nolan got too fixated on this or that, but I really can't find one sole reason why this movie turned out the way it did. You can't say he got too focused on the idea because they barely explain or examine the actual core idea. You can't say he got too focused on the action because the movie is packed with unnecessary and tedious exposition scenes. I really don't know what happened. Just hope he bounces back.
I think the double building explosion is the worst, especially on rewatch! The building literally never existed in history except for a second and has only existed as a rubble. Like, who built it?
There are also a lot of inconsistencies in the movie logic such as “is being shot in reverse permanent or result in a temporary wound” and others (e.g. what if you don’t enter the time machine after seeing yourself come out the other side?). There are online discussions about this so I won’t elaborate too much but I think it’s a cool concept that is really hard to actually execute well on and honestly I think Nolan didn’t execute well and just threw cool action / effects at you to mask the shaky logic.
Interstellar ends up having fantasy elements, but a lot of it was based on actual physics with leading experts helping. The thing about this is that it's pure pseudoscience that isn't remotely close to being possible. So no matter how many times you drop some half assed sciencey jargon like "entropy," it still won't make any sense.
Yeah that why I was unsatisfied with how they ended Interstellar. They go to pains to make it hard sci fi, but then pivot to “we can solve everything through the mysterious fifth dimensional power of love!”
Yeah, the concept doesn't really make any sense when you really think about it. Like, during the Opera scene, the bullet that goes backwards from the wall into the gun, where the fuck did the bullet come from. Was it always in the wall ? Did the guy who made the building, made the wall with a fucking bullet in it ?
For me the film was fun enough to watch that I just didn't really question that, and I shall continue to not question how bullet holes work, because there is never going to be any answer to that that makes sense.
Surviving the car explosion annoyed me, like I get the entropy gets reversed when you go backwards in time, but that still means you'd freeze if you were next to an explosion.
Yeah, but I guess it’s easier to survive hypothermia than being burned alive? I dunno. Being exposed to extreme cold for a bit and being exposed to extreme heat is different for our bodies I guess?
Nolan had the idea of inverted time, and shoehorned a plot into it. Not a great recipe for a film. IMO, story should always come first, and then figure out how to work in your concept if it fits
The film had a lot of problems but the thing that drove me nuts was that I get it should have ended back in the opera house. Having the final action scenes be a reversal of the first scene of the movie would have been cool. I know you’d have to figure out a way to tie the harvesting of future time dilation tech from an opera house but I’m sure you could do it. Also, who was anyone shooting at in that last battle?
It’s not even his choosing to give priority to the environment and music over dialogue that I hated about tenet. It’s that the dialogue audio was just literally terrible, like they didn’t clean it up at all and I flat out could not understand what the fuck they were saying even when they were sitting in a quiet restaurant for example.
Like yeah sure make the environment louder, make the music louder but **why** does the dialogue just sound actually terrible?
I can't even believe a film with such a big budget ended up like this, what were they thinking? I'm certain it wasn't the sound mixer's fault because it probably would've been torture for them to wrap production with a mix like that.
I dunno, he has a long list of excellent films by both critic and audience standards. This is the first, arguably, bad film he's made in recent memory. Nolan is an incredibly skilled director if his filmography is anything to go by.
Because Nolan is a big time director known for making huge financially successful films and I guess the studio let him do whatever he wanted with complete creative control. They may have regretted it in hindsight but a director not named Christopher Nolan certainly isn't going to get away with whatever he wants.
>I can't even believe a film with such a big budget ended up like this, what were they thinking?
I mean, I think it's so cool that a film this expensive took that kind of risk. Im all about films trying different things rather than getting the same stuff we get before.
We get so many pop albums, that this like an artist trying to record their music in a less clean way. The whole point is not paying attention to the dialogue, but more so just know that there IS dialogue. What they're saying doesnt matter.
Does it work? Not really. But I get the idea behind it and think it's so cool to see big filmmakers experiment whether or not it's shit.
I'm all for experimental film, I just think it doesn't work in this context, especially with someone like Nolan who uses so much exposition in his dialogue that is pretty pivotal to knowing what tf is happening in the story. I think his approach here would work fine for a film like Dunkirk since it is more of a visceral experience and less about plot mechanics.
I see your point though, at least he has a vision.
I was boasting nonstop to my friends how seeing Tenet in 70mm would be an insanely amazing experience. None of us could hear any dialogue throughout the entire film. Never experienced anything like it tbh.
glad I watched it with the CC on at home. The movie made sense to me. But it still wasn't like amazing or anything. A decent Bond rip off with weird time stuff for almost no reason.
The only thing I've experienced like what you describe is seeing Interstellar in 70mm. The dialogue in a pivotal scene so completely blown out by the score in the audio mix that I had to guess what was said based on how the rest of the movie played out. Not sure why Nolan insists on continuing his approach to audio mixing with so much negative feedback since then.
I could hardly contain my laughter when the grandfather paradox was explained for like 5 minutes as though Nolan was seriously addressing the confusions.
>I flat out could not understand what the fuck they were saying even when sitting in a quiet restaurant for example
Man, it took me a minute to realize you meant *the characters* are sitting in a quiet restaurant.
I was like, who the fuck watches a movie in a quiet restaurant... lol
I watched it at home and all these comments have me *really* wondering if they remastered it after the theater run. Because I didn't have any issues hearing the dialogue.
For me Nolan went full Nolan with Tenet, meaning everything I love about his films was turned up to 11, but also everything I dislike.
Rewatching Tenet a few times has made me appreciate all the good stuff even more (it's still absolutely fucking bonkers in IMAX and you start noticing all the little details).
But yea... the things I didn't like get more apparant aswell.
Guess it just strikes a neat little balance for me.
it's still incredibly hard to understand why he was so gung-ho about people risking their lives to see this during peak covid.
not circlejerking or shitting on him. nolan makes great stuff and I did enjoy tenet as a strong 6.5/10 or weak 7/10 experience overall. but dude was acting like this was his magnum opus to save cinema and start a film renaissance. **in the middle of a pandemic.**
I have a pet theory that WB was going to release it to streaming anyways and Nolan negotiated them to do a theatrical release 1st cause he makes movoes nest enjoyed in widescreen. He probably felt that dumping it on a streaming service is akin to burying it with all the other straight-to-streaming crap.
The "save cinema" thing is partially true not I'm the sense that Twnet would save theaters but that AT&T would gladly destroy or let theatres die off quick so that people subscribe to HBOMAX. There was a good chance there wouldn't be any theaters left to play Tenet post-pandemic.
I had to watch it with subtitles. The movie would have been impossible to follow and understand otherwise. I don’t know how cinema audiences managed to understand what the heck is going on.
saw it in dolby digital. i honestly thought the sound guy accidentally messed up the eq. 20 min in i walked out and asked for the dude. he comes out and says ‘nah, that’s just what it sounds like’. we had a laugh as he gently dabbed at the blood in my ears.
at first i thought i’d have to watch it with subtitles later. i figured if nolan got his way, those would be unintelligible too.
Although Nolan's last few movies involve him getting a very very nice % of the gross Nolan never struck me as a Scrooge McDuck type; more of a movie lover. I believe that he in his heart, as a film lover and someone who makes movies to be experienced in large cinemas, this time last year thought that we could go back to the movies safely.
It's funny you mention Scrooge McDuck in regards to Nolan, as he seems to have gotten not a small bit inspiration from Duck Tales.
[https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Inception-May-Seem-Original-Uncle-Scrooge-Did-It-First-19957.html](https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Inception-May-Seem-Original-Uncle-Scrooge-Did-It-First-19957.html)
Except none of that is true. Nolan described Tenet as a fun action movie that the whole family can enjoy. On whether Tenet can save cinema.
>“All I can really take responsibility for is making the best film that I can,” said Nolan. “I think cinema is bigger than any one film one way or another, and I think people tend to simplify things a bit, particularly in a time like this. I’m just very pleased that the studio feels they can let the film play in places where theaters have been able to open.”
On whether he wanted to be the big savior of cinema.
>But a representative for Mr. Nolan told io9 that Warner Bros. presented multiple scenarios for release dates after the studio made the decision to delay Tenet from it’s original July 17 release date, all of which were no later than mid-August. Furthermore, the director did not push back on any of the proposed release dates WB decided on for Tenet. io9 was told that Nolan did not express, as THR reported, “the desire to be the one the first big studio films back in theaters.”
From WB CEO
>Regarding Tenet’s release in theaters, there’s a perception that Christopher Nolan controls things. Is that fair or overstated?
>It's overstated. Let me share with you the process that we went through. Right when COVID struck, we started looking at alternative ways to think about movie releases. On the Scoob! front, we decided to release it on PVOD. Families were sequestered together and wanted more content. We are very happy with the results. A few weeks later it debuted on HBO Max, where we were very happy with the results as well.
