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When this happens to me, I think it’s a bit of a mental decision between “They’re going to explain it, it’s meant to be mysterious now.” and “They explained it poorly”.
Biggest pet peeve is when the plot centers on one key character that people only talk about, and you never see. Or when one key piece of information is muttered in a heavy accent during five other things happening.
I of course love the former. I’ve been burnt by the latter many times, like “Oh, I should’ve rewound the movie.”
The scene in question is the opening scene of the film. It is fully explained pretty early in the second act. Definitely intended to be the “mysterious” option in this case.
There are types of Tenet watchers
One who doesn’t know what the fuck is happening.
And the other who doesn’t want to admit that they don’t know what the fuck is happening.
Then there’s Christopher Nolan laughing at us, because he made the movie as confusing as possible, because one upon a time, he witnessed someone committing the horrific sin of watching Interstellar on a 720p 4.5" Android Phone¹, so he decides to enact this revenge arc by making a movie in the 5th dimention that nobody but his 5d brain can understand.
¹Yes I did that 👀
I watched Tenet while sick in bed on my phone. Some people are traveling backwards through time. there’s a conspiracy. some ex soviet dickhead wants money.
it’s not worth MAKING THE PANDEMIC WORSE YOU PRETENTIOUS TWAT
Plot twist.
spoiler
The protagonist doesn’t actually need a mask because he’s going backwards through time, it’s because he realized how much of a selfish PoS he used to be, and therefore decided to mask up to stop further worsening the spread of the
virusalgorithm
Idk, Tenet didn’t seem that complex to me?
If anything, it’s decent at hiding things from you at first and then providing explanations later. And if you watch again, some things suddenly make more sense now that you know about the inverted people.
At the end of the day, remember that temporal pincer movement that they explained in the part in Tallinn? Where you send people in both forwards and backwards into some point so one group has information from the other (or it’s the same people going into the same time multiple times)? The whole movie is temporal pincer movements encompassed within each other so there’s shorter periods of people going inverted, but also longer ones - towards the end they go several days if not weeks inverted so they can go back to when Sator’s on the boat with his wife around the same time as the attack in the “Kyiv Opera House” (actually filmed in Tallinn City Hall) at the beginning of the movie.
I’m sure there’s details I’ve missed, and for sure I don’t remember the exact order of each inversion and what happened exactly when. But broad strokes, it’s easy to understand and doesn’t take a superior 5d brain at all. My average ADHD brain can handle it.
It took me three viewings but I was finally able to follow the plot. I honestly loved it.
I watched the first time and was utterly confused, but I was sure there was a narrative that I just wasn’t following so a couple weeks later I watched it again. This time I figured out the mechanics of the plot but I did lose the continuity. So, I watched it like 2 days later and literally took notes (like 3 sentances, not an academic study), and was able to follow the entire plotline.
Probably doesn’t sound like fun to many, but for me it was an ideal movie watching experience. It provided the experience Inception promised but never lived up to (I did enjoy it as well, but it was not challenging to follow).
I had the luxury of watching it twice in a week (was visiting family for Christmas that year, not a ton to do around the house but watch movies), and I thought that it was a really satisfying film to watch over two viewings. It’s definitely an interesting artistic choice to make a movie that benefits from a second viewing, and I can see why that turns people away, but I really enjoyed it.
man that interview where he revealed this was wild
First act: confusion. Third act: payoff. Cinema, baby.
Awesome shutdown from the guy, but I can’t get over that user name. More like CursedUserName.
that is my mom to my dad every time we get together to watch a movie
Tenet isn’t terribly difficult to explain, though it’s been too long since I’ve seen it for me to do it now. I remember watching it and being able to say, ok, it’s not airtight, but I know what Nolan was trying to do with the movie at least. It’s a very interesting idea, but while the execution has a normal amount of plot holes, they’re exacerbated by a story that uses what seem like plot holes as a story device.
It hurts our brains because effect is preceding cause, and because most sci-fi stories with time travel use it in the same way as they might use a space ship: to travel to a different place that has only tangential effects on the main location (even though they may make a big noise about the Butterfly Effect, in reality it’s rarely that severe) or to make nonsense shenanigans happen (things that have no basis in logic from any direction). Tenet actually did come up with a really interesting concept, and tried to give it interesting stakes, but got distracted by the shiny of “backwards bullets” and so let the logic suffer.
