Tenet

OldCorpse said:
Unfortunately, Nolan picked something where the physics is too flawed for those who know physics and too abstruse for those who don’t care - so the number of those who are somewher the middle (such as you) is too small for the movie to be successful.
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Why I found it worked for me was that I don't think Nolan is actually making physics based films, rather, spiritual/mythological based films where there is a partial scientific explanation. Same with Interstellar and Inception, they are deeply spiritual/psychological/mythological. Jung meets Norse mythology meets Abrahamic relgions meets mysticism meets quantum mechanics.

Now, you didn't finish Tenet (and I don't think you could be paid to!), but there is a lot of interesting Armageddon/Ragnorak ("twilight of the gods")/pre-destination & fate/eternal recurrence themes going on. The science just gives modern context, in my opinion, to something that is more grappling with deeper issues of mystery that have humankind.

The wake-up scene, for example - I don't think it was a "test", I think he died, and time reversed for him at this point... sort of like what happens with another character at a certain point later in the film...

OldCorpse said:
You mention the “mcguffin” which is a Hitchcockian concept - and means the opposite of a plot driven film. It’s the notion that the plot device, or the object of pursuit is completely unimportant in itself.
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I did misuse that, thanks for the correction

OldCorpse said:
the scene where Washington is tied to a chair was already a huge letdown purely technically - I found the way it was shot completely uninvolving (really a bad job).
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Interesting. What specifically didn't you like, how would you have shot it? I'd love to hear your breakdown!

Perhaps he was too focused on some of the symbiology for you (the two trains moving in opposite directions), mirroring the theme of the film and this principle: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-propose-a-mirror-universe-where-time-moves-backwards
 
mcbob said:
OldCorpse has hinted a larger point... noticing in a lot of recent films that the "why the flip do we care about these people" is wrongly taken as a given with great frequency. It's as though there's an assumption of "well, the camera is following them, so obviously we should sympathize with them."

No.

Thinking even through some dippier 80's action flicks, there was usually a whole first act with a bunch of talking and emotion and stuff where we got intimate with the main character(s) and their role as the "everyman/woman"... Sarah Connor messing up restaurant orders and getting stood up in Terminator... Martin Riggs lamenting over his wife's picture and in Lethal Weapon... most modern action-y films don't wait ten minutes before everything starts simultaneously exploding and the CGI team in Hyderabad starts earning their $2.50/hr.

It's like where Breaking Bad lost me, somewhere around mid-late season 1, when I realized, "hey... these are all terrible people and I sincerely don't care what happens to them."

Arguably, the degredation of anything that could be seen as an objective morality or a commonly identifiable "everyman/woman" has made this all a tricky are for screenwriters (don't want to clearly make the protagonist from this week's chosen symbol of systemic whateverism), and they just punt. "Here's this person, we have a camera on them, so care, ok?"
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I think I agree, although I would put it the opposite way - the screenwriters MUST comply with an objective morality. It's just not a common-sense morality and it's constantly in flux. So, it's best to be vanilla and play things safe. Classic cowardice of subjects in a repressive society in which excommunication is an ever-present threat if you cross an invisible line.

Even the whole Greedo shooting first thing...I know that change pre-dated the recent wave of moralistic fanaticism, but it was a shady detail of Han that made him more dangerous and interesting. And it's just so stupid that Greedo would have missed that badly if he fired first. Perfect example of what's wrong in Hollywood today.

And you see it in the reboots of star wars and star trek. Everybody "pisses rainbows" (- House of Cards). I mean, these were Manichaean good vs evil morality tales with clear political leanings in the first place. But they used to have an edge.
 
LOL! You want more verbiage from me?! You’re either a glutton for punishment, or trying to get me banned :)

Awright. I’ll do this from memory - I’m not going to rewatch that scene, so we’ll see how that goes.