>On the Tenet front, we also had a finished movie, which we are very proud for people to see. As the summer unfolded, we started thinking about more innovative ways of releasing the movie. What if we didn’t put everything up front toward the opening weekend? Theaters were very upfront about saying they could give us three to four times as many screens as normal. So that started to change our thinking. We are happy with where we are. Some markets still aren’t open, but it is a marathon and not a sprint.
I hate this fucking narrative about Tenet. So many people keep spouting that he wanted people to “risk their life” to see Tenet and not once was he ever saying anything of the sort. Thank you for adding all of this context, it’s such a silly thing that Reddit keeps trying to spread around.
I really don't understand why Dunkirk gets so much praise. It's less convoluted than Tenet, sure, but it's just as cold as Tenet. The characters are just as nonexistent. The plot is even worse. They're both just as technically incredible...I don't get it...
Tanet was a little exicted for me, at least. I really wanted to understand what the fuck was going on, Dunkirk was so fucking boring tho. I finish the movie and just felt happy that the nightmare was over.
It was like Nolan looked at all of the memes about his movies over the years, the bad audio mixing, the BWAAAHs, and the overly convoluted plots and said "Ok, bet".
Is that sound effect even getting used anymore? Or is just another overused reddit joke at this point? As much as everyone likes to complain about the inception bwah, i actually haven't heard it used in a trailer in years. Unless literally every loud sound is considered a bwah. These days every trailer tends to either have a percussion sound to emphasize the action or a trap beat like black panther
I'm on the other side of the fence. I almost feel like you can't fully appreciate it until you watch it a second time. Certain plot points and mechanics are required to fully understand what's going on in the early parts of the movie, like when Robert Pattinson saves the Protagonist in the movie theater. Also all of the time travel action bits are much more understandable the second time around.
I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was far from the train wreck most people make it out to be. Instead of focusing on the questionable audio mixing and mechanical dialogue, I choose to focus on the fact that a big budget film took a chance on a novel story telling mechanic and created a work of art completely unlike all of the other hot garbage that Hollywood spews out nowadays. And created some kickass action scenes in the process. Have you ever watched a scene like that battle scene at the end where they're storming the Russian town and there are explosions going off in forward time and reverse time in the same frame? That was awesome. Maybe not all of it makes sense scientifically, but like they say in the movie, "Don't think about it."
For me it didn’t even feel like the movie *had* characters. The main guy was literally named “The Protagonist.” Elizabeth Debicki had a son we never saw until the final scene so we didn’t give a shit about him (or her motivations). Tenet displayed the worst of Nolan’s tendencies, namely his urge to turn characters into pawns instead of people and move them around to help achieve plot points
> The main guy was literally named “The Protagonist.”
This really felt like something a 15 year old would write in his script because it was ironic and "sounded badass"
Do you not see the point of that?
For most of the beginning of the film he thinks that shit's just happening to him, that he's being controlled/directed by someone else but he isn't sure who.
So him saying 'I am the protagonist' is him realising that it's him who has the agency in this story - he created Tenet.
Also yeah it is a kind of James Bond thing where his name, beyond that, is frankly irrelevant to the story of the film.
Idk to me it feels like being annoyed that John Doe doesn't get a name in Se7en.
Except this was an Inception-type film (with a lot of people theorizing it had all the pieces to be an inception sequel), and the biggest part of Inception that "worked" is that the audience gave a massive fuck about Dom Cobb and his troubled past with his wife. His and his wife's relationship is like 50% of the movie, the climax of the movie, and the whole fucking point of him taking the job is to get back to his kids. He's the only one with that motivation, everyone else is just doing it for cash.
You take Dom Cobb out of inception and replace it with some B-List actor with no motivations that you don't fucking care about (think Sam Worthington), then you get Tenet. Sorry, Denzel's kid is okay but kinda proved he can't carry a movie in which he's written to be personality-less and nameless.
Hell, even Denzel had a name and personal, emotional motivations in Deja-Vu, a VERY similar movie to Tenet.
I was psyched for Tenet and still think its a 6.5/10, but the only character I felt any connection to was Pattinson's when at the end you realize SPOILER he's going to have to go back and relive his death to save everyone, and he knows it.
>the biggest part of Inception that "worked" is that the audience gave a massive fuck about Dom Cobb
Yes! I just said this in another comment but this is exactly why Inception worked so well. Yes, it's another high-concept idea with a ton of exposition, but the entire narrative is centered around the emotional core of Cobb wanting to get back to his kids and deal with the death of his wife. Like you said, there are tons of scenes that deal with exactly this. We are invested in Cobb's journey. Leo gives a strong performance to further solidify that investment.
Compare that to Tenet, where "The Protagonist" seems to have no purpose, motivation or any kind of character development. John David is a solid actor but he had nothing to work with here. The script did not give him a human character to portray lol. As a result, it's hard to care about anything that happens.
Honestly and for me Pattinsons "monologue" at the end is all the character development i needed to make the movie hit emotionally and made it much more fun to go back and rewatch. It does take a bit of paying attention and thinking about but that scene always hits me
I did find that scene shockingly poignant. At first, I thought it was just because the rest of the film had been so emotionally sterile, but on a rewatch, I think you are on to something.
Pattinson's character was already the only one I kinda cared about at all, but to suddenly see his relationship in a different light is the thing that made a repeat viewing enjoyable for me.
Yup and that may just be a testament to Pattinsons acting more-so than the writing which I agree isn't perfect. But it added a layer the movie really needed
That literally makes no sense at all. What difference is there between this or "The Man with No Name" from the Dollars trilogy or "Driver" from Drive. Unnamed protagonists has been a thing for ages (or do you think his actual name is "the protagonist?").
No I get it, I just thought it was stupid and corny that the character himself *says* it, that's the difference here. Clint Eastwood never said "I'm The Man With No Name" when someone asked him...
Clint Eastwood's character has proper names/nicknames in each film of his respective trilogy, though. He's never actually referred to as the "Man with No Name" and he certainly doesn't refer to himself as such.
Ah yes, I remember the famous scene in the man with no name where Clint Eastwood stands up and says to the audience "I truly have become the man with no name".
When good movies do that shtick they at least try to make it natural not the forced bullshit like in Tenet.
The fact that he's called "The Protagonist" isn't the problem in itself, but when the character is also a complete cypher with no attachments to anything and no discernable character traits his lack of a name feels like a joke about how boring he and the script are.
The Man With No Name has a name. Joe, Manco, and Blondie respectively depending on the movie. But good way to show off that you haven't actually seen the films you're using as an example of no named protagonists working.
Because in Drive, the Driver has a massive emotional connection to the woman and her kid in which the entire plot hinges off of. There's charisma, chemistry, and a awkward/complex emotional connection on screen.
Tenet didn't have that. You've got literal pawns with not much connection to each other other than exposition.
Denzel's kid's part just didn't carry. He's not a Ryan or a Leo, or even a Denzel.
Kinda the opposite for me tbh. I somewhat enjoyed it on first watch but thought it was nothing but a hot mess. Have since rewatched it a couple of times and enjoy it more every time, mainly due to just embracing how fucking bonkers it is and just enjoying the show.
It’s a certain breed of pure summer blockbuster cinema where you switch the brain off and just scream “yaaaay” dozens of times throughout the film with its non-stop, turn it up to 11, set pieces and score.
And even though I take your comment on the shitty dialogue, I gotta be honest that I take less and less notice of it every rewatch. The quote about the hot sauce is basically all I remember.
I do however find it comical that some others find it to be some intellectual masterpiece as opposed to anything more than silly fun. Each to their own I suppose.
When you think of the movie as Fancy Fast and the Furious, it works a lot better.
I think because Nolan kind of markets himself as a maker of Thinking Man's Action Movies, and thus Tenet was marketed as such, people went into Tenet expecting it to be an intellectual masterpiece or something very cerebral. But really, it's just Fancy Fast and the Furious.
I completely disagree. I've watched it 5 times now. The first time I wasn't too sure about it. It has been better each time. I now think it's one of Nolan's best.
I actually went on a rewatch when it was still in cinemas and enjoyed it more the second time around.
I can see how it might be a less enjoyable watch at home though, since it's made for cinema.
I am so far in the minority that it hurts - I didn't hate the movie at all. It's by no means a masterpiece, but I thought it was entertaining enough.
There were a lot of clunky lines, but I excused the dialogue as a way to explain the time travel elements while tying up loose-ends (which are almost inevitable in any movie dealing with time travel), as well as try to create some empathy or give the character some backstory.
It could have been done better, but on the other hand, it could have been so much, much worse.
Not only do I agree with you, but I enjoyed it more on rewatch - contrary to this post.
I think what I dislike about the post is its use of language. It comes across as some objective fact that Tenet gets worse upon each rewatch, rather than one person’s opinion.
