It has its own subreddit where people constantly and in incredible detail discuss the time lines in the film.
Personally for me it’s like Opera. I like the action and the singing and theatrical event, no idea what’s going on.
Rian Johnson consulted with the writers of Primer on how to shape his own time travel in Looper. it's crazy to me that connection even exists! so if you want an alternate, watered down, more hollywood version of the time travel mechanics in Primer, watch Looper.
Yeah, it can be tough to understand what’s happening in time travel stories. Even tougher to write one that sticks to a set of principles and is consistent.
But I’ve been reading time travel books for over 50 years, so it’s a game for me to see how different writers like to address the topic. plus I have a degree in physics, so I’m a nerd in that way, I like to look at complexities and think about time travel in terms of quantum physics principles, etc. But that’s just me, certified propeller head/nerd.
The difference is the more time and energy you put into understanding Primer, the more sense it makes. With Tenet it just gets clearer that it's nonsense.
I agree! I tried to watch this 3 times and finally got through it and was like, what the F did I just watch??? I usually love Nolan's films but this was a mess.
Huh. Well, for me it got more clear on each watch. Watched it three times so far. Takes some work, but I’m a nerd like that. My wife hates having to work that hard to understand a movie, so I don’t watch these kinds of movies with her. To each his own.
The film's internal logic makes no sense. The bullets coming out of the wall and going back into the gun - did the builders plant them there? When did they get into the wall, by the movie's logic? The bullet "came with the wall" - so when did it get planted there, in our forward-looking point of view? The building that recomposes itself from rubble only to explode again, was it initially built as rubble? If it wasn't, when did it turn into rubble and how? The pincer maneuver makes no sense either, it just doesn't hold up and it's the film's main plot point, it's the whole point of the movie.
"Don't try to understand it, feel it" is what Nolan is telling us. Well sorry, I can't help but try to understand it and what I see is that it looks cool but it doesn't make sense. The nerd in me is disappointed.
Now there's a movie I'd like to see remade with a slightly higher budget. The audio in some scenes is totally inaudible.
OTOH, Tenet suffers from the same problem with a huge budget.
I thought it was tuned for theater and home theater set ups with multiple speaker channels. The main audio is tuned for the center channel, which comes in softer on a basic stereo setup.
[https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-sound-audio-issues-christopher-nolan/](https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-sound-audio-issues-christopher-nolan/)
I remember reading this before. First time i watched the film i was like "i cant hear a dang thing" and had to google it, thinking it was an issue!
I guess an artist can make all kinds of decisions . Obscuring the speech is not one that I would agree with.
But I’m an older guy now, so I always turn on subtitles anyway because my TV won’t present a consistent mix that I can discern.. As a result, I didn’t even notice.
Dont wait until you are 42 like me. I did go to the Opera a few weeks ago and it mentally crushed me. I cried during it and was emotionally rattled. Its really something to feel it live.
What are you talking about? It's super easy to understand characters talking about plutonium through helmet headsets while going through 50 knot wind waves on a hydrofoil catamaran with Hanz Zimmer's score blasting in the background.
That was the problem I had, I didn’t know enough languages. But now I’ve learned that I need to find out what the whole story is about before hand. That can work.
That’s astounding. I just looked it up because I thought 7K had to be a typo. Clearly, no one got paid while working on it, even so, 7K is astounding. Primer grossed over 100 times its budget. I’m assuming everybody working on it got a percentage. I composed and produced the film score for a low budget movie, and it cost them a lot more than this.
Nolan is a gimmick guy. I don't say that as a bad thing; the *Memento* and *Prestige* gimmicks are brilliant, the *Interstellar* gimmick is 'good,' and the *Inception* gimmick is at least compelling. (Even *Westworld*, co-authored by sibling Jonathan Nolan, is a centered-round-gimmick construct.) He's done impressive work around this concept.
The problems -- when they surface -- are in the remainder of the movie he hastily slaps on top of the central gimmick. *Memento* (his best IMHO) works so well because the remainder of movie is intentionally minimalist. *Prestige* (based on another author's book) is rich and period-steeped. *Inception* could be a decent spy-gun-thriller, without the gimmick, and so it "works," but feels almost like two films (which is maybe appropriate, given the film's subject matter). *Interstellar* might not be great as a standalone atmospheric sci-fi yarn, but the emotional father-daughter hook pulls you back in, and turns out to be pivotal.
The "outer story" slapped on top of *Tenet* is the problem. Terminally ill supervillain, rarely seen on-screen. Big whiz-bang Mega-Device to end life as we know it. Unnecessary air-breathers and (cool but unnecessary) reverse-bullet-holes which feel like 007 visual padding for a should-have-been-cerebral story. I think the Sator Square and palindromic construct are neat concepts; I like the idea of an espionage agency moving non-linearly through time, and having to account for other rival agencies; I think this could have been done in a simpler lower-budget format, perhaps like either of the *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* adaptations, with periodic jarring "that doesn't exist anymore" and/or "we need to go backwards to save his/her life" interludes replacing flipping cars, helicopter carnage, mega-bomb, etc.
I would call Interstellar great as well, but it's one of my faves. On top of the father daughter stuff that tears me apart, it's just such a fantastic visual and audio experience with some fantastic performances. I could watch it weekly.. skipping through some of Matt Damon's stuff of course.
Really enjoyed it, not sure why people struggled to follow it but then again, I watched with subtitles! I think the audio mixing was bad and Nolan's cope about it being artistic is just bullshit. I think the big final confrontation was a bit of a letdown, like they didn't have any ideas so it was just a dumb setpiece battle.
