Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet'

[JD10367]

Slightly less confusing than I expected, slightly less muffled audio than I expected, but Nolan still deserves a punch in the balls.

[Frazod]

Originally Posted by JD10367

Slightly less confusing than I expected, slightly less muffled audio than I expected, but Nolan still deserves a punch in the balls.

I've just learned to loathe Nolan. I swore after suffering through the odious Interstellar that I'd never watch another one of his movies. Then Dunkirk came out, and I figured what the hell, it's a war movie based on actual events, should be straightforward. But no, he had to time jump the events instead of telling a coherent, linear story. I know his fanboys think it's all brilliant and visionary. Whatever. I think it's just annoying.

He's made some great movies that I really liked, but at some point he became less concerned about making great movies and more concerned about the need to continually outsmart himself by making each movie more ridiculously and needlessly convoluted than the last. And now he's running shit backwards with muffled dialogue? Yeah, **** that.

[listopencil]

Originally Posted by Frazod

I've just learned to loathe Nolan. I swore after suffering through the odious Interstellar that I'd never watch another one of his movies. Then Dunkirk came out, and I figured what the hell, it's a war movie based on actual events, should be straightforward. But no, he had to time jump the events instead of telling a coherent, linear story. I know his fanboys think it's all brilliant and visionary. Whatever. I think it's just annoying.

He's made some great movies that I really liked, but at some point he became less concerned about making great movies and more concerned about the need to continually outsmart himself by making each movie more ridiculously and needlessly convoluted than the last. And now he's running shit backwards with muffled dialogue? Yeah, **** that.

I think he was skimming through old video in his editing room one day and saw something that he thought looked cool when he ran it backwards. Then he just thought, "That looks cool. I'm gonna make a movie about that." And that's all this is.

[RN47]

Originally Posted by Frazod

I've just learned to loathe Nolan. I swore after suffering through the odious Interstellar that I'd never watch another one of his movies. Then Dunkirk came out, and I figured what the hell, it's a war movie based on actual events, should be straightforward. But no, he had to time jump the events instead of telling a coherent, linear story. I know his fanboys think it's all brilliant and visionary. Whatever. I think it's just annoying.

He's made some great movies that I really liked, but at some point he became less concerned about making great movies and more concerned about the need to continually outsmart himself by making each movie more ridiculously and needlessly convoluted than the last. And now he's running shit backwards with muffled dialogue? Yeah, **** that.

Bringo.

[BWillie]

Originally Posted by Frazod

I've just learned to loathe Nolan. I swore after suffering through the odious Interstellar that I'd never watch another one of his movies. Then Dunkirk came out, and I figured what the hell, it's a war movie based on actual events, should be straightforward. But no, he had to time jump the events instead of telling a coherent, linear story. I know his fanboys think it's all brilliant and visionary. Whatever. I think it's just annoying.

He's made some great movies that I really liked, but at some point he became less concerned about making great movies and more concerned about the need to continually outsmart himself by making each movie more ridiculously and needlessly convoluted than the last. And now he's running shit backwards with muffled dialogue? Yeah, **** that.

I'm with you on Dunkirk, but Interstellar was a great, great film. Which coincidentally was Nolans worst reviewed film on RT while Dunkirk (Along w TDK) was the highest on RT

[BigBeauford]

Someone else put this better than I could: Denis Villeneuve does the things I used to expect from a Nolan movie, but better. After his last two turds, Nolan movies are no longer must see for me.

[comochiefsfan]

Other than The Dark Knight, The Prestige is Nolan’s best film. By far imo.

[Frazod]

Originally Posted by comochiefsfan

Other than The Dark Knight, The Prestige is Nolan’s best film. By far imo.

I still think Batman Begins is the best of the trilogy. It's the only one I'll still occasionally watch. I personally think that Dark Knight was when he started to go off the rails.

Prestige is awesome. I really liked Insomnia, too.

[BigBeauford]

Originally Posted by Frazod

I still think Batman Begins is the best of the trilogy. It's the only one I'll still occasionally watch. I personally think that Dark Knight was when he started to go off the rails.

Prestige is awesome. I really liked Insomnia, too.

If you haven't, do yourself a favor and watch "Memento". Its his best work IMO, and Guy Pierce is one of Hollywood's most underrated actors.