The job of any work of art is to engage the audience. So the killing scene ought to engage - we should not be left indifferent. In fact, it’s inherently a higher octane concept - two men tied up in chairs - their lives in imminent danger, it’s almost a freebie with inbuilt tension. Let’s see how Nolan manages to nonetheless somehow screw it up anyway to where we care not a whit about any of this... in its own way a remarkable achievement.

The fundamental problem is that we don’t care about the characters, because we don’t know who they are or whether we should root for them, and whether it matters if they live or die. Hard to engage on an emotional level if we know zero about the characters. The killer is another anonymous cypher whom we neither fear (knowing nothing about him), nor pull for.

Contrast that with the audience engagement in the torture scene in “Marathon Man”. We care about Dustin Hoffman’s character, because we’ve been introduced to him and feel some level of empathy. We fear the Lawrence Olivier character, because we know the kind of monster he is. So when we see Hoffman tied up in a chair with Olivier looming over him, it’s heart-pounding time. We care.

“Oh, but we can’t do that in Tenet, because it comes at the beginning and we didn’t have time to introduce the characters!”. OK - what does that tell us? It tells us that there is a STRUCTURAL problem here, because you necessitated a high octane scene to be in the beginning where we don’t know the character and so don’t care. Mistake in the structure.

But there was a chance to nonetheless rescue some of this scene, by casting a charismatic character. If it were a charismatic actor (picture anyone - Sam Jackson, Wesley Snipes etc.), we now are riveted by THAT guy, THAT face possibly being killed or tortured - same with a more charismatic villain/killer. We know nothing about the character, everything is the same, but now we are engaged. But instead, we have Washington. Fail. Another consequence of poor casting.

In my example of why we wouldn’t cast a no-charisma actor instead of Cruise in The Pelican Brief, sometimes you hear folks claim that “oh, it’s just a star, but anyone would’ve worked in a good film with a good script, the vibe would’ve been slightly different, but THE FILM WOULD WORK” because the structure of the film is sound dramatically. But that’s not true. Tenet is an example of a film where Nolan cast a character that cannot carry this particular movie and the failure is abundantly clear... meaning that if Tenet had a Samuel Jackson level charismatic actor (not Jackson himself, as he’s too old now), the film would benefit immensely... though ultimately it would still fail due to too many flaws. The casting mistake that keeps on “giving”.

Now let’s take a look at other factors. First the location - a giant FAIL. I’m sorry, but there is no concentrated threat from the surroundings like in a small space (Marathon Man), or spooky hospital or dungeon or some place where it’s isolated, a forest, or even a field of wheat, or an unusual place - abandoned playground, rooftop, whatever. You have guys tied to CHAIRS. A chair, in an open place like a train depot is the definition of anticlimactic. We don’t have a sense of doom and lack of any chance of rescue - any moment someone might come by and interrup the proceedings, a train might pass and a report might be filed. They’re not even tied to the tracks. It’s an utter failure of location to highten the tension - it’s a location that does the opposite, lets the tension out like a deflated baloon.

“Oh, but see, it had to be a train yard because of the metaphor and how it fits in thematically with time reversal!!!!UNO!!!ONE!!!” - this is an utter disgrace. Utter disgrace. You are telling me, that you have sacrificed all engagement in a scene JUST so that it would fit with your crappy metaphor for a crappy theme?? It is your JOB as an artist to create GRIPPING metaphors in service of your deeper theme, not crippled ones in service of your deeper theme! “Quick everyone, gather around, I have a really crappy scene to refer to my crappy theme! Metaphor!”. “I had to let the air out of any engagement in a scene, in the service of my idiotic theme! WIN!”. That’s the opposite of how it’s supposed to work.

Chairs - where did they come from - in an train yard where anyone might potentialy come by, a drone fly by, a stranger interrupt, all presided over by ONE villain who has two victims - threat level about snail menace grade. LOL!

And how is it shot? Is there any involvement with the characters? It’s all shot as if with hand puppets - the mix of shots, the number of close-ups vs medium and long shots - we never comfortably enter the perspective of the victims or the killer, feel their fear, hope or dispair... we’re removed emotionally. In the climax with the presumed killing, it’s all at a big distance through a passing train... talk about anti-climactic. A train passes by! LOL!