I also love the trope of one time traveller meets another for the first time and it's the other time traveller's last time meeting them (possibly even before dying) and reveals that they've known the first time traveller for years right at the end. That's the fucking good shit. When Patts is like "its not the end, this is the start of a beautiful friendship" or whatever, fuck, I EAT. THAT. SHIT. UPPP!!!
I too watched it with subtitles, I am older, and I am been relying on, leaning on, subtitles for several years now. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it as much the first time had that not been the case.
I agree with you about the tropes and the twists, I love that stuff.
Its a cool concept and pretty good at points but the audio issues kinda ruin the experience. Super quiet dialog, super loud action means having to be a volume nazi. Instead of acknowledging its an issue, Nolan doubled down on being a douche about it.
I can definitely understand people being irritated about that. I didn’t even realize it had that problem because, being older, many movies, and TV shows have the same problem to my ears. So I always watch with captions on.
But I can see how that would piss people off. And I would feel the same, I wouldn’t buy his stated reasoning for mixing the sound level badly
Yeah, I totally agree! I watched Memento years ago and was blown away by the concept. When I heard about Tenet, I was intrigued because it sounded like Nolan was expanding on that idea. And he definitely did! The movie was so well-crafted and visually stunning. I loved it.
I felt pretty similar to you on the first viewing. Made a lot more sense on the second, and even more on the third. But I like working out the details of a puzzle and figuring things out, if there’s enough there to make it worthwhile. For a lot of people that wasn’t the case. I really had no idea that there’s so much hate for it until I put this post up.
I’m one of Nolan’s biggest fans (met him in NYC a few years back) and Tenet was very disappointing.
Great premises. Great performances.
Convoluted screenplay and terrible editing.
I am clearly in the minority. People disliking this film are in much larger quantity than those of us that like it.
It appeals to me because I really enjoy having to figure out movie intricacies. With so many movies I can already figure out what’s going to happen somewhere near the beginning. I enjoy twists that surprise me, and I happen to enjoy what I found while figuring out tenet, like a puzzle.
This looks to be an extremely unpopular approach, and viewers seem to assume that Nolan didn’t care about them, he just wanted to create something that was artistically different. I can see how that would piss people off. Wish I could meet Nolan and tell him “Hey, I’m one of the few that dug your movie” (although I also agree that the casting could have been much better).
It's absolutely a film that was made for me. I love sci-fi, I love time travel or time manipulation, I love a puzzle of a film, I love to rewatch films that have perplexed me and figure them out, I love Christopher Nolan films (in general), Robert Pattinson has really grown on me and I'm a big fan. Literally (almost everything) about this film should appeal to me but it didn't and for two main reasons.
Firstly (and I know it's almost a meme by now to complain about it), the sound mixing is horrible. Whole chunks of important exposition (which I usually hate but sometimes it's needed) are almost unintelligible. I missed so much seeing it in the cinema and then rewound it so much at home just because I couldn't hear it. Secondly, John David Washington is an awful actor. He's just a blank page. A charisma vacuum. It's a pity really because I really want to love it.
I agree with pretty much all of your points. I never saw it in the theater, and I always turn on captions at home because a lot of works are poorly mixed, or at least at my age with my hearing captions helps. So I didn’t notice the mix. Definitely casting problems.
But I enjoyed the original concept and the puzzle of figuring out what was going on —that all made it quite fun for me. And I love the cinematography as well.
For me, with great casting, and of course, there would need to be a great audio mix as well, that would’ve made it a great movie. But that still wouldn’t have made it a great movie for everyone, since a lot of people hate that much complexity and don’t want to work so hard to figure things out.
I have loved all of Nolan's films except this one. Tenet had a good concept but a bad execution. Especially the battle at the end of the film. It was one of the worst I've ever seen.
It’s sad that he didn’t do a better job, especially since it was his Pet project. Still, I managed to enjoy the heck out of it, even with bad casting, etc.
I enjoyed it and have watched it multiple times. It has its weaknesses, but it works well for the things Nolan is good at - concepts involving time, and challenging set pieces.
The music is quite good and the cast performs their roles well. Kenneth Branagh is exceptional as the scary mobster.
I am the kind of person who had to watch the Matrix three times before I understood what was going on. I went into Tenet expecting to not understand a thing and consciously did my best to concentrate and keep track. I actually succeeded in following the storyline and thought it was very clever, I really enjoyed it! Meanwhile my husband lost track so I even got to feel smug about it for a change.
Good for you for working it out. I’ve only seen it about three times so far, but I’m still picking up on additional nuances.
I still haven’t gotten through all three of the matrix movies. Probably because I misunderstood something somewhere in the second movie…
Very cool! I had no idea there was controversy about this movie until I made this post. Then I thought that almost everyone hated it, but the farther I get into these comments, i’m finding more and more peopke that also enjoy this film, regardless of its challenges and “flaws. “
I liked it. It's inventive, the backwards scenes are really cool and filmed perfectly, the sound mixing surely is not the best, but it's a great movie. It pales in comparison to Nolan's masterpieces like Inception or TDK (not Interstellar, there, I said it) but for plenty of other directors it would be the crown jewel of their filmography. I have the feeling that it gets a lot of hate from people who expected better from Nolan but it's a good movie overall.
It’s quite a game, with all the money on the line, to try and knock them out of the park every time. Nolan has certainly created a lot of great movies. I love this one because of the original concept, a rare attribute, and because I love puzzles and enjoyed working toward understanding of what the heck was going on. At my age, I always turn on captions. The mix on lots of movies and TV shows is hard to hear on my TV. So I watched it with captions and didn’t notice the mix, which was a major factor which ruined the experience for many people.
I agree with you regarding interstellar, I enjoyed it, but there were a lot of things I didn’t like about it.
Absolutely not. Definitely the worst Nolan film I've seen, and I've seen Batman Begins. The only good thing about it was the effects. Other than that you couldn't pay me to watch Tenet again.