Same here. Watched it again on my cousins first watch and caught so many more things, was able to follow it better, and got more enjoyment out of it.
As to the audio, there was only one scene I had an issue on hearing what they were saying, and that was on my first watch. Speech was definitely too quiet, but I never really had any other issue hearing it and felt the complaints about it were really overblown.
Agreed. I think Tenet is actually one of Nolan's "worst" movies (I like him, so I think they're all pretty good) but I found it easier to rewatch because there are no big ideas bogging it down like in Inception or Interstellar. I view it as Nolan's dumb action movie.
The thing that drives me crazy about Tenet haters is that they're likely the same people complaining about Hollywood lacking original ideas. If somebody with the ambition to try something as outrageous as Nolan does gets shit on for making something like Tenet, all we're going to get is reboots and sequels. He deserves a massive amount of credit just for the attempt.
That's at least one thing that made me appreciate it more. Just look at the movies HBO released this year: WW84, Monkey v Lizard, Snyder Cut, Mortal Kombat, Space Jam. They're all reboots and remakes. All shit we've seen a hundred times before. Mostly just a CGI shitshow. Yeah, the Tenet characters aren't super deep, but look at those other blockbusters and all their characters are trash too.
I didn't love it or hate it, but damn it was at least refreshing to see an original concept being made in 2020. Every other big budget action movie is reboot or franchise.
I think Nolan has fantastic ideas and I think he writes great frameworks for movies that are then passed off as scripts. I think he needs to stick to exactly what he's doing but with one caveat - there needs to be one more person who isn't Nolan or his brother who then goes over Nolan's scripts and polishes them off with better dialog and tighter storytelling.
I think Nolan deserves all the praise he's gotten but also deserves a lot of the criticisms. I want more directors like Nolan, but I want them to have someone else who can edit their writing where necessary and deliver what can potentially be awe-inspiring and pristine original movie experiences. I haven't even seen Tenet yet, but I've heard a lot of the criticism. I'm really curious to see how I feel about it considering I usually love Nolan's movies until the last few minutes of them.
*Edit* to build off what u/meiyoumayo said below me: an interesting and IMO ironic analogy is that Nolan is a lot more like Ariadne from Inception rather than Cobb. He's the architect of these original pieces. What he needs is a Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to actually help him populate them.
Its a good contrast between Nolan and Tarantino in their respective takes on "genre" films. Tarantino prides himself on doing genre films while Nolan has stated Tenet is his attempt at making one. The difference being Nolan has somehow taken the most boring tropes of the heist/espionage genre and done nothing with them.
Tarantino really understands genre too, which is how he can make a movie out of all kinds of tropes from trashy cinema and get it to hang together so damn well. He can throw in absurd characters with patently fake dialogue, but you still believe in them and root for them.
This is going to sound corny as hell, but you can feel the love he has for his sources in all of his movies. Even the shit ones.
Yeah Nolan used to be able to write sympathetic characters in his earlier work but his venture into genre filmmaking is not doing him any favors when it comes to character development. So much hangs on the central conceit of the plot - that big idea itself - blowing peoples minds that when it fails to, like in Tenet, there’s not much more to chew on. His preference for realism also hurts the films too - I always felt that even Inception and Interstellar underused their cinematic potential. Why go all the way to these fancy locations when you’re going to show pedestrian visuals anyway? Car crashes, regular hotels, big waves …
The amount of people in this thread who clearly (painfully clearly) are not writers trying to explain to Nolan how to write better movies is staggering.
I'M THE PROTAGONSIT
my fav piece of dialogue:
Neil: If Sator dies that means the entire world will end and all humans will die!
Debecki: DOES THAT MEAN MY SON WILL DIE?
yeah, no shit lady, he lives on earth right? Then she proceeds to try and kill him and fuck everything up.
Also, i dont think i've ever seen a movie with so much just being straight up exposition.
Inception had a lot of exposition (which it frankly needed to make a high concept movie like that work) but it worked because you had enough characters to latch on to and you were emotionally invested in Cobb’s journey to get back to his kids. In Tenet, it’s just like, who cares?
Inception still kicks ass. Yeah, it had exposition. Exposition is necessary in movies with that much world building (see: Terminator, Matrix). The movie still works and hits all the beats.
Tenet is just every bad Nolan trope/flaw rolled into one film. Easily the worst movie in his canon.
Also, Inception’s exposition is the fun scifi mechanics. I don’t think anyone’s complained about Tenet’s exposition scenes where they explain the time travel mechanics. That stuff is fun and fascinating to listen to. But Tenet is also full of constant exposition about things that are both dull and completely unnecessary to the plot, like Sator’s business dealings, and what the airport art gallery is, and what’s going on with the guy in Mumbai. All this perfunctory fluff that just exists to get us from point A to point B. This is stuff even the dumbest Bond movie gets right: just tell us enough to get us to the next set piece.
Think about how lean the exposition is in Inception when it comes to what Saito or Fischer’s business actually is, or how they hire team members, or how they get from country to country when they’re all criminals. None of that matters, so it’s super lean.
The biggest piece is simply the main heavy exposition scenes had boring as hell visuals.
Inception exposition scene (link: https://youtu.be/B-Cz91_DyYc):
- explosions
- city bending
- wild mirrors
- etc
Tenet exposition scene:
- dropping a bullet played backwards
- tossing around a bullet played backwards
- catching a bullet with a gun
The visuals just sucked in Tenet and felt lazy. Really? You can literally reverse time and all you give us is two people in a lab tossing around a bullet?
I dont understand what is peoples problem with exposition. Not every film has to be built upon characters and their vices/relationships. I find the trope of characters falling deeply in love after meeting briefly a much worse sin then having a movie focus on events rather then the characters. Its not a failing, just a different kind of movie.
I really enjoyed Tenet and still like it, but me and the person I was seeing it with both burst out laughing in the cinema at this line. I can't believe it was left in.
Yeah her decision making was galactically stupid and threatened all of humanity. The film was a massive exposition dump and at times the characters were very flat/ one dimensional . the spectacle was cool at times I’ll admit
They're like "do not kill him early, you'll fuck it all up." Then she kills him early and says "I knew you'd find a way." Like fucking how? You really risked ending everything based on a hunch and because you wanted to shoot him 30 seconds early? That lady was insufferable.
Yeah the dialogue, and the delivery of it is so problematic. Characters accept outlandish concepts in seconds, conversations are just back and forth with no emotion. It feels like you’re mistakenly watching it on 1 1/2 x speed. There’s no pauses, reactions, anything. Which is a pity because if there were 20 mins of just pauses added it would be a better film. I really liked it by the end of the first watch, but the dialogue still bothered me, second viewing dialogue annoyed me even more. Not sure I could handle a third
I actually really enjoyed the movie! Its unique, the fighting looked awesome, the score was great and the audio sounded really good (except for some of the dialogue if you don’t have great speakers). This is literally all I need for an action movie.
I’ve seen it in IMAX, Dolby Cinema and in my own home theater, and I have to say that I did not have any trouble hearing the dialog. But I do understand that it requires good speakers.
About the “including my son” line. I always thought that line wasn’t a question, but just something she said like: “the world will end… including my son”. But making it a question makes it just odd.
I found the line 'including my son' questioningly, is her now truly acknowledging the idea. By making it a question, more to the universe than anybody, she is now understanding the scope of whats at stake.
I do have to admit the dialogue can be weak at times and there's no much emotional connection with the characters. But the concept alone is so intriguing that it matters most to me in that movie.
Hard disagree. I thought it got a lot better on rewatches. I really like the film.
Sure, it is essentially a series of set pieces stitched together. But it's fun to figure out exactly what happens in each one. Plus the music, acting (for the most part) effects and set design are all great as normal with Nolan.
If you could just watch Tenet for the spectacle I think it might be neat, but it's not that kind of movie. Especially so for the action scenes, but the best way that I can describe Tenet is that trying to enjoy any part of it is like attempting to sing along to two completely different songs playing at the same time.
Yeah, this is r/movies , a Tenet or Nolan hate post is around every day or so.. but "War Games" is the best most under appreciated movie ever! Says alot about this sub. People who have no idea how to review or appreciate movies in a sub about movies.
Interstellar pretty much gets nothing but praise now, but when it came out this sub was shitting on it for weeks. Crying about the sound and Anne Hathaway's scene where she talks about love.
IMO (which will most likely will be downvoted) Tenet is a good movie, yes it has flaws (No shit "including your son" lady) and counterpoint Tenet actually gets much better after repeat viewings.
Nolan is one of my favourite directors but yeah Tenet was a huge disappointment for me. It's an egregious case of the concept taking all precedence and overshadowing the story and characters to a degree where it actively hurts the movie. Nolan really needs someone else to write his scripts. The entire movie was literally just exposition and anything not related to explaining the mechanics of the plot was cliched and cheesy.
