Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 06:48:40 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Tenet

Started by Head Gardener, December 20, 2019, 10:51:45 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

mothman

... OK. You pin a major failing of the film on a continuity blunder or plot hole pertaining to one particular named character, I then asked when that was in the film. That's, um, "why it matters." But, fine. Apparently lots of characters do it. I'd best not ask for any more details and get my head bitten off again!

.egap wen :TIDE

thugler

Quote from: mothman on March 14, 2021, 10:51:31 AM
... OK. You pin a major failing of the film on a continuity blunder or plot hole pertaining to one particular named character, I then asked when that was in the film. That's, um, "why it matters." But, fine. Apparently lots of characters do it. I'd best not ask for any more details and get my head bitten off again!

.egap wen :TIDE

What do you mean? What minute or what. It happens at multiple points, most obviously towards the end. I think it's beyond a continuity blunder that the film makes no attempt to make sense from early on and when rules as to what's going on are set they are ignored without any effort to explain why.

This is all pretty secondary to the film being thunderously boring anyway,  no characters that you care about and all the action scenes are dull or outright confusing. It's perfectly possible to make an box office movie with high concepts and a complicated story but this was just a mess.

beanheadmcginty

The most laughable bit in this film is when fire going backwards turns into ice for some reason.

Butchers Blind


Ant Farm Keyboard

I'd argue that Nolan is getting more and more convoluted with each high concept movie of his, if we start with The Prestige, which is still quite straight-forward (and didn't require more explanation than Memento). Inception had some arbitrary stuff but still could be enjoyed, while Interstellar starts to rely on supposedly random elements introduced in the first act that suddenly make sense in the third one. Tenet has it, plus constant technobabble that's supposed to make the visual gimmick at the heart of the movie look smart, as based in scientific "facts", rather than believable.

By this point, I predict that in 2026 Nolan will reach the "Upside Down" point, making something even more convoluted than the 2012 Canadian-Argentinian-French flop starring Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst, where Wikipedia starts the plot description by two paragraphs about the arbitrary rules that take place within the film universe.

dissolute ocelot

Just watched this. I thought the first half was surprisingly entertaining, some travel, some punching, some espionage, even a few jokes. But it gives up on being coherent later. You can mostly figure it out by comparing against the clichés that are in every film of this type (
Spoiler alert
trade/fake swap, etc
[close]
) but it's not enjoyable if you aren't invested. And as with Inception it
Spoiler alert
just ends with a massive gunfight for no good reason other than looking spectacular
[close]
.

At least try and explain and involve the viewer. There is one slow, well planned heist halfway which is fun. Say what you like about The Godfather or Star Wars, they understand the virtues of exposition and planning and watching a plan play out

frajer

Yeah I didn't completely hate it, and really liked a few of the light-hearted bits, but by god it is po-faced and often incoherent to the point of frustration.

I thought the final battle hammered home everything that was wrong with the film. Couldn't care about anything happening because it was intentionally convoluted and 99% of the soldiers are faceless ciphers. You could argue it's an artistic choice to show a bloodless battle to achieve a lower certification rating, but it just makes everything feel weightless and takes away the impact of what would surely be absolutely desperate, skin-of-your-teeth split-second military decisions and sheer bloody carnage. An occasionally interesting but hollow and unengaging film, for this viewer.

Also was it me or did the "inverted" car chase effects look really shonky? I'm not convinced driving a car backwards down a motorway looks as cool as it's meant to.

Sonny_Jim

Quote from: mothman on March 10, 2021, 06:18:10 PM
And that's absurd. You shouldn't need a flowchart to follow the plot of a film... um...
Took me 3 viewings and a flowchart for me to piece together Primer[nb]Coincidentally also has a shit dialogue track, but that's a fault of the budget[/nb], but that's a film I'd quite happily watch 4 or 5 times.  Only seen Tenet the once, the problem is I'd probably rather rewatch Interstellar or basically any of his other movies.

Bad Ambassador

Quote from: frajer on April 19, 2021, 11:15:58 AM
I'm not convinced driving a car backwards down a motorway looks as cool as it's meant to.

Especially since you can do that already without reversing the flow of time.

frajer

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on April 19, 2021, 11:47:36 AM
Especially since you can do that already without reversing the flow of time.

Yeah, and it would have looked about the same without effects trickery added. I thought that about
Spoiler alert
Washington fighting himself too. No need for any backwards effects, and on a filmic level you could have had the "older" Washington being able to anticipate his former self's moves but of course being unable to kill or injure him. But it just looked like a happy-slap scuffle in a playground.
[close]

Glebe

Finally watched this last night. Was prepared for it to be utter bobbins due to all the flack it got, but for the most part very much enjoyed it, it's just ultimately undone by Nolan's usual over-complications. Towards the end it gets too busy and the narrative kinda suffers as a result. But it's not a total wash out. Clever and mostly-entertaining pseudoscience gubbins!

phantom_power

The reason that sometimes they didn't need the oxygen masks was because they were in an oxygen tent that was pumped full of the reversed air