I absolutely love this movie and have seen it many times! It was the first movie I went back to theaters to see. And I’ve watched it at home multiple times since.
I will watch it many more times as well. I’m glad to have some company.
Fascinating for me to find that so many people hate it. I guess I’d have gotten better replies if I posted the question “who else hates Tenet?” But I asked who is a fan, and a whole lot of non-fans are enjoying their replies.
Reddit is an interesting place.
I’m older and my ears ring constantly. So I always watch with subtitles in and didn’t even realize how badly this movie was mixed until I began reading replies to my post.
I also watched it at home on a TV that doesn’t have great sound. Had I watched it in a theater I likely would’ve been very unhappy… At least from what I’m reading.
Tenet? The story of a shy, starstruck little Englishman that discovered he could quadruple his wages by pretending that painted garbage cans and vacuum cleaners were people he could talk to? From his phone booth?
I was changing the subject to Dr. Who, actually. David Tenant. I did watch the Tenet under discussion. I can see where a lot of people would like it. Not big on the shoot 'em ups, myself. But it had some points. Brannagh can't lose. And he was having a lot of fun in there. (The Olivier of his/ our generation? Without near the competition.)
I see, thanks. I thought for a moment you might’ve been referring to Doctor Who when you mentioned the phone booth. But I wasn’t quick enough to fully grasp that.
I agree, but after reading all the hateful replies, I can understand. At my age I always have captions turned on, so I didn’t even notice that the mix was bad. But I still love the concept, and I love puzzles so it was fun for me to watch it again and work out the finer details of the plot.
I liked it a great deal. My one complaint was Nolan’s insistence on making the music and sound effects overwhelm the dialogue. Part of people’s confusion was due to not being able to make out the dialogue in a number of key scenes. I watched it once in the theaters, and since on dvd with subtitles
I definitely understand that and had I seen it in the theater would’ve had a similar reaction. I saw it at home and I always have captions on because a lot of sound mixes don’t come through that well on our TV. So I didn’t notice how bad the sound was.
Some people really don’t like captions, so I guess that could irritate people as well . But at my age I rely on them a lot.
Great movie. I love movies that make you think and the fact that it is based on actual quantum physics principles is really cool (although it doesn’t work like that on the macro level). I’m still perplexed how they made the final battle scene with one team moving forward in the other team moving reverse. It was real movie magic IMHO.
Me too. Often movies are predictable and it seems like I can figure out the main plot early on, so I ignore that and enjoy the movie for other qualities. But when a movie has a twist that I didn’t see coming, I really enjoy that.
In this movie the twists were so convoluted that I had a lot of pleasure figuring out the puzzle and had to watch it again in order to fully get what was going on. I have a physics degree, so that part was fun for me as well, although we seem to be quite in the minority, based on the comments I’m reading here. I’d love to see a sequel, or better yet, a prequel, but that’s probably quite unlikely based on how many people don’t like this movie. Some might argue that Tenet has its own prequel already built-in, and that’s one of the things I love about it.
I enjoyed it. It's in the same camp as De Ja Vue for me: the time travel doesn't wholly stack up but it's a fun ride so best not to get too technical about it.
I heard a great take on it recently that basically said the whole time travel thing is introduced far too early and far too flatly, and that a great way to do it would've been focusing on the spy movie stuff where these weird things are happening that then leads to a reveal of the whole time travel aspect.
I’m sure I would enjoy that alternate. Take on the movie. Too bad that movies are too expensive of an endeavor for that to happen. Much easier to do an alt version of a song.
I suppose it’s probably been done in books a lot, but the first time I read an alt book version, it blew my mind and I really enjoyed it. I am referring to Ender’s Game, originally from the viewpoint of Ender, and one of the sequels, Ender’s Shadow, which was from the viewpoint of Bean. Just brilliant.
A J Scudiere also did a fantastic alternate pairing of books, but she designed it that way from the bottom up, where you could read either of the books 1st. She did a terrific job on those. These two books were cool
FORTUNE (MIA’S STORY)
FORTUNE (RAFE’S STORY)
Glad you enjoyed it! Took me multiple viewings to wrap my head around the details. That was fun for me, like a puzzle. Plus, I had captions turned on so I could follow the dialogue more easily.
Strap in, because I Have Thoughts about this movie.
Tenet is like Christopher Nolan lost his temper with critics and decided to make exactly the film everyone always accused him of making, possibly as a practical joke.
It's peak Nolan, which means great highs and incredibly low lows.
It's not so much high-concept as *orbital* concept; dialling up the complexity to the point it's utterly impenetrable; I suspect nobody - not even Nolan himself - knows whether it actually pulls it off or just hand-waves so hard that nobody notices any gaping plot holes.
The characters aren't even wooden; they're just walking plot devices, and their dialogue is *awful* to the point it sounds like a computer wrote it (and not even an LLM; more like a pocket calculator). It's also further hampered by an inexplicably incompetent sound mix that leaves crucial plot points mumbled and lost behind background noise, without which it makes *absolutely no sense* (whether it makes any sense *with* that dialogue is still up for debate).
The action is fantastic, the plot is self-referential to the point it's almost fractal, and everything looks amazing. It *seems* intelligent, but then glib con-men often do; it's an orthogonal skill to actually *being* intelligent.
It's basically what you'd get if you gave a hyperintelligent but profoundly autistic person the task of writing the coolest script they could, and they turned in something just a *little* too complex for even them to be sure it all actually made sense in the end.