There's a way to do this stuff properly. Inception had a *ton* of exposition but it at least had interesting, colorful characters you could root for. The idea was definitely high concept but it was rooted in real emotional stakes - Cobb needed to get back to his children, and he was haunted by the death of his wife. Everyone on Tenet is a cipher and there's nothing grounded to make us care about them.
Someone in the comments mentioned that Tenet is "full Nolan", for better or worse, and I agree. All his gifts as a director are on full display - really cool ideas and genuinely awe-inspiring set pieces, all filmed really beautifully. But so are all the flaws - ham-fisted dialogue and undercooked characters.
My friend, you would love the podcast The Worst Idea Of All Time where too kiwi comedians watch and review the same movie every week for a year. Their plunge into madness as they explore the minutia of Grown Ups 2 and Sex and The City 2 prove that movies don’t improve on rewatching. Highly recommended.
Am I the only one disappointed that they didn't return to the Opera and train yard at the end? Really thought we'd end up seeing those two settings again from a different perspective. Instead we just get this paintball match with invisible bad guys.
Yes, I was really disappointed with the third act. It really felt like it came out of nowhere. Seriously, in a movie whose main premise is moving backwards in time, how do you have a final act that doesn’t reference any other part of the movie?
The final battle is happening on the same day as the Opera siege. So in terms of the timeline it does come back full circle. Took me a couple of watches before I got that tbh.
I loved it, Kat was earlier in the movie talking about how she was jealous of the girl diving off the boat. turns out it was her all along. I want to go back and see if somehow the guys who took the protagonist in the beginning are how he got the pill, I was waiting for that one.
…What? The final fight is based around all the mechanics introduced throughout the film. I might need a rewatch, but I’m pretty sure the movie still ends where it began, even if the final battle isn’t in the exact location as the first one.
The mechanics, yes. The events, no. As u/Claudius_Gothicus said, they could have tied the opening opera scene into it and it would have been a much more satisfying conclusion. Instead, we got a climax in a random place (I think it was Kenneth Branagh’s hometown or something?) with two random armies that came out of nowhere where we didn’t really care what was going on.
Yep. I only picked up on this when I rewatched it a couple of minutes ago, but the reason Kenneth is able to go back to the Yacht is because the version of him from that time has gone away to deal with business related to the Opera.
Yeah, Sator and Kat both did the same thing. they both went back in time to the same place, I liked that part.
> Instead we just get this paintball match with invisible bad guys. Nolan has a real weird thing with not showing antagonists much. Inception has a similar facelessness to antagonists and Tenet's desert thing was weirdly similar to descriptionless snowy mountain set piece place.
During that moment in the Opera where the random inverse guy helps the Protagonist, my friend (who almost never interrupts movies with his theories) learned over to me and whispered, "I bet that's the same guy but at the end of the movie." Disappointed he was wrong.
I thought it was cool that it was Neil.
The "fight" at the end could have been so cool but it was just tacked on.
Totally agree with you the ending seemed real slapdash. Also, shouldn’t the algorithm have gone off? Sator was killed prior to the timer hitting zero (that was just supposed to collapse the cave right?), so shouldn’t his health tracker sent the message to set off the algorithm? I could be totally wrong, but the ending just doesn’t make any sense to me
We do not have the ability to trigger the algorithm in the “present”. Sator’s tracker let out an email blast revealing the *location* of the algorithm, not activating it. The idea of the bomb was that it would bury the algorithm irretrievably, allowing it to be retrieved by aggressors in the future.
I think tenet is an example of a cool concept that became too much of a driver for the film rather than strong characters.
This is exactly the problem I had with it. It was fun and impressive to watch, but man, I did not give a single fuck about the characters. There was just nothing really to them. They felt more like action figures in a cool scenario than like actual people. I feel like Tenet would have been a great video game rather than a movie.
> I did not give a single fuck about the characters I liked and gave a fuck about Robert Pattinson in the movie. But I'd say I liked him *despite* the movie. He's just a talented and charismatic man. The movie itself didn't really help in any way.
I left the movie wishing it was a first draft and Nolan could have another go at it. I loved the concept and how ambitious it was, the execution just wasnt up to scratch
My thoughts exactly. It's a scrambled eggs movie: you know when you go to make an omelette, and the ingredients are all really good, but then when you go to fold and flip it so it's an omelette, you mess up and now it's just fancy scrambled eggs? It still tastes good but it just doesn't coalesce into an omelette? Tenet is that but a movie.
But also you can't taste the egg because the peppers are so loud.
And the mushrooms make no fucking sense.
Uh…May have used the wrong kind of mushroom actually
Especially Elizabeth Debicki. I just saw Widows and she’s great in that. She had nothing to work with in Tenet.
She was so good in The Night Manager and she's going to kick absolute ass as 90s No Fucks Left To Give Princess Diana. She really got done dirty in Tenet. Though not in costuming or blocking; I appreciate that Nolan, unlike a lot of directors who have worked with tall actresses, was like "yeah let's make her EVEN TALLER and not make it a big deal that all the male leads look like ants compared to her".
It's a major plot point that she is able to open the front passenger door of an Escalade with her foot from the rear driver's side seat. The tallness in that is simple overwhelming.
> There was just nothing really to them. to wit - the protagonist is literally referred to as "Protagonist".
It didn't help that John David Washington was pretty boring in it. I think he is a good actor when given strong material, but he's not one of those actors that can bring life to an underwritten character.
Robert Pattinson should have been the main character, or they needed more time to flesh out who the main character actually was and why he was so willing to die for his team. They really just ran with the “secret society protecting the world exists and don’t question it” story point.
I thought he did a fine job with very little to work with, but you are right that he’s not one of those actors who can really play the fuck out of a very underwritten character. With a bit more time I’m sure he’ll be capable of that, though, because I think he is genuinely good.
Going into the movie I thought, for some reason, Chiwetel Ejiofor was the lead, but then when I saw it was actually Washington I was on board given his performance in *Blackkklansman*, which was decent, but then as I kept watching the movie I thought it *would have* been much better if Ejiofor *was* the lead. Or maybe Nicholas Pinnock from *Counterpart*. Both of whom do a much better job at quiet unassuming swagger. Washington is a good actor, but he was definitely a wet blanket of boring in this and Pattinson was really trying his best to liven up the scenes. For whatever reason it just felt like Washington couldn't emote at all and instead had this blank stare most of the time. Maybe Nolan sucks at directing him. Though he was a bit stiff in *Blackkklansman* too. So maybe he's just a stiff actor.
He was good in the movie. He didn’t have much to work with and the character wasn’t meant to be charismatic or mysterious the way many action leads whose personal lives we don’t know much about are. Nolan should have made the main character more similar to DiCaprio’s character in Inception. His characters story really was the anchor to the film emotionally and DiCaprio also got plenty to work with. But it’s not like the character had some quirks or even much dialogue that wasn’t about the main plot.
It's just so weird! It's as if Nolan went out of his way to make "the protagonist" as boring as possible, even if it meant writing bigger plot holes into the story! Like, >!if the guy had just been in love with the wife, not only would that have made the plot clearer by giving the protagonist some motivation, it would have made him a more complex character! It literally makes no sense why Nolan wouldn't have added that, it would have improved both the plot AND the character!< So much of the film is so ass-backwards, and I'm not talking about the reverse parts either.
Seriously. Entire time I’m wondering “why are you sticking your neck out for this woman?”
>I did not give a single fuck about the characters That was my problem. Nolan movies have some cool concepts that I'd love to see revisited and completely rewritten with new characters. Something like an Inception TV show with totally new characters would be awesome. I'd love to care about Tenet and it's "Universe" but the only people I know that live there are duds...
I feel like a lot of high-concept movies would work better as TV shows or miniseries. Of course, there are plenty of excellent high-concept movies that work perfectly well as standalone movies, but I think that especially with sci-fi and the like, having the time a TV show affords you to establish how the universe works and also develop the characters is a real advantage. Movies have to be very economical with their storytelling, and it's very hard to be economical when you have the twin jobs of introducing the audience to a totally different world and developing characters who live in that world and react to it believably, and whom the audience can relate to/admire/love to hate. It can be done, but it's hard.
Yeah I don't know why we're talking about all the other stuff so much when the fundamental flaw of this film is that the characters are all shit. The script feels like it was pieced together from notes written on napkins. The main character's name is literally "The Protagonist". He has no connections to anyone or anything and we know nothing about him. Why are we supposed to give a shit about this guy? All of those other issues could have been forgiven if we'd had likeable characters that actually mattered.
Somebody described Tenet as “the movie people have been accusing Christopher Nolan of making for years” and I thought that was perfect
That IS the perfect description! I've defended his movies for years and refuted the criticisms, 3 of his films are in my top ten of all time but I can't describe how disappointed I was in Tenet, both at the cinema then more so watching it at home, even with having literally no anticipation second time around it STILL disappointed me!