And the fire/ice thing was because the entropy of the atoms were reversed, not just their temporal behaviour. I think there was a theoretical physicist involved in the production so I imagine that stuff holds up to reasonable scientific scrutiny

The time-travel stuff was bobbins though, made no sense, and not because I couldn't follow it. It was just the usual time-travel issues but compounded by time going both ways in certain scenes. The whole idea of cause and effect goes out the window and people just end up doing things because either they are forced to by "fate" or because they have already happened that way anyway

PlanktonSideburns

Reversed air lol

Eat this, - it's OK, it's and upside-down cake

dissolute ocelot

Quote from: phantom_power on May 09, 2021, 11:13:17 PM
The reason that sometimes they didn't need the oxygen masks was because they were in an oxygen tent that was pumped full of the reversed air

And the fire/ice thing was because the entropy of the atoms were reversed, not just their temporal behaviour. I think there was a theoretical physicist involved in the production so I imagine that stuff holds up to reasonable scientific scrutiny
I'm sure he tried his best to make it scientific, because he does seem to care about realism up to a certain point. But it's still nonsensical. What happpens if material going backwards comes into contact with material going forward? In the film it seems to interact normally, as in the fight scenes, but surely it'd freeze in time or not interact at all or get all fuzzy and jumbled up. Physicists don't really agree about the nature of time (or if time even exists), and entropy isn't an inherent property of atoms but of arrangements of atoms, so it's at best Dr Who style mumbledscienceology.

PlanktonSideburns

Someone should tell him about the suspension of beleif that occurs with good storytelling

He's the Richard Dawkins of filmmaking

Reversed air indeed

frajer

Nolan's dedication to research and the physics of things is admirable, and can create sensational set-pieces, but also ends up being needlessly restrictive too.

Like with "The Bat" in Dark Knight Rises. It may well be aerodynamically accurate but also ends up looking like a clunky unwieldy oblong with an upside down rotor stuffed up its arse, and not looking remotely like a bat.


phantom_power

Quote from: PlanktonSideburns on May 10, 2021, 08:41:34 AM
Someone should tell him about the suspension of beleif that occurs with good storytelling

He's the Richard Dawkins of filmmaking

Reversed air indeed

Reversed air was my words, and only so I didn't say oxygen twice in one sentence. In the film it is explained as they oxygen transfer in the lungs of someone going in reverse would be working the opposite way so would not be able to process "normal" oxygen so they would need oxygen with reversed entropy to be compatible. You may disagree with the concept as a whole but if you take that as given then that explanation makes sense. You could say it is an extra level of thought that isn't required for the story but then you would get some smart-arse saying "how could they even breathe if their lungs were working in reverse?"

Glebe


PlanktonSideburns

Quote from: phantom_power on May 10, 2021, 09:35:26 AM
Reversed air was my words, and only so I didn't say oxygen twice in one sentence. In the film it is explained as they oxygen transfer in the lungs of someone going in reverse would be working the opposite way so would not be able to process "normal" oxygen so they would need oxygen with reversed entropy to be compatible. You may disagree with the concept as a whole but if you take that as given then that explanation makes sense. You could say it is an extra level of thought that isn't required for the story but then you would get some smart-arse saying "how could they even breathe if their lungs were working in reverse?"
yea thats a fair point, was getting off on my own strop there

PlanktonSideburns


Ham Bap

I'm a big fan of Nolan (I even saw this in the cinema last summer, maskless risking death) but he disappeared up his own arse for this one.

Even the end battle, I was just sat there thinking how shite it all looked people running backward and forwards rather than there being any tension.

The only thing that saved the film from being a total miserable existence was the performances of Washington and Pattinson.
But i'll be there for the next Nolan film.

Ant Farm Keyboard

Nolan tries harder and harder to find new gimmicks involving time to make for spectacular and original sequences, but they have lately resulted in convoluted explanations and fridge logic that doesn't even make it to the fridge.
Memento was simple. It was just about memory loss and how people can get tricked or make false assumptions.
Inception used the idea of a dream within a dream within... to have parallel timelines, each one of them being slowed down, with the events of each timeline affecting what happens to the dream from that timeline.
Interstellar relied on half-assed scientific concepts to have some shady version of the theory of relativity, just to make way for the last act.
Dunkirk had three parallel timelines, but they were clearly separated and easy to follow. (It's something of an exception to my theory)
Tenet is full of technobabble, supposedly in the service of riveting action sequences that fail to rivet anything. If it had Swiss clock movements, there would be some stuff to admire, but the stuff feels so much arbitrary, convoluted with the science from centuries away being actually technobabble out of a bad Star Trek Voyager episode, that it's Nolan's shallowest film by far.

Dex Sawash


This was ugly and shit. Looked like one of those streaming only war movies with nobody casts.
People pointlessly walking through the pointless expository shots.

Really enjoyed the thread though. Had avoided thread until after watching. Thought the 10 pager meant CaB liked it and I would feel extra thick.
Audio terrible (HBOMAX stream)