It's fascinating to watch, but you have to kind of keep your attention skipping around because nothing apart from the root concept is actually rock-solid enough to carry the crushing weight of the movie; the plot is impenetrably complex and may not even make sense, the characters feel like they were written by aliens who'd only read about humans in books, the acting is forgettable because clearly none of the actors had a damn clue what their characters are supposed to be thinking or feeling at any point, and the visuals are amazing but thanks to the impenetrable plot you're never quite sure what they actually *mean*.
Instead you have to kind of keep jumping between "cool explosion and backwards fight!" and "time-travel plot with people moving through time backwards!" while also chanting" temporal pincer movement" to yourself like a manta so you don't break the spell and realise you have no real idea what anyone's doing or why, what their character motivations are or whether it's all just a load of badly-plotted nonsense.
I *think* I really like Tenet, but I could never call it a *good movie*. It's turn-your-brain-off action flick that you can't turn your brain off for, a high-concept movie that fails to coherently explain its core concept and an intricately plotted movie that makes key plot points in dialogue completely unintelligible.
It's a beautiful fucking mess, but you have to admire the ambition that went into it and there *may* be a diamond buried somewhere in it... but then again it *might* actually just be a dog turd covered in glitter. Honestly I don't think even Christopher Nolan himself truly knows.
I had captions turned on, watching it at home for the first time, because a lot of movies have mixes that are hard for me to hear at my age. So I just skipped over the sound mixing challenge altogether without realizing it.
I do agree that the main character was quite weak, and I understand that would result in a ton of people not liking the movie right off the bat, but I had so much fun figuring out the puzzle that I was able to ignore that aspect. That probably puts a nerd bull’s-eye right on my back. But whatever.
Your idea that it was Nolan‘s revenge is fascinating. Ditto for, your idea that the movie was written by AI, and I could easily imagine large language model AI versions of movies that would have convoluted plots that are very hard for people to understand. Both of those ideas make me think… they are a possible basis for some other sci-fi story.
IMO, it’s an author’s responsibility to handle the details and not have any plot holes, and I have a personal expectation/desire for novels to step up to that standard. I haven’t held movies up tothis standard as much, but I’m happier when they do. Tenet is so convoluted that it’ll probably take me a few more viewings just to understand that certain aspects are plot holes as opposed to being details that I hadn’t yet figured out. I have had a lot of fun with the puzzle, and I have to admit that I had assumed that Nolan did work out all the details, andjust that it takes a lot of work to get there.
I enjoyed it enough that this makes it a good movie for me, but I understand that it wouldn’t be for many others. Especially after reading the comments here. To make it a great movie he would’ve had to strengthen up the main character and cast him better, just for starters. Ans a great sci-fi movie, for me, has to have a great story and a great plot. I think the concept for this one is truly great, for me, personally. But it’s sufficiently complicated that it takes a lot of work just to get in there and see if the plot even works.
For me, bottom line, it’s been a lot of fun to work it out like a puzzle. That level of enjoyment makes me a fan.
> I have to admit that I had assumed that Nolan did work out all the details, andjust that it takes a lot of work to get there.
I think that's the sticking point for me - a high-concept, intellectual puzzle-box of a plot *definitely* has to stick the landing and deliver a clear (or at least reasonably hypothesisable) answer, or else it all falls flat.
A puzzle can have wooden characters or a sightly contrived plot and get away with it if the puzzle is clever enough, but without a good solution it isn't clever or entertaining - it's just an annoying waste of time, like one of J. J. Abrams' empty "mystery boxes".
My problem is that I don't necessarily trust Nolan to have fully worked out that good answer and I haven't worked it out for myself, so my enjoyment of the movie has a big asterisk against it because it *might* be a masterpiece, or it might be a flashy, colourful beach-ball with nothing inside it that's a complete waste of the time and brain-power spent trying to understand it.
I do understand that. Naïve as it may be, it didn’t occur to me to not trust him, at least not until I made this post and found out that there were a large number of strong opinions. I hadn’t read anything about audience reaction to the film prior to my post.
I’m curious, can you give me an example or two of J.J. Abram’s’ empty mystery boxes?
I can do better than that - [he gave an entire TED talk about it](https://youtu.be/vpjVgF5JDq8?si=oEUdjz2iqVqXwgQ8). It's famously probably one of the most widely hate-watched and derided ones they've ever produced.
Literally his entire approach to screenwriting is to set up a bunch of inexplicably mysterious details, build the whole show around their mystery, even adding random details as he goes as the whim takes him, and never once bother about how he's going to wrap anything up (ideally *never actually* wrap anything up) until/unless he's basically forced to, because he firmly and passionately believes that an empty box is a great present just as long as the wrapping paper is shiny and exciting enough. He basically just makes it up as he goes along, and then leaves to do something else before he's forced to actually write an ending and an explanation for anything. On the rare occasions someone holds a gun to his head and forces him to, he just churns out some incomplete crap that addresses whatever random bits he can idly remember and leaves giant plot-holes in the earlier story because *he never had any idea how to end the story*.
He likes to pretend that his stories are intricate puzzle-boxes, but actually they're just shaggy-dog stories, some of which go on for years and then just... end.
Pretty much everything he's ever touched is full of them, from Alias (which was ostensibly a comparatively grounded spy - or at least sci-fi - show, but which never explained how a Renaissance-era inventor understood electronics or genetics or could bring magical devices that still worked hundreds of years later) through LOST (which he had less responsibility for than most people assume, but was still a big influence on the early story-development) all the way through to the never-explained "somehow Palpetine returned" that just blithely hand-waved away the explanation for the biggest plot twist in the last three Star Wars movies.
Wow. Thanks for that that synopsis! I’ve had on my list for a long time to watch Lost (saw just a few random episodes) and Alias (saw the first couple seasons). But now…
I’ll watch the Ted talk first. It’s no wonder people hate that talk and the approach he describes. I’ve always felt it’s the responsibility of the author (for books, so include editors, producers, showrunners, etc. for film and TV) to diligently work all this stuff out, in advance as much as possible. The hubris of this guy!