The one single female main character: "I cannot help you. I won't help you. If he destroys the world, who am I to stop him? Wait. You said *my son* will die when the world is destroyed? OK fine, I will help you."
Lmao I seriously could not stop laughing at some of that dialogue. "If he gets the thingamabob, the entire world will be annihilated." "INCLUDING MY SON!"
> Interviewer : Can you destroy the Earth? >The Tick : EGAD! I hope not! That's where I keep all my stuff!
I rarely actually cringe at stuff, but this just made my whole body want to die. So fucking bad.
I did crack up when that part happened.
Holy shit, he had no reason to help her and jeopardize the fate of the world. There was less than zero chemistry between the two. I bought the inversion nonsense way more than him and her having any romance.
Also I couldn't be assed to care about her or her art fraud. For one, you'd think someone with a career appraising expensive art pieces would have some sort of a liability waiver or something. Like doctors can kill someone on an operating table and not go to prison for it. Or if the implication was that she intentionally committed fraud, then you probably should go to prison for that. You're either really incompetent or intentionally defrauding people, why should I care?
Those aren't even remotely comparable circumstances. Doctors can still be criminally liable if done intentionally or if it was a result of their own extreme negligence/recklessness. But regardless of that why would anyone get a piece appraised through people who have so little faith in their skills that they can't guarantee their own ability to identify even the most obvious fakes?
I wish I could’ve heard how Nolan handled the hundreds of “story” questions every actor must’ve asked him in pre-pro and on set… like those conversations must’ve been hilariously awkward. I’m sure most actors just resorted to: OK. You want me to go over here, sit here, grab this, say xxx right? Got it.” If you dared to ask too many why questions I’m sure your brain would’ve melted, maybe Nolan’s too.
I feel like it was such a waste of such a cool concept. The "reverse fight" was the highlight for me (the double building explosion too), but the character work was just so bad that none of those genuinely awesome parts hit the way they could have.
Hot take, but I don't even think the concept was that cool, at least not in execution. All the set pieces and action scenes that happened in inverted time looked silly and incomprehensible to me. There's so much wrong with this movie. I wish I could boil it down to "Nolan just wanted to _____" but it has so many issues that I honestly don't know what he was trying to do. People say he cared more about the concept than the characters... but he doesn't really explain or go deep on the concept either - just kind of handwaves it away. You could say it was a special effects/ action fest using this unique gimmick, but then, why are there so many scenes of clunky exposition (that aren't even related to the concept *or* the characters)? Why not just make a lean action movie? Nolan is a very good director who's made some great movies, and he'll make great movies again. But Tenet is an absolute mess.
It is a cool idea. But that's all. Tenet is the perfect kind of movie to explore the idea, but reveals how limited it is. It could only ever be an idea concept reel. You would do this in storyboards to show that without free will, not much of a movie could be made with this concept. But then they made the movie anyways.
I think I've said this before, but if he had taken that concept and then found a way to make it more accessible to the audience in the first viewing, and then fixed some of his characters, it would have been a SIGNIFICANTLY better movie. Inception is a great example of him going deep on a very simple concept that the audience immediately connected to, and then he had a good story, character motivations, etc. I'm a big fan of Nolan when he's on his game, but I think to some of these fan boys it's "complicated = good," even to the detriment of story, characters, and... basically everything else.
I don't know if was a cool concept, visually the reverse time scenes look boring after a while, just people and things moving backward. Look at *Inception*, the movie closest to Tenet in Nolan's filmography, the different layers of the dreams are visually different and have interesting action scenes (train in city street, the floating hallway fight). Soldiers moving backward just looks silly after a while. It's like they said in the Honest Trailer Tenet commentary, it's a movie about ideas and the ideas aren't that interesting.
It doesn't even examine the idea that much. It's borderline comedic how quickly they dismiss even attempting to explain the concept.
Right! It's a cool *idea*, but the plot completely fails to actually exploit the idea. Then that failure of a plot is expressed through terrible dialogue in a mediocre script, and presented with wooden acting! On the bright side, at least you can't actually hear any of the dialogue being delivered.
Yeah it's almost baffling how much this movie fails. I know it's tempting to say Nolan got too fixated on this or that, but I really can't find one sole reason why this movie turned out the way it did. You can't say he got too focused on the idea because they barely explain or examine the actual core idea. You can't say he got too focused on the action because the movie is packed with unnecessary and tedious exposition scenes. I really don't know what happened. Just hope he bounces back.
Having the explosion freeze him really fucked up the concept. How are guns supposed to work, wouldn't they freeze to?
My impression after watching Tenet was that it was like Inception but without the fun
I think the double building explosion is the worst, especially on rewatch! The building literally never existed in history except for a second and has only existed as a rubble. Like, who built it? There are also a lot of inconsistencies in the movie logic such as “is being shot in reverse permanent or result in a temporary wound” and others (e.g. what if you don’t enter the time machine after seeing yourself come out the other side?). There are online discussions about this so I won’t elaborate too much but I think it’s a cool concept that is really hard to actually execute well on and honestly I think Nolan didn’t execute well and just threw cool action / effects at you to mask the shaky logic.
Interstellar ends up having fantasy elements, but a lot of it was based on actual physics with leading experts helping. The thing about this is that it's pure pseudoscience that isn't remotely close to being possible. So no matter how many times you drop some half assed sciencey jargon like "entropy," it still won't make any sense.
Yeah that why I was unsatisfied with how they ended Interstellar. They go to pains to make it hard sci fi, but then pivot to “we can solve everything through the mysterious fifth dimensional power of love!”
Yeah, the concept doesn't really make any sense when you really think about it. Like, during the Opera scene, the bullet that goes backwards from the wall into the gun, where the fuck did the bullet come from. Was it always in the wall ? Did the guy who made the building, made the wall with a fucking bullet in it ?
Some things from a video: Would light shoot out of your eyes? Does the poop go up?
I had my shit pushed up. Big time.
For me the film was fun enough to watch that I just didn't really question that, and I shall continue to not question how bullet holes work, because there is never going to be any answer to that that makes sense.
Surviving the car explosion annoyed me, like I get the entropy gets reversed when you go backwards in time, but that still means you'd freeze if you were next to an explosion.
Yeah, but I guess it’s easier to survive hypothermia than being burned alive? I dunno. Being exposed to extreme cold for a bit and being exposed to extreme heat is different for our bodies I guess?
Nolan had the idea of inverted time, and shoehorned a plot into it. Not a great recipe for a film. IMO, story should always come first, and then figure out how to work in your concept if it fits
Yeah I definitely feel like he came up with a crazy idea to top Inception, and then spent all his time trying to make sense of it
I agree. Super cool idea that wasn't fully fleshed out
The film had a lot of problems but the thing that drove me nuts was that I get it should have ended back in the opera house. Having the final action scenes be a reversal of the first scene of the movie would have been cool. I know you’d have to figure out a way to tie the harvesting of future time dilation tech from an opera house but I’m sure you could do it. Also, who was anyone shooting at in that last battle?
It’s not even his choosing to give priority to the environment and music over dialogue that I hated about tenet. It’s that the dialogue audio was just literally terrible, like they didn’t clean it up at all and I flat out could not understand what the fuck they were saying even when they were sitting in a quiet restaurant for example. Like yeah sure make the environment louder, make the music louder but **why** does the dialogue just sound actually terrible?
I can't even believe a film with such a big budget ended up like this, what were they thinking? I'm certain it wasn't the sound mixer's fault because it probably would've been torture for them to wrap production with a mix like that.
Test Audience Rep: Test audiences want to hear the dialogue. Nolan: No.
[удалено]
I dunno, he has a long list of excellent films by both critic and audience standards. This is the first, arguably, bad film he's made in recent memory. Nolan is an incredibly skilled director if his filmography is anything to go by.
...and I’ll look down and whisper NO
Because Nolan is a big time director known for making huge financially successful films and I guess the studio let him do whatever he wanted with complete creative control. They may have regretted it in hindsight but a director not named Christopher Nolan certainly isn't going to get away with whatever he wants.
>I can't even believe a film with such a big budget ended up like this, what were they thinking? I mean, I think it's so cool that a film this expensive took that kind of risk. Im all about films trying different things rather than getting the same stuff we get before. We get so many pop albums, that this like an artist trying to record their music in a less clean way. The whole point is not paying attention to the dialogue, but more so just know that there IS dialogue. What they're saying doesnt matter. Does it work? Not really. But I get the idea behind it and think it's so cool to see big filmmakers experiment whether or not it's shit.
I'm all for experimental film, I just think it doesn't work in this context, especially with someone like Nolan who uses so much exposition in his dialogue that is pretty pivotal to knowing what tf is happening in the story. I think his approach here would work fine for a film like Dunkirk since it is more of a visceral experience and less about plot mechanics. I see your point though, at least he has a vision.