[Frazod]

Originally Posted by BigBeauford

If you haven't, do yourself a favor and watch "Memento". Its his best work IMO, and Guy Pierce is one of Hollywood's most underrated actors.

I've seen it. I liked it, just not as much as some of his other earlier stuff.

[Discuss Thrower]

/r/FanTheories material here, but **** reddit so I'mma post it here.

Nolan has a meta narrative with his recent films, particularly Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, signaled by the fact that those films themselves are conducive to meta-textuality themselves as well as that they plausibly exist within the same universe.

Inception spoiler:

Spoiler!

Inception takes place in a speculative fiction near-future where a cocktail of boutique chemicals combined with fantastic consciousness-sharing technology allows for shared subconscious interactions among participants. The rules of reality apply but can be stretched in a shared dream and it seems the only limit to what is possible is the imagination of the dreamers. Such technology is wrangled by rich multinational corporations to attack their competitors or (try) to defend against such attacks. And it isn't that these corps are rich -they have the influence to totally wave off murder charges. We see one rich corp enlist the protagonist, Dom, to carry out their wishes to foil a rival and by the end of this takedown we see this protagonist being reunited with his children as a reward for a job well done. But he does this after discarding a 'totem' -the tangible marker a shared dreamer uses to delineate between a dream and reality- which suggests Dom no longer cares if he's dreaming or not.

Interstellar spoiler:

Spoiler!

Interstellar we're treated to a further future reality that almost looks identical to our current year but with some huge caveats: robots are borderline sentient and are much more capable in terms of what they can do physically, we've mastered suspended animation, and most importantly, have discovered a hyper-efficient space propulsion technology.

But all of this has occurred whilst a climate catastrophe has plagued the planet to a death of almost all plantlife. A catastrophe which is hinted by Cooper's father-in-law as a result of over-consumption. By the current day of the movie, most nations have fallen and the USA is reduced to a resource-poor technocratic state that determines the fate of all people in order to preserve whatever is left of the infrastructure and isn't above outright lying about historical events in order to keep people in line. But then a wormhole is found and hints at salvation through colonizing potentially habitable planets on the other side. Our protagonist, Cooper, is tasked with the last ditch effort to save the species by taking an embryo-bomb payload on a mission to one of three planets which might be the most conducive to colonization. But he is insistent on saving all of humanity -namely his kids- by finding whatever information might allow his physicist mentor Dr. Brand to "solve" the problem of gravity and allow for total evacuation of Earth. By the end of the movie we see that Cooper put himself into position to do both: the "Bulk Beings" from a fourth dimension allow him a spacetime warp in order to manipulate his (relative) past to get him to NASA's secret launch facility and thus ensure that the embryo bomb along with Amelia to the last habitable planet as well as translate quantum data collected by the robot TARS to Morse code in a watch possessed by his daughter Murph in a (relative) past/present/future.

Tenet spoiler:

Spoiler!

Tenet is set in an almost-identical present reality where whatever damage humanity has done has driven some powerful people to try and destroy it retroactively to either prevent such damage regardless of the consequences or just to say "Humanity sucks and we're gonna go for self-extinction lmao." But an organization, Tenet, is around in the present to fend off entropic attacks from the future. The Protagonist is recruited into Tenet (so he thinks) and tasked with stopping an oligarchical gangster, Sator. We come to find out Sator is the pawn of the people of the future who has access to Turnstiles which can reverse entropy in objects as well as people, and that he's on the cusp of assembling all pieces of a future artifact -the algorithm- which when assembled and acquired by the people of the future will wipe out all of existence. By the end of the movie, Sator is stopped, the algorithm successfully kept from being totally assembled in the future and we find out Tenet is founded by the Protagonist himself. The meta part of Tenet is that the story is told in such a way you want to go back and watch it again even though you know how it ends.

Spoiler!

Given all that, my fan theory is that Nolan is an environmentalist who is trying to save the world through his own sheer will. Hear me out. (Dane don't call me a butt****ing moron for the Inception part of this.)

Spoiler!

Tenet's main thrust is that the future of humanity is trying to destroy itself through the past and "present" through inverting entropy. He tells that story using the concept of "inversion" -backward moving people, objects and sounds. Invert Tenet and we get "our" present: humanity is destroying its own future.