And what about the flat lighting? I mean, a TV movie tries for more artful lighting - what does the cinematography bring here? Here - the simplest of simple things... if this was happening at night, you’d already jack up the tension by 50% and had interesting lighting opportunities. But no, Nolan needs to flatten everyting into an even layer of indifference.

What it looks like is that Nolan had a schematic in hand where he wanted to illustrate his theme and he shot it in such a way that the theme was the only governing principle at the disastrous cost to the art. The old adage “it’s not what, but HOW” wrt. art has been stood on its head, so that it’s like the flattest didactic statement without any ARTFUL way of expressing it. May as well faxed us the drawing of the scene. It’s like he DGAF, and subsequently we DGAF.
 
Characters don't need to be likeable, they just need to be interesting. Tenet was deliberately written to make the lead character uninteresting. Nolan didn't even give him a name, he just called him 'The Protagonist'. What likeability he has is due solely to John David Washington's personality. Not a defense but Nolan knew what he was doing, and in his past couple films he's been pushing how far he can push lack of character in a narrative film. In an interview for Dunkirk he said he didn't want to shoot with a script as he wanted to break from the traditional way of making films. He only wrote a brief sketch of a script because his wife, the producer, needed one.
 
The thing I appreciate about Tenet and Nolan, regardless of how well the movie worked, is that he took a risk and did something different. I mean, hollywood has become so generic and formulaic and unwilling to take risks. Here Nolan makes an intentionally uninteresting lead character to create a movie that is more like a painting than a traditional linear story, something meant to be viewed, thought about, reviewed, unpacked. Love it or hate it, don't we need more risk taking in the industry? People willing to do something unique rather than just phone home Bond 22?

How hard would it have been to alter Tenet into a super generic action spy thriller using time control and awesome effects. Not hard. And maybe a lot of people would have enjoyed it more, but it's the catch 22 - make a super catchy pop song, people complain it's the same 3 chords and there's no creativity in music. Experiment with something new, and people complain it's not catchy and they don't like the dissonanace.

Not defending Tenet to anyone who doesn't like it; rather pointing out that the fact a talented big budget director actually got the license to take some risks here should be lauded. We need more cinema that breaks audience expectations and norms. Tenet will never be as good as Inception or Dark Knight to me, but while I didn't *love* it, I certainly liked and appreciated it.
 
I just wasted one hour on Dunkirk. Annoying film, terrible music/sound effects.
It looked so cheap comparded 'saving privar Ryan'.
 
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No. I had high expectations.
But it looked like a low budget film. Where are the 500.000 troops, the 18 squadrons of fighters, the armada 800+ ships? I missed wide shots. The film doesn't show the scale of the operation. A few boats, a mine sweeper a destroyers, a bunch of yachts and six planes.


First ten minutes boring, stopped watching after an hour.
This movie relies entirely on the sound track.

And what annoyed me was the clear difference in time and place during the scenes. Part of it filmed on Lake IJssel (fresh water and gray like mercury and the greenish, more choppy water of the North Sea.)

I also noticed that people hate the film or love it. I don't hate the film but I just could not bare watching it longer than an hour.
 
easily one of nolan's best. i watched it 4 times in quick succession. also his most successful and best-motivated use of different time-scale storylines told in parallel.

most of the dogfights were further inland. i felt i saw enough troops since we were keeping to the perspective of a few individuals

fwiw tarantino called it the 2nd-best movie of the 2010s
 
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I neither loved nor hated Dunkirk, I thought it was akin to a WWII VR experience. I believe the tighter focus was to bring the story into a human scale rather than vast armada warfare.
 
>> I edited my post because I realized in hindsight that it had nothing to do with Tenet, the topic of this thread.

Apology to OP.

Not yet seen Tenet.
 
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JPNola said:
>> I edited my post because I realized in hindsight that it had nothing to do with Tenet, the topic of this thread.