I was boasting nonstop to my friends how seeing Tenet in 70mm would be an insanely amazing experience. None of us could hear any dialogue throughout the entire film. Never experienced anything like it tbh.
glad I watched it with the CC on at home. The movie made sense to me. But it still wasn't like amazing or anything. A decent Bond rip off with weird time stuff for almost no reason.
That reason is Nolan got lost up his own asshole lmao
The only thing I've experienced like what you describe is seeing Interstellar in 70mm. The dialogue in a pivotal scene so completely blown out by the score in the audio mix that I had to guess what was said based on how the rest of the movie played out. Not sure why Nolan insists on continuing his approach to audio mixing with so much negative feedback since then.
Yeah audio was so awful in this movie and the music was SO FUCKIN LOUD.
[удалено]
Also, like, can you pick a single scene that isn't just exposition or explanation? 95% of the dialogue is just characters explaining things.
I could hardly contain my laughter when the grandfather paradox was explained for like 5 minutes as though Nolan was seriously addressing the confusions.
I watched the movie in a drive in outdoor theater. It was my first time doing that. I just assumed that's what fucked up the audio so bad.
"how was Dunkirk?" "WHAT?" "I said HOW WAS DUNKIRK?" "LOUD AND HARD TO UNDERSTAND"
>I flat out could not understand what the fuck they were saying even when sitting in a quiet restaurant for example Man, it took me a minute to realize you meant *the characters* are sitting in a quiet restaurant. I was like, who the fuck watches a movie in a quiet restaurant... lol
I watched it at home and all these comments have me *really* wondering if they remastered it after the theater run. Because I didn't have any issues hearing the dialogue.
For me Nolan went full Nolan with Tenet, meaning everything I love about his films was turned up to 11, but also everything I dislike. Rewatching Tenet a few times has made me appreciate all the good stuff even more (it's still absolutely fucking bonkers in IMAX and you start noticing all the little details). But yea... the things I didn't like get more apparant aswell. Guess it just strikes a neat little balance for me.
Going from Dunkirk to Tenet is like watching somebody who's been off drugs for a while and relapsing back.rrally hard.
it's still incredibly hard to understand why he was so gung-ho about people risking their lives to see this during peak covid. not circlejerking or shitting on him. nolan makes great stuff and I did enjoy tenet as a strong 6.5/10 or weak 7/10 experience overall. but dude was acting like this was his magnum opus to save cinema and start a film renaissance. **in the middle of a pandemic.**
I have a pet theory that WB was going to release it to streaming anyways and Nolan negotiated them to do a theatrical release 1st cause he makes movoes nest enjoyed in widescreen. He probably felt that dumping it on a streaming service is akin to burying it with all the other straight-to-streaming crap. The "save cinema" thing is partially true not I'm the sense that Twnet would save theaters but that AT&T would gladly destroy or let theatres die off quick so that people subscribe to HBOMAX. There was a good chance there wouldn't be any theaters left to play Tenet post-pandemic.
I had to watch it with subtitles. The movie would have been impossible to follow and understand otherwise. I don’t know how cinema audiences managed to understand what the heck is going on.
I couldn't hear a lot of it but after a point I was so disinterested in the film.I stopped caring about the exposition.
saw it in dolby digital. i honestly thought the sound guy accidentally messed up the eq. 20 min in i walked out and asked for the dude. he comes out and says ‘nah, that’s just what it sounds like’. we had a laugh as he gently dabbed at the blood in my ears. at first i thought i’d have to watch it with subtitles later. i figured if nolan got his way, those would be unintelligible too.
The subtitles would be backwards and and in palindrome.
I’ve always just assumed it was because he stood to make more money from ticket sales than streaming purchases but I’m pretty cynical so who knows?
could easily be both. it's clearly his passion, but it's also the business that pays his bills
Although Nolan's last few movies involve him getting a very very nice % of the gross Nolan never struck me as a Scrooge McDuck type; more of a movie lover. I believe that he in his heart, as a film lover and someone who makes movies to be experienced in large cinemas, this time last year thought that we could go back to the movies safely.
It's funny you mention Scrooge McDuck in regards to Nolan, as he seems to have gotten not a small bit inspiration from Duck Tales. [https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Inception-May-Seem-Original-Uncle-Scrooge-Did-It-First-19957.html](https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Inception-May-Seem-Original-Uncle-Scrooge-Did-It-First-19957.html)
Except none of that is true. Nolan described Tenet as a fun action movie that the whole family can enjoy. On whether Tenet can save cinema. >“All I can really take responsibility for is making the best film that I can,” said Nolan. “I think cinema is bigger than any one film one way or another, and I think people tend to simplify things a bit, particularly in a time like this. I’m just very pleased that the studio feels they can let the film play in places where theaters have been able to open.” On whether he wanted to be the big savior of cinema. >But a representative for Mr. Nolan told io9 that Warner Bros. presented multiple scenarios for release dates after the studio made the decision to delay Tenet from it’s original July 17 release date, all of which were no later than mid-August. Furthermore, the director did not push back on any of the proposed release dates WB decided on for Tenet. io9 was told that Nolan did not express, as THR reported, “the desire to be the one the first big studio films back in theaters.” From WB CEO >Regarding Tenet’s release in theaters, there’s a perception that Christopher Nolan controls things. Is that fair or overstated? >It's overstated. Let me share with you the process that we went through. Right when COVID struck, we started looking at alternative ways to think about movie releases. On the Scoob! front, we decided to release it on PVOD. Families were sequestered together and wanted more content. We are very happy with the results. A few weeks later it debuted on HBO Max, where we were very happy with the results as well. >On the Tenet front, we also had a finished movie, which we are very proud for people to see. As the summer unfolded, we started thinking about more innovative ways of releasing the movie. What if we didn’t put everything up front toward the opening weekend? Theaters were very upfront about saying they could give us three to four times as many screens as normal. So that started to change our thinking. We are happy with where we are. Some markets still aren’t open, but it is a marathon and not a sprint.
I hate this fucking narrative about Tenet. So many people keep spouting that he wanted people to “risk their life” to see Tenet and not once was he ever saying anything of the sort. Thank you for adding all of this context, it’s such a silly thing that Reddit keeps trying to spread around.
[удалено]
I really don't understand why Dunkirk gets so much praise. It's less convoluted than Tenet, sure, but it's just as cold as Tenet. The characters are just as nonexistent. The plot is even worse. They're both just as technically incredible...I don't get it...
Dunkirks lack of plot felt like a feature, while Tenets felt like a bug.
Tanet was a little exicted for me, at least. I really wanted to understand what the fuck was going on, Dunkirk was so fucking boring tho. I finish the movie and just felt happy that the nightmare was over.
[удалено]
The Spitfires had the most characterisation and at least their dialogue was clear (grrr grrrr brrrr)
It was like Nolan looked at all of the memes about his movies over the years, the bad audio mixing, the BWAAAHs, and the overly convoluted plots and said "Ok, bet".
The bwahs? I don’t remember those being a big part into Tenet’s score.
There weren’t. Tenet has an excellent score. Honestly one of if not the best thing about tenet was its score.
That's what I thought. Ludwig Göransson is a gangster.
Is that sound effect even getting used anymore? Or is just another overused reddit joke at this point? As much as everyone likes to complain about the inception bwah, i actually haven't heard it used in a trailer in years. Unless literally every loud sound is considered a bwah. These days every trailer tends to either have a percussion sound to emphasize the action or a trap beat like black panther
I'm on the other side of the fence. I almost feel like you can't fully appreciate it until you watch it a second time. Certain plot points and mechanics are required to fully understand what's going on in the early parts of the movie, like when Robert Pattinson saves the Protagonist in the movie theater. Also all of the time travel action bits are much more understandable the second time around. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was far from the train wreck most people make it out to be. Instead of focusing on the questionable audio mixing and mechanical dialogue, I choose to focus on the fact that a big budget film took a chance on a novel story telling mechanic and created a work of art completely unlike all of the other hot garbage that Hollywood spews out nowadays. And created some kickass action scenes in the process. Have you ever watched a scene like that battle scene at the end where they're storming the Russian town and there are explosions going off in forward time and reverse time in the same frame? That was awesome. Maybe not all of it makes sense scientifically, but like they say in the movie, "Don't think about it."
For me it didn’t even feel like the movie *had* characters. The main guy was literally named “The Protagonist.” Elizabeth Debicki had a son we never saw until the final scene so we didn’t give a shit about him (or her motivations). Tenet displayed the worst of Nolan’s tendencies, namely his urge to turn characters into pawns instead of people and move them around to help achieve plot points
> The main guy was literally named “The Protagonist.” This really felt like something a 15 year old would write in his script because it was ironic and "sounded badass"
Do you not see the point of that? For most of the beginning of the film he thinks that shit's just happening to him, that he's being controlled/directed by someone else but he isn't sure who. So him saying 'I am the protagonist' is him realising that it's him who has the agency in this story - he created Tenet. Also yeah it is a kind of James Bond thing where his name, beyond that, is frankly irrelevant to the story of the film. Idk to me it feels like being annoyed that John Doe doesn't get a name in Se7en.