Interstellar's story can be interpreted as "love conquers all" and Cooper himself claims that's how the events of the story played out with the love for his daughter (and the rest of the people on Earth) transcends everything, namely gravity. The "explanation" for how Cooper is able to warp spacetime in the Tesseract is that it's a construct of "Bulk Beings" who exist outside of the concept of spacetime. Simply rendered, it's easiest to explain that people from the future with super advanced technology are the ones that saved Cooper and thus all of humanity. But think of how Amelia Brand conceptualizes time: a construct a being unbound through four dimensions can descend or ascend like three dimensional beings can similarly do in a valley or mountain respectively. Cooper says the Bulk Beings are us and again, the simple rationale is that they are from the future. But if they are truly unbound by time then it's just as valid to say that people from the "past" or the "present" are the ones responsible for the wormhole, saving TARS in the black hole as he gathered the quantum data and then placing Cooper in the tesseract where he can transmit the data in Morse to Murph.

Finally, in Inception, one meta-reading (and not mine) of Inception is that Dom's organization of a team with specific roles to carry out the foiling of one rich megacorp for another is that this is actually a parable for filmmaking. We see it with the roles of the characters in Dom's team: Eames -a dream 'forger'- is an actor: his job is to convince you what you are watching is a totally different persona that is not his own. Ariadne is a dream architect -a screenwriter. Arthur and Dom's actions as point people in shared dreaming operations can be understood as directors or creative producers though Dom's plotline complicates such reading since he explicitly avoids seeing the 'mazes' Ariadne cooks up which would imply he's a film director that doesn't use a script and I'm pretty sure that doesn't fly particularly well. Saito represents the commercial side of movie making who insists on being in close contact with the production team to see that everything goes to plan.

In the movie, the team comes together to impart to carry out Saito's goal of breaking up Fisher's conglomerate to prevent domination of an entire market. In a coded reading, this story is of one movie studio / producer puts genius directors, screenwriters and actors together to come up with a better "movie" than a competitor studio in order to protect his share of the audience. Dom convinces Fisher to break up the conglomerate through an elaborate dream within a dream within a dream wherein he goes so far as to convince Fisher that he's part of the dreaming process which results in Fisher being "Inceptioned"- his subconscious has been tricked into thinking breaking up the conglomerate is his own idea in order to be not like his father. Dom, as a film director, convinces an audience they are taking part in the filmmaking process.

Taking all three meta narratives together, Nolan's narrative is that we need to save the environment (Interstellar) to save our future selves (Tenet) and he's been using movies to convince audiences to pursue this goal subconsciously because we'll do something if we believe it's our own personal idea (Inception).

[-King-]

Just finished it. I obviously have to read more on it to even come close to understanding what I watched but off my first watch.....it sucked. By far Nolan's worst movie. I don't think I've had a bad review of a Nolan movie until now. They may not be great, but they're never bad...until now.

[BigBeauford]

Originally Posted by -King-

Just finished it. I obviously have to read more on it to even come close to understanding what I watched but off my first watch.....it sucked. By far Nolan's worst movie. I don't think I've had a bad review of a Nolan movie until now. They may not be great, but they're never bad...until now.

Inb4 "nah bro, you just need to watch it 7 times with subtitles on and high quality headphones"! Nolan is hurdling at light speed towards M.Night levels of hackery between his shit sound mixing and convoluted plots. Tenet was such a dumpster fire of a movie.

[-King-]

Originally Posted by BigBeauford

Inb4 "nah bro, you just need to watch it 7 times with subtitles on and high quality headphones"! Nolan is hurdling at light speed towards M.Night levels of hackery between his shit sound mixing and convoluted plots. Tenet was such a dumpster fire of a movie.

Nolan kind of lucked out that covid kept Tenet from being released normally and that only a fraction of the people who would have originally saw it actually ended up seeing it. His reputation would have taken a huge hit if it was a normal wide release with full theaters.

[DaneMcCloud]

Originally Posted by -King-

His reputation would have taken a huge hit if it was a normal wide release with full theaters.

This is absurd. The movie grossed $360 million during a pandemic and now, it's available on DVD/Blu Ray and Digital. It won't be long before it's on HBO Max as well.

The distribution mechanism is irrelevant.

If it's a bad movie, it's a bad movie. A movie theater doesn't make a bad film better. And Nolan has built a huge following worldwide so there's no way that one film that doesn't live up to expectations is suddenly going to ruin his reputation as a filmmaker.

Again, your comments are absurd.