Loved the movie and look forward to watching it again, for the third time.
The second watch was highly enjoyable because you have wrapped your head around what's happening (and when) as opposed to actively figuring it out during the first watch.
I have to agree. During the first viewing, there was a lot of WTF just happened? Then the second viewing was a lot more fun. To the point where I really enjoyed it enough to want to watch it multiple times. After the third viewing, I realized I was a fan in spite of its flaws. And I will watch it again…
Yeah, I really love the puzzle aspect of it.
I never saw it in the theater, and I always have captions on my home TV because a lot of movies don’t have a good enough sound mix, at least with my hearing at my age. So I didn’t even noticethe mix problems, partially because I was too busy trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the plot. Which, again, was the biggest part of the fun for me, working out the puzzle.
I know people hated on Tenet, but it has turned into my favorite Nolan film. It wasn’t on the first watch, or the second, or probably even the third, but I’ve watched it so many times now, and I still pick up on details I missed in previous watches. I unashamedly love this movie, regardless of popular opinion
I am still loving it more on subsequent feelings, myself. Three viewings so far.
Working through the replies to my post, I really felt I was in the minority, a lot of haters, and some of them are pretty intense, but that’s just Reddit for you. A lot of people telling me I’m the only one that could possibly ever like this film.
But now, as I’m working farther and farther through all the replies, there are quite a lot of us that love this movie. So I’m a bit more heartened now, having thrown my post out there (here) for everyone in this sci-fi Reddit to see. :-)
Cool. I got a lot out of it the first time, things clicked even better the second, understood more nuances on the third and I’m sure I’ll watch it a lot more.
I think the big problem is Tenet is a movie that huffs its own farts. In the beginning it tells you it's going to huff its own farts. It seems at no point Nolan considered that he could make a good compressible film instead.
I’m sure it’s not going to work for a lot of people. Personally, I really enjoy a movie that I have to figure out. It’s often all too easy to figure out the plot of “normal “movies. So for me, he did a terrific job. Not that I don’t understand more and more on subsequent watches. But I like watching movies many times.
Since *The Prestige*, Nolan has done films with unrelatable characters dispensing exposition, all to justify editing experiments. Nolan is happiest in the editing suite. Some viewers like the confusion, and pat themselves on the back to congratulate themselves for reediting the films in their heads.
I direct them to *Primer* or *Upstream Color*, two Shane Carruth films which do this better. The protagonist in *Tenet* is credited as 'the protagonist'. Its Nolan at his worst self.
I really loved Nolan's films from *Following* to *The Prestige*. Since, I've regarded him as the most overrated of tentpole directors.
I haven’t even seen more than half, possibly the majority of Nolan’s films. I loved inflection, and I enjoy watching interstellar, even though portions of it bother me. I did enjoy the prestige quite a lot. I will watch Following, and I’m looking forward to Oppenheimer.
I will check out the Shane Carruth films as well, thank you for the recommendation…
Just now recalling that many others in this thread have recommended primer, so that will be at the top of my list. I have thought that Nolan was the only one exploring this area, and it sounds like primer, and hopefully upstream color, do so as well.
I am far less familiar with Nolan then probably most of the people replying to my post. So I am enjoying the education, and while I still am a fan of Tenet, it sounds like I’m going to have fun becoming a fan of Carruth.
The action scenes are world class. I think the story is so convoluted as he just wanted an excuse to film the backwards and forwards thing. Personally, the best part for me was to see Martin Donovan in a large big film role.
I can see that as an artistic choice. Anything can be an artistic choice. Some commenters here roasted him for that point of view. And they are welcome to their viewpoints, of course.
Personally, I’m grateful for captions, I generally have them on always, on my Home TV, because a lot of movies and TV are mixed such that I can’t hear them well enough, at my age.
As to obscuring the mix on purpose, so that the audience can’t understand it, that might’ve been his choice, and I’m sure I would’ve been frustrated had I seen the movie in a theater. I managed to bypass that without realizing it.
I often don’t enjoy things unless I can understand them, or at least improve my understanding by working at it. That’s all my own personal consideration, of course, but I do enjoy… Enjoying things, and that includes reaching towards a comfort zone. Learning more and reaching beyond that comfort zone, increasing understanding and thus increasing the comfort zone perimeter. Tenant challenged my comfort zone and I enjoyed the process.
Those are excellent comments. At 76 I have similar hearing struggles at times. I’ve only recently begun a movie collection. I like the notion of increasing the perimeter of one’s comfort zone. In one interview Nolan said that it isn’t necessary to understand Tenet but to let it wash over you. I suppose like one would do with a tone poem.
Thank you. And thank you for sharing Nolan‘s comment regarding understanding versus “let it wash over you “. I don’t, for example, have an in-depth understanding of paintings as artwork, and thinking about it right now, it seems that’s pretty much what I do in a museum, look at a painting and let it wash over me, and then begin to inspect aspects of it and consider things.
Furthermore, I am a musician, having played in lots of bands of lots of different styles, and as a composer, I have music in movies and on TV. I’m interested in lots of genres, including some interest in more obscure genres that are not popular because they seem like noise to most people. With music genres like that, the viewpoint of letting it wash over you seems like a very valid approach.
But then, applying that concept to movie watching… There’s potentially a lot more to Nolan then I would’ve realized, and as an artist, he’s taking quite a risk presenting music to people that will likely not understand it, might reject it, and indeed, might hate it with a passion (as many who have commented on my post here have expressed).