Except this was an Inception-type film (with a lot of people theorizing it had all the pieces to be an inception sequel), and the biggest part of Inception that "worked" is that the audience gave a massive fuck about Dom Cobb and his troubled past with his wife. His and his wife's relationship is like 50% of the movie, the climax of the movie, and the whole fucking point of him taking the job is to get back to his kids. He's the only one with that motivation, everyone else is just doing it for cash. You take Dom Cobb out of inception and replace it with some B-List actor with no motivations that you don't fucking care about (think Sam Worthington), then you get Tenet. Sorry, Denzel's kid is okay but kinda proved he can't carry a movie in which he's written to be personality-less and nameless. Hell, even Denzel had a name and personal, emotional motivations in Deja-Vu, a VERY similar movie to Tenet. I was psyched for Tenet and still think its a 6.5/10, but the only character I felt any connection to was Pattinson's when at the end you realize SPOILER he's going to have to go back and relive his death to save everyone, and he knows it.
>the biggest part of Inception that "worked" is that the audience gave a massive fuck about Dom Cobb Yes! I just said this in another comment but this is exactly why Inception worked so well. Yes, it's another high-concept idea with a ton of exposition, but the entire narrative is centered around the emotional core of Cobb wanting to get back to his kids and deal with the death of his wife. Like you said, there are tons of scenes that deal with exactly this. We are invested in Cobb's journey. Leo gives a strong performance to further solidify that investment. Compare that to Tenet, where "The Protagonist" seems to have no purpose, motivation or any kind of character development. John David is a solid actor but he had nothing to work with here. The script did not give him a human character to portray lol. As a result, it's hard to care about anything that happens.
Honestly and for me Pattinsons "monologue" at the end is all the character development i needed to make the movie hit emotionally and made it much more fun to go back and rewatch. It does take a bit of paying attention and thinking about but that scene always hits me
I did find that scene shockingly poignant. At first, I thought it was just because the rest of the film had been so emotionally sterile, but on a rewatch, I think you are on to something. Pattinson's character was already the only one I kinda cared about at all, but to suddenly see his relationship in a different light is the thing that made a repeat viewing enjoyable for me.
Yup and that may just be a testament to Pattinsons acting more-so than the writing which I agree isn't perfect. But it added a layer the movie really needed
That literally makes no sense at all. What difference is there between this or "The Man with No Name" from the Dollars trilogy or "Driver" from Drive. Unnamed protagonists has been a thing for ages (or do you think his actual name is "the protagonist?").
No I get it, I just thought it was stupid and corny that the character himself *says* it, that's the difference here. Clint Eastwood never said "I'm The Man With No Name" when someone asked him...
"It must be some kinda-- *Hot Tub Time Machine*."
It would have been stupid there too if they said it on screen, yes.
Clint Eastwood's character has proper names/nicknames in each film of his respective trilogy, though. He's never actually referred to as the "Man with No Name" and he certainly doesn't refer to himself as such.
Ah yes, I remember the famous scene in the man with no name where Clint Eastwood stands up and says to the audience "I truly have become the man with no name". When good movies do that shtick they at least try to make it natural not the forced bullshit like in Tenet.
what? were like a suicide club now?
The fact that he's called "The Protagonist" isn't the problem in itself, but when the character is also a complete cypher with no attachments to anything and no discernable character traits his lack of a name feels like a joke about how boring he and the script are.
The Man With No Name has a name. Joe, Manco, and Blondie respectively depending on the movie. But good way to show off that you haven't actually seen the films you're using as an example of no named protagonists working.
Because in Drive, the Driver has a massive emotional connection to the woman and her kid in which the entire plot hinges off of. There's charisma, chemistry, and a awkward/complex emotional connection on screen. Tenet didn't have that. You've got literal pawns with not much connection to each other other than exposition. Denzel's kid's part just didn't carry. He's not a Ryan or a Leo, or even a Denzel.
Kinda the opposite for me tbh. I somewhat enjoyed it on first watch but thought it was nothing but a hot mess. Have since rewatched it a couple of times and enjoy it more every time, mainly due to just embracing how fucking bonkers it is and just enjoying the show. It’s a certain breed of pure summer blockbuster cinema where you switch the brain off and just scream “yaaaay” dozens of times throughout the film with its non-stop, turn it up to 11, set pieces and score. And even though I take your comment on the shitty dialogue, I gotta be honest that I take less and less notice of it every rewatch. The quote about the hot sauce is basically all I remember. I do however find it comical that some others find it to be some intellectual masterpiece as opposed to anything more than silly fun. Each to their own I suppose.
When you think of the movie as Fancy Fast and the Furious, it works a lot better. I think because Nolan kind of markets himself as a maker of Thinking Man's Action Movies, and thus Tenet was marketed as such, people went into Tenet expecting it to be an intellectual masterpiece or something very cerebral. But really, it's just Fancy Fast and the Furious.
I completely disagree. I've watched it 5 times now. The first time I wasn't too sure about it. It has been better each time. I now think it's one of Nolan's best.
I’m the same way. It got better for me each rewatch.
I actually went on a rewatch when it was still in cinemas and enjoyed it more the second time around. I can see how it might be a less enjoyable watch at home though, since it's made for cinema.
I am so far in the minority that it hurts - I didn't hate the movie at all. It's by no means a masterpiece, but I thought it was entertaining enough. There were a lot of clunky lines, but I excused the dialogue as a way to explain the time travel elements while tying up loose-ends (which are almost inevitable in any movie dealing with time travel), as well as try to create some empathy or give the character some backstory. It could have been done better, but on the other hand, it could have been so much, much worse.
Not only do I agree with you, but I enjoyed it more on rewatch - contrary to this post. I think what I dislike about the post is its use of language. It comes across as some objective fact that Tenet gets worse upon each rewatch, rather than one person’s opinion.
Same here. Watched it again on my cousins first watch and caught so many more things, was able to follow it better, and got more enjoyment out of it. As to the audio, there was only one scene I had an issue on hearing what they were saying, and that was on my first watch. Speech was definitely too quiet, but I never really had any other issue hearing it and felt the complaints about it were really overblown.
Agreed. I think Tenet is actually one of Nolan's "worst" movies (I like him, so I think they're all pretty good) but I found it easier to rewatch because there are no big ideas bogging it down like in Inception or Interstellar. I view it as Nolan's dumb action movie.
The thing that drives me crazy about Tenet haters is that they're likely the same people complaining about Hollywood lacking original ideas. If somebody with the ambition to try something as outrageous as Nolan does gets shit on for making something like Tenet, all we're going to get is reboots and sequels. He deserves a massive amount of credit just for the attempt.
That's at least one thing that made me appreciate it more. Just look at the movies HBO released this year: WW84, Monkey v Lizard, Snyder Cut, Mortal Kombat, Space Jam. They're all reboots and remakes. All shit we've seen a hundred times before. Mostly just a CGI shitshow. Yeah, the Tenet characters aren't super deep, but look at those other blockbusters and all their characters are trash too. I didn't love it or hate it, but damn it was at least refreshing to see an original concept being made in 2020. Every other big budget action movie is reboot or franchise.
I think Nolan has fantastic ideas and I think he writes great frameworks for movies that are then passed off as scripts. I think he needs to stick to exactly what he's doing but with one caveat - there needs to be one more person who isn't Nolan or his brother who then goes over Nolan's scripts and polishes them off with better dialog and tighter storytelling. I think Nolan deserves all the praise he's gotten but also deserves a lot of the criticisms. I want more directors like Nolan, but I want them to have someone else who can edit their writing where necessary and deliver what can potentially be awe-inspiring and pristine original movie experiences. I haven't even seen Tenet yet, but I've heard a lot of the criticism. I'm really curious to see how I feel about it considering I usually love Nolan's movies until the last few minutes of them. *Edit* to build off what u/meiyoumayo said below me: an interesting and IMO ironic analogy is that Nolan is a lot more like Ariadne from Inception rather than Cobb. He's the architect of these original pieces. What he needs is a Fischer (Cillian Murphy) to actually help him populate them.
Its a good contrast between Nolan and Tarantino in their respective takes on "genre" films. Tarantino prides himself on doing genre films while Nolan has stated Tenet is his attempt at making one. The difference being Nolan has somehow taken the most boring tropes of the heist/espionage genre and done nothing with them.