I swear I’m going to, start forcefully, inserting commas in wrong, places.
I read this like William Shatner in my head.
It hurt to read this. It was like stop and go traffic in my brain
Ngl, I think part of the reason for widespread reading comprehension being so fucking bad and getting worse, is the popularity of horrible grammar. It requires people to do a lot more assuming when reading, and so it essentially becomes a loosely typed language, like JavaScript, inviting wrong assumptions and errors.
getting worse, is the popularity of
Is this part of your idea from your first comment to insert commas in jarring, objectively incorrect places?
If you
write a sentence
split into multiple
lines
it sounds
like you got
asthma
sucks to your assmar
It’s nice to see more federal agencies being represented in movies these days. When I was a kid you never saw ATF, feds were always FBI.
Reminds me of my grandmother’s famous cry… in waking up at random times during a movie or TV show
"is he dead yet? "
Tenet is an anti-film. You watch it and lose information as it goes on.
Given that a defining characteristic of time is that the universe will move from an information-filled organized state towards increasing chaos as entropy increases, maybe the whole movie is moving backwards through time?
exactly, their explanation of the backwards-in-time-travelling bullets started making less and less sense as the movie went on
My wife is a pretty even keeled person. Tenet made her visibly angry and to this day, I have to consider her current mood before I mention it.
Tenet reminds me of the game Braid.
Braid is a platformer where you can reverse time on demand. At first it seems so easy. Just reverse time any time you make a mistake. But then you encounter items that don’t get reversed in time. At first this seems like an annoyance, but you have to learn how to utilize this odd behavior to advance in the game. It’s a clever mechanic that’s difficult to fully grasp.
It turns out that having some things exempt from the normal flow of time gets really complicated.
Yes but sometimes I miss that information or it’s obvious to other people and not me. So sometimes, I ask my partner.
This is why my typical response is “we don’t know yet” or, if I’ve seen it already “they haven’t told/showed us yet”
My ex used to do this. We be watching a film, and then she’d start playing with her phone, then she would look up from her phone after about 10 minutes and say, “what’s happening”. I still maintain that there is no more of an aggravating personality trait.
Nope, I’ve got one worse: My father.
Watching a movie. A character is introduced.
My dad: Oh look who that is, it’s Fleeg Fleegerson. He was in, ooooooh, that movie with Heeb Leebert and Dick Tickle where the bad guys hold an airliner hostage as a misdirection for robbing it? Sky Hard? Yeah. And he died in the sequel. His dad used to be John Wayne’s shoe shiner’s understudy, married Cla Cla Rodrigruez, Fla Fla’s sister. You ever seen any of Fla Fla Rodriguez’s movies? She made 445 films between the age of 5 and 11 as the singing dancing child thing that didn’t get a real upbringing or childhood and they starved her so she’d stay short and it messed up her bones, and they gave her a gallon of laudanum a day for the pain, and then once she grew up she got typecast as a femme fatale in noir movies. She died in 2009 of huge pox, I hated to hear that.
Also my dad: So now where are they going?
My adhd brain when I watch a movie
At least I don’t do it when watching a movie with others
Good to know you’ll have a flashing red light if he ever starts to develop dementia
What, if he ever actually watches a movie?
Haha no. If he can’t recite the most esoteric, inane facts in an unending chain of blather
Well that does sound annoying. I don’t fuck with my phone during a film except to look up actors, so I am more talking about garden variety stupidity.
Sure, but the scene is the first scene of the movie. There is nothing you can miss.
Except of course if you know anything about the movie or what it is about, but then it should be kinda obvious why they are shooting at the dog…
Or if you speak Norwegian. They’re yelling spoilers the Americans can’t understand.
I had a friend once who, if I’d seen a film and they hadn’t, would ask me questions every few minutes throughout the movie about things it was foreshadowing but hadn’t fully shown yet. If not being omniscient is that painful, run to the bathroom, read the plot summary on Wikipedia, and come back – ruin the film for yourself on your own time.
After the third question, I would explain the plot and ending. They learned to stop asking.
In that lady’s defense, I’m pretty sure the opening scene of The Thing was intentionally written to make people go “what the fuck? why are they shooting at that dog?!”
Yes, and in the guy’s defense, the rest of the movie is written to reveal more info.