Apology to OP.

Not yet seen Tenet.
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It's also possible to outright delete a post, y'know. Not to give you too hard a time :)
 
Characters don't need to be likeable, they just need to be interesting. Tenet was deliberately written to make the lead character uninteresting. Nolan didn't even give him a name, he just called him 'The Protagonist'. What likeability he has is due solely to John David Washington's personality. Not a defense but Nolan knew what he was doing, and in his past couple films he's been pushing how far he can push lack of character in a narrative film. In an interview for Dunkirk he said he didn't want to shoot with a script as he wanted to break from the traditional way of making films. He only wrote a brief sketch of a script because his wife, the producer, needed one.

Absolutely, a character doesn’t need to be sympathetic - only interesting. And furthermore, there is nothing wrong even with Nolan’s ambition of making the characters in his movie uninvolving/uninteresting - after all, there are many elements to a movie, and characters is only one of them. You don’t need to generate audience engagement with characters, if you can generate it with something else - however, crucially, you need to have engagement with *something* - if the film is completely uninvolving, then it is by definition a failure... any art that’s *completely* uninvolving has no aesthetic response - art 101. I can appreciate that Nolan thought that subordinating his characters completely to the plot is a strategy, but that’s putting extremely high demands on the plot, and if that point of failure collapses, then the whole enterprise is doomed. It’s a high risk strategy - and in this case, I think he catastrophically misjudged the interest in this plot (to the vast majority of audiences, some exceptions - like filmguy - notwithstanding). Ordinarily, I’d give him credit for trying something new or for the ambition, but not when the execution is so incompetent, the artistic judgment so disastrously poor and it’s a completely foreseeable failure. In contrast, a director like Michelangelo Antonioni also tried something new and even though he ultimately did not succeed, he didn’t fail catastrophically, and there his films were still engaging - and so, I still give him credit, despite his ambition exceeding his ability to execute.

Let’s take the example of the Danish film The Guilty (2018) - Oscar submission that made the list in 2018 - which I reviewed here on dvxuser. Here we had a director who decided to break a bunch of “unbreakable” film rules, in particular the old saw “show don’t tell” “it’s FILM not radio”. Well, as I often claim, there’s only one truly unbreakable rule in film - “engage the audience”, if you manage to do that, to make an engaging, involving film, then you can break whatever other supposed rule there is (another example of a supposedly “unbreakable” rule of film, “dialogue sound quality cannot be very bad” “audienced will forgive a murky picture, but never a murky sound”... successfuly broken by John Waters “Multiple Maniacs” which has atrocious sound among its multiple capital crimes of technique - but it’s engaging, and so, it’s a great work of art - I also reviewed it here on dvxuser).

Now, imagine that The Guilty was not only all about “Tell, not show”, but what it told was also boring... at that point, there is zero engagement from the audience. You have to give them something. OK, you make cardboard characters in Tenet, but at least make the rest interesting/engaging (in bestsellers we often have cases of flat, uninteresting cardboard characters, but the book is successful because the pacing, or intrigue, or plot, or some element is engaging - see Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame). In Antonioni’s films, there are often great engaging elements - fantastic sound effects, musical cues, actors, compositions etc., even if ultimately it misses the highest mark.

I give credit to the director/artist who tries something new, if what he tries isn’t clearly stupid and doomed from the getgo, like, hey, what if I shot a whole movie with the lens cap on???!!!UNO!!! - yeah, it’s “original” but also very stupid. We want something that’s original, but at least has a chance at success, even if it doesn’t achieve it. Instead, Nolan gave us *nothing* - not characters, not plot, many scenes not well shot (see my example of the execution scene), horrible use of music - just listen to how the music is a bed under the various boring lengthy dialogue scenes, where it’s supposed to inject drama and interest, because without it it’s just so, so, so leaden - it shows Nolan knows those scenes are boring (just imagine them witout the music!) and tries to rescue them with that old, old trick of “music!”... which doesn’t work - they’re still deadly boring. If you give us *nothing*, I don’t care that it’s “new” and “ambitious” - it’s a complete and utter failure with no redeeming elements.