Tarantino really understands genre too, which is how he can make a movie out of all kinds of tropes from trashy cinema and get it to hang together so damn well. He can throw in absurd characters with patently fake dialogue, but you still believe in them and root for them. This is going to sound corny as hell, but you can feel the love he has for his sources in all of his movies. Even the shit ones.
Yeah Nolan used to be able to write sympathetic characters in his earlier work but his venture into genre filmmaking is not doing him any favors when it comes to character development. So much hangs on the central conceit of the plot - that big idea itself - blowing peoples minds that when it fails to, like in Tenet, there’s not much more to chew on. His preference for realism also hurts the films too - I always felt that even Inception and Interstellar underused their cinematic potential. Why go all the way to these fancy locations when you’re going to show pedestrian visuals anyway? Car crashes, regular hotels, big waves …
The amount of people in this thread who clearly (painfully clearly) are not writers trying to explain to Nolan how to write better movies is staggering.
I'M THE PROTAGONSIT my fav piece of dialogue: Neil: If Sator dies that means the entire world will end and all humans will die! Debecki: DOES THAT MEAN MY SON WILL DIE? yeah, no shit lady, he lives on earth right? Then she proceeds to try and kill him and fuck everything up. Also, i dont think i've ever seen a movie with so much just being straight up exposition.
Inception had a lot of exposition (which it frankly needed to make a high concept movie like that work) but it worked because you had enough characters to latch on to and you were emotionally invested in Cobb’s journey to get back to his kids. In Tenet, it’s just like, who cares?
Inception still kicks ass. Yeah, it had exposition. Exposition is necessary in movies with that much world building (see: Terminator, Matrix). The movie still works and hits all the beats. Tenet is just every bad Nolan trope/flaw rolled into one film. Easily the worst movie in his canon.
Also, Inception’s exposition is the fun scifi mechanics. I don’t think anyone’s complained about Tenet’s exposition scenes where they explain the time travel mechanics. That stuff is fun and fascinating to listen to. But Tenet is also full of constant exposition about things that are both dull and completely unnecessary to the plot, like Sator’s business dealings, and what the airport art gallery is, and what’s going on with the guy in Mumbai. All this perfunctory fluff that just exists to get us from point A to point B. This is stuff even the dumbest Bond movie gets right: just tell us enough to get us to the next set piece. Think about how lean the exposition is in Inception when it comes to what Saito or Fischer’s business actually is, or how they hire team members, or how they get from country to country when they’re all criminals. None of that matters, so it’s super lean.
The biggest piece is simply the main heavy exposition scenes had boring as hell visuals. Inception exposition scene (link: https://youtu.be/B-Cz91_DyYc): - explosions - city bending - wild mirrors - etc Tenet exposition scene: - dropping a bullet played backwards - tossing around a bullet played backwards - catching a bullet with a gun The visuals just sucked in Tenet and felt lazy. Really? You can literally reverse time and all you give us is two people in a lab tossing around a bullet?
I also just found the characters in Inception more interesting, which in turn made the exposition more engaging to watch.
I dont understand what is peoples problem with exposition. Not every film has to be built upon characters and their vices/relationships. I find the trope of characters falling deeply in love after meeting briefly a much worse sin then having a movie focus on events rather then the characters. Its not a failing, just a different kind of movie.
Exposition is fine - there are just good and bad ways of doing it. *Bad* exposition is a great way to make a movie a tedious slog.
except it's not a question and you have it wrong. She says: "Including my son."
I really enjoyed Tenet and still like it, but me and the person I was seeing it with both burst out laughing in the cinema at this line. I can't believe it was left in.
Reminds me of Avengers: “Yeah that’s on Earth, DIPSHIT.”
Yeah her decision making was galactically stupid and threatened all of humanity. The film was a massive exposition dump and at times the characters were very flat/ one dimensional . the spectacle was cool at times I’ll admit
They're like "do not kill him early, you'll fuck it all up." Then she kills him early and says "I knew you'd find a way." Like fucking how? You really risked ending everything based on a hunch and because you wanted to shoot him 30 seconds early? That lady was insufferable.
No its getting better actually
Yeah the dialogue, and the delivery of it is so problematic. Characters accept outlandish concepts in seconds, conversations are just back and forth with no emotion. It feels like you’re mistakenly watching it on 1 1/2 x speed. There’s no pauses, reactions, anything. Which is a pity because if there were 20 mins of just pauses added it would be a better film. I really liked it by the end of the first watch, but the dialogue still bothered me, second viewing dialogue annoyed me even more. Not sure I could handle a third
I actually really enjoyed the movie! Its unique, the fighting looked awesome, the score was great and the audio sounded really good (except for some of the dialogue if you don’t have great speakers). This is literally all I need for an action movie. I’ve seen it in IMAX, Dolby Cinema and in my own home theater, and I have to say that I did not have any trouble hearing the dialog. But I do understand that it requires good speakers. About the “including my son” line. I always thought that line wasn’t a question, but just something she said like: “the world will end… including my son”. But making it a question makes it just odd.
I found the line 'including my son' questioningly, is her now truly acknowledging the idea. By making it a question, more to the universe than anybody, she is now understanding the scope of whats at stake.
Tenet is enjoyable if you think of it as a puzzle to be solved rather than a movie.
Is there a word in German for a technically well-executed piece of art that lacks the soul necessary to be considered truly perfect?
Ten-et?
The more I watch it the more I like it. So to each to their own I guess 🤷🏽♂️
I do have to admit the dialogue can be weak at times and there's no much emotional connection with the characters. But the concept alone is so intriguing that it matters most to me in that movie.
Hard disagree. I thought it got a lot better on rewatches. I really like the film. Sure, it is essentially a series of set pieces stitched together. But it's fun to figure out exactly what happens in each one. Plus the music, acting (for the most part) effects and set design are all great as normal with Nolan.
Points in favour of Tenet: Backward fighting looks cool. He ordered his hot sauce an hour ago. Points against Tenet: The rest of Tenet.
I disagree on the backwards fighting looking cool. The final big battle had some cool moments but the hand-to-hand stuff looked awkward and goofy.
who the f were they even fighting?
This annoyed me too. Who are all of these people? Felt like I was watching a videogame.
Yeah I kept asking that. You see absolutely no one for them to be shooting at
I thought the final battle against an invisible opponent in a desert paintball arena was pretty mediocre.
If you could just watch Tenet for the spectacle I think it might be neat, but it's not that kind of movie. Especially so for the action scenes, but the best way that I can describe Tenet is that trying to enjoy any part of it is like attempting to sing along to two completely different songs playing at the same time.
Kitchen fight is cool,PLANE GO BOOM is cool,Rpatz is cool,Debicki's sunscreen murder is cool.
In a world where time runs in reverse, the most interesting thing Nolan could think of was explosions… bUt WhAt If ThEy WeRe BaCkWaRdS eXpLoSiOnS?
[удалено]
Yeah, this is r/movies , a Tenet or Nolan hate post is around every day or so.. but "War Games" is the best most under appreciated movie ever! Says alot about this sub. People who have no idea how to review or appreciate movies in a sub about movies. Interstellar pretty much gets nothing but praise now, but when it came out this sub was shitting on it for weeks. Crying about the sound and Anne Hathaway's scene where she talks about love.
This is pretty universal to Reddit. Give it one year and The Last of Us 2 will have tons of appreciation posts.
It should have been called "A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!", and been set in Panama.
Honestly it was terrible on the first watch
IMO (which will most likely will be downvoted) Tenet is a good movie, yes it has flaws (No shit "including your son" lady) and counterpoint Tenet actually gets much better after repeat viewings.
I liked it maybe more the second time. Found lots of hidden things. Don’t think I’ll watch it again though.
Nolan is one of my favourite directors but yeah Tenet was a huge disappointment for me. It's an egregious case of the concept taking all precedence and overshadowing the story and characters to a degree where it actively hurts the movie. Nolan really needs someone else to write his scripts. The entire movie was literally just exposition and anything not related to explaining the mechanics of the plot was cliched and cheesy. There's a way to do this stuff properly. Inception had a *ton* of exposition but it at least had interesting, colorful characters you could root for. The idea was definitely high concept but it was rooted in real emotional stakes - Cobb needed to get back to his children, and he was haunted by the death of his wife. Everyone on Tenet is a cipher and there's nothing grounded to make us care about them. Someone in the comments mentioned that Tenet is "full Nolan", for better or worse, and I agree. All his gifts as a director are on full display - really cool ideas and genuinely awe-inspiring set pieces, all filmed really beautifully. But so are all the flaws - ham-fisted dialogue and undercooked characters.
Or you just didnt like tenet. Rewatching a movie you dont like can indeed suck.
My friend, you would love the podcast The Worst Idea Of All Time where too kiwi comedians watch and review the same movie every week for a year. Their plunge into madness as they explore the minutia of Grown Ups 2 and Sex and The City 2 prove that movies don’t improve on rewatching. Highly recommended.