In that lady’s defense, some people seem to have their internal monologue tuned to the wrong frequency, and usually blurt it out instead.
Prosecution: …uh, the prosecution rests, m’lud.
Also I think they literally tell you (just not in English) why they’re shooting at it at the beginning of the movie.
Iirc “fun it’s not a dog it’s a thing run”
He literally says: "Se til helvete og kom dere vekk! Det er ikke en bikkje, det er en slags ting! Det imiterer en bikkje, det er ikke virkelig! Kom dere vekk, idioter!”
So, I guess that ruins the movie for anyone who understands that.
Fyi : google translates to : "
Look to hell and get away! That’s not a dog, that’s some kind of thing! That’s imitating a dog, it’s not real! Get away, you idiots!"Look to hell …
Technically, the “look to” is connected to the rest of the sentence and the hell is just injected. So it’s probably better translated as for fucks sake, but who doesn’t love Norwegian swearing.
Oh yeah then explain Tenet
Magical machine can make time work backwards.
Is it really that hard to explain?
No Tenets problem is that you can’t hear it. So it’s somewhat complicated plot is even more difficult to follow.
BWAAAH
It’s not hard to explain, but boy do some people find it hard to get
Also considering that the movie does actually explain how things work
Just watched it two days ago, all of the explanations were dumb.
“Friction is reversed” and “The people are reversed but the cars are not” and the whole backwards oxygen thing was all entirely stupid nonsense because they always applied to one thing but not anything else that would be similar and related.
I agree, it’s a fucking stupid movie
Christopher Nolan’s ideas are better than his executions.
I thought Inception was executed pretty well
Momento and The Prestige might be the exceptions, where the execution did match the ideas. I enjoyed the Batman movies, but they certainly have their silly moments and some major plot holes that can be glossed over because of the source material being comic books.
But he has certainly leaned really far into the style over substance and over time the characters take a backseat to the point that by TENET no character interactions had any weight or tension and they just ran around and did silly stuff that made no sense.
Someday I’m going to make a movie called Momento and it won’t matter what a piece of shit it is, it’ll end up selling plenty of copies simply because people don’t know words.
Words are hard!
Entropy decreasing isn’t original or a good idea for a film.
Time travel movies either need to be not really about the time travel. Or all about the time travel.
In the first instance the time machine is basically just a plot device. So you can have the story set in mediaeval Europe or 5,000 years in the future or whatever. E.g. The Time Machine, Doctor Who, Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure. This is the most common depiction of time travel.
In the second case the time machine is almost a character, e.g. Primer, and the plot of the game Quantum Break. It allows people to have access to abilities that other people in the story do not have, and fundamentally changes what is possible for those characters.
But Tenant isn’t either of those two, it’s a third option which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before where the time machine basically just rewrites the rules of the universe. Everyone knows about the pseudo time travel, but not really time travel technology and so no one really has any advantage over anyone else. So it ends up just being a John Wick style action movie where everyone has access to time travel, so it kind of cancels itself out. It’s really unclear why the technology even needs to be in the story, or what it adds to the story.
Christopher Nolan has a bit of a tendency to make complicated movies, and he seems to think that that’s the same thing as making good movies. Sometimes that works like in Inception, and other times you get just a weird complicated mess that doesn’t really have anything to say for itself.
My favorite part of that movie was the last half hour where they’re just like “fuck it, we’ll just get special ops guys to shoot everything.”
My cousin made a movie that was ostensibly about time travel, but the kicker at the end was that it was a group of people fucking with a rich person to make them think time travel was possible in order to scam him. I hated the movie until the ending because I think time travel is such a worn-out and lazy sci-fi trope.
Okay then explain Memento
A linear story is split in two parts.
The black and white sections explain Leonard’s backstory and show that he’s willing to lie to himself to be happy just like his wife was willing to lie to him because she was unhappy.
The color section is revealing the consequences of Teddy using Leonard, but also Leonard’s willingness to lie to himself.
The special edition DVD had it recut in a linear fashion. It works both ways… linear is a standard detective story without much depth. Recut, it’s a compelling story about Truth and consequences
Okay, then explain Backdoor sluts 9.
In and out. A lot.
But you can’t breath backwards air? Yeah, just move past it.
Whatever you do before you step into the backwards tine machine, make sure you don’t feel like you just took a shit.