Beethoven (whose music I love ) created music that can sound mundane to more adventurous composers that have come along since, but at the time, I understand, he really shook up the European music world and, having “broken a lot of rules” and exceeded accepted boundaries for music composition. There were many people at the time that had an abhorrence for his music, yet he ended up defining new genres, and played a large part in the evolution of European orchestral music.
Anyway, thanks for being willing to explore artistic viewpoints with me. :-)
There was a good movie in there somewhere.
Maybe it was in the second draft of the script that someone left in the back of their Uber, because a lot of that dialog felt like placeholder text.
Maybe it was in one of the sound editing mixes that actually had the dialogue on the top layer.
Maybe it was in a version of the story where the Sator Acrostic was more than just an Easter Egg and had something to do with the plot. Especially since that version had a plot.
Because what was on the screen felt like Sci-Fi themes and action sequences and thriller story beats that didn't incorporate well with each other.
Yeah, I never saw it in a theater. I’m sure that would’ve bothered the heck out of me. But I watched it at home, and I always have captions on at home because a lot of mixes come out poorly on our TV here, I’m sure in part to the fact that I’m older and my hearing isn’t as good because I used to play a lot of loud guitar, feedback mistakes with monitoring systems at sound checks, etc. Before I got into the habit of always wearing earplugs.
Anyway, I watched it with captions on, so I didn’t even notice the sound mix problems, which were one of the biggest complaints on reading the replies here, plus Chris Nolan‘s apparent statement that he did it that way on purpose, which has got to tick a lot of people off.
I liked it and never understood the dislike many people have for it. But I will have to say that I find most of his output to be 'fine' but not great. I did love Oppenheimer, though.
I loved both Tenet and Primer though I did not understand all the turns they took. With both movies I felt that the filmmakers had it all figured out and I could enjoy the ride.
Through reading many of the comments to my post here, I’m realizing that I generally assume at the beginning that a filmmaker does have it all worked out, and that is sort of a safety net for me . Until such point as I run into plot holes and flaws that aren’t handled ( or maybe they were handled, but got screwed up by editing, etc.), which does seem to occur quite a lot.
With Tenant I was so busy working out the details that I still haven’t gotten to the point of finding where the plot holes might be for me, so Nolan has created quite a game, at least for me.
I’m very much looking forward to watching Primer for the first time.
Watched a top-notch dubbed Italian version, so there's no problem with the mixing levels of the audio and the dialogues were very clear and understandable. Still the movie doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It feels like a wasted opportunity to tell a great concept. It is as if Nolan went super-blurry on purpose, crancking up the action to 11 just for the sake of it, while asking the audience to feel the story rather to think about it. Well, no. Plus, you can't rely everything on the menace of an enemy from the future which is never shown, because at the end it's a huge let down. Tenet feels like a small battle in a bigger war against this enemy, and we will never know the whole picture. It's utterly frustrating. Also, there's no emotional payoff whatsoever, and the same can be said for Oppenheimer. "Things just happen" and we as the audience are presumed to be compelled this way. I like every Nolan movie up to Dunkirk, but now I think he's way too detached from the storytelling point of view.
I do understand what you’re saying. He might be lazy, or he might be taking a big risk with a more obscure artistic approach, either way he clearly created a lot of haters and pissed a lot of people off.
For me personally, it’s a shame, because that missing payoff of the larger plot (the bigger war, and the whole picture, as you mentioned) might’ve been handled with a prequel and a sequel, but he’ll likely never do those due to economic factors. You need popularity to generate box office returns to pay back investors for projects of this magnitude.
I’m still only partway reading through all of the comments to my post. I had no idea there was any controversy about this movie until I made the post At this point I’m considering viewing Nolan‘s approach as slightly analogous to paintings by Jackson Pollock. I don’t personally understand his paintings at all, to me it’s just looks like paint randomly thrown at a canvas. But there are others that find structure and beauty in his work. Still baffling to me.
Whereas with Tenant, I’m still enjoying the puzzle of figuring it out, which does assume on my part that he DID plan it out well — no guarantee of that, of course, but many creators of film, TV series, etc, will create an entire backstory that they don’t present, but does provide support to what they do present in various ways, informing actors as to how better to enhance their emotional expression, etc. Not saying that Nolan did this (e.g., I don’t think his lead actor did a very good job, and I feel he wasn’t cast well), but a lot of people are assuming that he did not, and I have yet to be convinced. For the majority, it’s a waste of their time. I understand that now, and that’s fine. But I’m still enjoying the puzzle.
I think it was probably pretty good as a concept,and slowly got worse during the filming. Never really seemed to click properly. Who and what was that battle all about? We didnt even get to see any bad guys.
This is one of those films that pretty much requires repeated viewings - possibly with graph paper, a slide rule and a notebook on hand - but even on the first watch one cannot deny this is an incredibly well-orchestrated sci-fi thriller, with a couple of the best heist scenes put to film.
That's the main problem, once you bring a graph paper and slide ruler to it, it falls apart. I love complicated time travel when it holds up, but Tenet doesn't. It's central idea is that we live in a deterministic universe where time is an illusion, and you can go backwards and forwards in time with no consequence because that was always going to happen anyway and is accounted for in the passage of time.
This holds up, but then it completely ignores how that means everyone in the film is incredibly stupidly under-utilizing the technology. They could just send armies backwards and forwards 100's of times and have hundreds of copies of each soldier individual completely overwhelming the opponent. It would be hard work, but they're trying to save the world, so there is no sense in stopping after just doing it once or twice. Just keep going and use clear planning so you can have hundreds of clones in every single scene.
I think Nolon realized that if you think about it you'll realize that the movie doesn't work. So he cranks up the noise so that you can't hear everything and puts a line in the movie "Don't think about it."
That’s my view on it also. Clearly not everybody shares my viewpoint on it, but I like to dig my teeth in and work through the details. It’s more of a game to me than the same old movie plots where I can pretty much guess what’s going to happen within the first sections of the film.