Btw. this ambition to just shoot with no script or a bare outline and let the film develop naturally is hardly a Nolan innovation - it’s been done many times, most famously by Godard and other New Wave directors - except, a good percentage of time, they managed to pull it off and make it engaging, unlike Nolan who produced dreck - it’s a very risky strategy and Nolan is not up to it.

Nolan needs to get back to basics and re-learn the one supreme rule - whatever you do, old, new or inbetween you *must* make it engaging on *some* level.
 
OldCorpse said:
Instead, Nolan gave us *nothing* - not characters, not plot, many scenes not well shot (see my example of the execution scene), horrible use of music - just listen to how the music is a bed under the various boring lengthy dialogue scenes, where it’s supposed to inject drama and interest, because without it it’s just so, so, so leaden - it shows Nolan knows those scenes are boring (just imagine them witout the music!) and tries to rescue them with that old, old trick of “music!”... which doesn’t work - they’re still deadly boring. If you give us *nothing*, I don’t care that it’s “new” and “ambitious” - it’s a complete and utter failure with no redeeming elements.
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In Tenet he did give is a few things. He gave us his trademarked muddy dialog, with his standard added feature of dropping dialog down below where it needs to be in the mix to make it audible. And it sounded to me like he was clipping the bottom end like he usually does (I can't be bothered to check this one -- but it wasn't as bad as Dunkirk which was borderline criminal). So that's something. As it were.

He also managed to give me a boring and unengaging film. So there's that.

I just really want my 2.5 hours back.

Nolan hooked me 20 years ago with Momento, a great film IMHO. And I marked him then as a director to watch. Every film since then that's dealt with his personal obsession of "time" has been worse. It's like a set of steps -- each one goes a little lower as you walk down to the basement.

Well, I'm not walking down those steps anymore. So yeah, I'm in full agreement that Tenet is "...a complete and utter failure with no redeeming elements."
 
Holy, Moly, Bruce! I’m usually the harshest in my critiques, but you’ve outdone me here, LOL! I have a slightly higher opinion of Nolan, or I should say, early Nolan. I’m a big fan of Memento, but I also like Following, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight - some, like Insomnia are not crimes, merely shrugs. But what has happened is that Nolan - in my opinion - started deteriorating sharply when he took his eye off the ball, and started making overrought overthought and underdelivered giant sludge like Inception... thus cementing him in my mind as the director for dumb movies that make people feel smart. He’s completely lost perspective and needs to get back to basics. It feels like he’s in love with his own ideas and there’s little critical thinking going on - it’s embarrasing highschool level “smart” movies. He’s much more limited psychologically and artistically than he realizes and takes on stuff that he has no hope of pulling off. There are those filmmakers - like Fellini - who have huge “souls” (psychological depth, essentially), and then there are those with smaller ones (nothing wrong with it, if you can work well within your capabilities), like Nolan (and of course directors with very little psychological depth). Sadly Nolan is way out of his depth.

Unless he can pull himself out of this self-indulgent spiral, he’s doomed to go on to ever more barren artistic wilderness. I’ve kinda lost all expectations with him - hope I’m wrong, and he can surprise us all with a return to form. We’ll see.
 
OldCorpse said:
Holy, Moly, Bruce! I’m usually the harshest in my critiques, but you’ve outdone me here, LOL!
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OK, I went too far. But really it sorta hacked me off. Probably showed that just a bit too much. Sigh...

That said, I think of the Nolan brothers I much prefer the writing of Jonathan. And notice that he gets writing creds for Momento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises. Hmmm... maybe he's been reigning in Christopher's more self-indulgent impulses for the last 20 years or so. Or at least, the Christopher Nolan films that seem to rub me the wrong way the most are the ones that Jonathan Nolan wasn't a part of. Whatever that means.
 
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