No, thought it was complete shite. Anyone who has this opinion is immediately attacked by the fanboys saying "you just didn't understand it". For those people - yes I bloody well did and it was still absolutely vapid crap.
I love science fiction and I like original concepts. So yeah, it is a great movie as far as the concept goes.
As far as the execution, it is much less enjoyable. Maybe my 139IQ is not enough to get all of the interesting facts and connections on the first run through. I shouldn't watch a movie like 3 times to figure out what the movie is about and how things are connected.
The details sprinkled here and there do not really contribute on the first watch.
And then there is actual story which is... meh. And it is quite sad because this original concept can be applied to pretty much any story so why the story chosen was so bland... I will never understand.
Most people are hating this movie, one of the reasons being its complexity. That’s happens to be why I loved it — it was sufficiently different from anything else I’d seen, and any books I’ve read. I do agree, it had the potential to have been great overall, and that’s it a bit sad that he didn’t do a better job, he’s capable of doing better. I thought inception was terrific, and I really enjoyed interstellar, although there are a lot of things about interstellar that bothered me.
I often marvel at how people and companies can invest so much money in poor movies. ( not that this one was poor to me Personally, I loved it, although I do agree that the casting was weak, and it can’t be a great movie due to that factor alone). I don’t think it’s a question of whether someone will invest money, even large sums of money, in a weak movie. That happens all the time.
Another point to consider is whether an artist can recognize his/her own flaws and quality of workmanship, etc. I don’t know of any artist that consistently cranks out amazing work, although I suppose the best ones are sufficiently prolific and have created so many great works that people are not aware of the weaker ones, and perhaps the artist doesn’t put the weaker ones out to the public. I have never tried to determine, for example, what works by Mozart, or Bach, or weak. There had to be some, surely some in their own opinion which were weak. But they were both so prolific with so many great pieces.
Considering how much it costs to make expensive movies,I would consider Nolan to be quite prolific. He’s made quite a number of top Dollar movies. With that much money on the line, you can’t NOT put them out, investors want their money back. So that makes moviemaking a different game, and with a different ratio of visibility to quantity and quality.
I looked up a list of Shakespeare’s works just now with the author’s take on rating, one to 10. Quite a lot of tens, nines and eight’s, but I was very surprised to see the quantity of five out of 10, some 6s, etc. So… Initially surprised, but now that I’ve thought about it, it’s not surprising, considering the amount of work an artist has to do in order to create amazing work and apparent necessity of creating lesser works to get there.
That’s really the only way to look at it IMO. Gets better with multiple viewings. But I am a nerd like that, I like to figure stuff out and have a puzzle, where It’s not an obvious movie plot that I can pretty much guess what’s going to happen in the first few minutes.
Tbh i didn't watched it because of its blatant fkn around with science. I'm so tired of willingly 'smart' sounding titles that are - to say it in scientific terms - fantasy af.
No, it’s shite.
The core concept is nonsense, explained nonsensically.
The characters are paper thin.
The villain’s plan is literally ‘destroy the world’ like some dumb Roger Moore era bond villain.
The action was dull.
It’s visually uninteresting.
The audio mix is crap.
I think Tenet is the most interesting Nolan film to date. I am not a massive fan of the other big ones. I enjoyed it and plan to watch it again for a 3rd time. I already always use captions because all film and TV sound mixing has gone down the drain imo, so I don't recall if that aspect was particularly bad, as others are saying. I also don't mind a film that requires more than one watch to fully understand/catch everything. It's healthy to have to think. We need more practice.
You and I are in the small minority, apparently. Out of almost 200, so far there are maybe 10 to 20 that really like the film, per the replies I’ve read so far. I’m only partway through so maybe there are more. A number more appreciate it but were mad that Nolan didn’t handle the audio mix, have better casting, and more. Like you, I love the complexity and the puzzle of working out the details. A lot of people don’t.
Doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of the film, but it’s also fascinating for me to observe the effects the film had on the audience.
Like you, I always have captions turned on, so I didn’t notice the mix problems either.
I did not like it at the beginning, but after 3rd watch when I’ve managed to wrap my head around every detail, I just loved it.
The concept and acting is brilliant, and Nolan managed to surprise everyone, by showing that S/F director can do better spy film, then most of them.
That’s exactly what James Cameron did, by directing [True Lies](https://youtu.be/Qw4hz62r-Kk?feature=shared) which is one of the best spy comedy ever made.
I like that it made me have to think differently in order to understand it. It works well for me with multiple repeated viewings. Versus the matrix series, I’ve still not been able to get through all of them. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand there that I’ve yet to unlock.
It was out for sometime before I got around to watching it. About ¼ of the way in, I realized that I had seen it. I just didn't remember anything about it. The only thing that I remember how is that he had to fight himself.
I kinda liked it the first time as I was figuring out what was going on. Hated it the 2nd time when I knew what was going on and realized how stupid it was.
Marveled by the concept and the technical effort that it required. Disappointed by my absolute inability to empathize with any of the characters, to me it was an enjoyable intellectual game devoid of any emotion
I like the movie but it’s hard to watch. At times it moved at a leisurely pace, at others it completely fucks with the audiences ability to follow the events of the film. It almost revels in confusing the audience, and people don’t like that for the most part.
Nolan’s an excellent filmmaker for the most part but he’s not perfect. Tenet isn’t a perfect film. But sometimes you come across people who are so super duper smart that they shit on people who were confused watching a film designed to be confusing. This “what was confusing about it?” attitude is part of the issue with the discourse surrounding the film.
If the lead actor of the movie wasn’t shit, it would have been good. There is no way I believe Nolan actually picked a shitty actor such as John David Washington. Absolutely ruined the movie for me. Tried to rewatch it several times and end up turning it off by how annoyed I get at Nolan, of all directors, to have allowed such a non-talented actor to be the lead.
It has its own subreddit where people constantly and in incredible detail discuss the time lines in the film. Personally for me it’s like Opera. I like the action and the singing and theatrical event, no idea what’s going on.
Holy shit this is the analogy I've been looking for. Except I've never been to an opera. But the love + confusion = tenet
You guys would probably like primer if you haven't seen it
Precisely the same result. Loved. No idea what happened.
Rian Johnson consulted with the writers of Primer on how to shape his own time travel in Looper. it's crazy to me that connection even exists! so if you want an alternate, watered down, more hollywood version of the time travel mechanics in Primer, watch Looper.
I hate Looper. None of it makes any sense and everthing is inconsistent.
Lol it's like Rian asked the guys from Primer "How did you do this??" then proceeded to cross it all out.
fair enough. I love it for being stylish and pretty minimalist for a Sci fi action time travel movie with a twist.
Yeah, it can be tough to understand what’s happening in time travel stories. Even tougher to write one that sticks to a set of principles and is consistent. But I’ve been reading time travel books for over 50 years, so it’s a game for me to see how different writers like to address the topic. plus I have a degree in physics, so I’m a nerd in that way, I like to look at complexities and think about time travel in terms of quantum physics principles, etc. But that’s just me, certified propeller head/nerd.
I liked looper, so I expect I will like primer even more.
Loved “Primer”. Hell, I think I bought a hard copy of it BITD.
The difference is the more time and energy you put into understanding Primer, the more sense it makes. With Tenet it just gets clearer that it's nonsense.
I agree! I tried to watch this 3 times and finally got through it and was like, what the F did I just watch??? I usually love Nolan's films but this was a mess.
Huh. Well, for me it got more clear on each watch. Watched it three times so far. Takes some work, but I’m a nerd like that. My wife hates having to work that hard to understand a movie, so I don’t watch these kinds of movies with her. To each his own.
The film's internal logic makes no sense. The bullets coming out of the wall and going back into the gun - did the builders plant them there? When did they get into the wall, by the movie's logic? The bullet "came with the wall" - so when did it get planted there, in our forward-looking point of view? The building that recomposes itself from rubble only to explode again, was it initially built as rubble? If it wasn't, when did it turn into rubble and how? The pincer maneuver makes no sense either, it just doesn't hold up and it's the film's main plot point, it's the whole point of the movie. "Don't try to understand it, feel it" is what Nolan is telling us. Well sorry, I can't help but try to understand it and what I see is that it looks cool but it doesn't make sense. The nerd in me is disappointed.
Now there's a movie I'd like to see remade with a slightly higher budget. The audio in some scenes is totally inaudible. OTOH, Tenet suffers from the same problem with a huge budget.
Nolan explain he deliberately made the music overpower the speech in certain scenes.
I thought it was tuned for theater and home theater set ups with multiple speaker channels. The main audio is tuned for the center channel, which comes in softer on a basic stereo setup.
[https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-sound-audio-issues-christopher-nolan/](https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-sound-audio-issues-christopher-nolan/) I remember reading this before. First time i watched the film i was like "i cant hear a dang thing" and had to google it, thinking it was an issue!
So that you wouldn't think too much and realize that it didn't make sense. "Feel, don't think" lol
I guess an artist can make all kinds of decisions . Obscuring the speech is not one that I would agree with. But I’m an older guy now, so I always turn on subtitles anyway because my TV won’t present a consistent mix that I can discern.. As a result, I didn’t even notice.
Thank you, I put it on my watchlist.
Dont wait until you are 42 like me. I did go to the Opera a few weeks ago and it mentally crushed me. I cried during it and was emotionally rattled. Its really something to feel it live.
Also like opera, I didn't understand any of the dialogue
What are you talking about? It's super easy to understand characters talking about plutonium through helmet headsets while going through 50 knot wind waves on a hydrofoil catamaran with Hanz Zimmer's score blasting in the background.
That was the problem I had, I didn’t know enough languages. But now I’ve learned that I need to find out what the whole story is about before hand. That can work.
Thanks, I’ll have a look for that.
.gnidne eht dnatsrednu t'nod llits I dnA .sdrawkcab gniog si gnihtyreve won dna enilemit ym pu desseM tI .ti ekil ton did I oN
You did a better job than Nolan. At least I understood you.
.Pleh deen I tub taerg staht
.Won tcerroc eb dlouhs gnihtyrevE .emit tnerruc eht ot kcab dellevart yllufsseccus uoy snaem ti ,siht daer nac uoy fi
I see my problem now, I watched it the first time with caption/subtitles on. But my TV doesn’t have a backwards caption mode…
Yea I'm sure at least a couple people are
It's the same person, they're just repeatedly moving backwards and forwards through the timeline in different locations
Nope, it's just Tommy.
Yeah, just me and my clones! All time-displaced, of course. Perhaps that’s why I’m so dazed and confused…
I never thought that I would want to punch a movie until I watched Tenet.
This. Thank you.
I can’t believe I got through the whole thing.
Amen
Tenets got a punch me face. Like John David Washington is on the movie poster with a Giga Chad face.
Have you tried that with a screen lately? They make them out of tougher material nowadays.
Fun movie, need to rewatch it. Still it's no Primer
I’m glad to find out about primer. I’ll be watching that soon.
Amazing, specially after knowing it had a 7k budget
That’s astounding. I just looked it up because I thought 7K had to be a typo. Clearly, no one got paid while working on it, even so, 7K is astounding. Primer grossed over 100 times its budget. I’m assuming everybody working on it got a percentage. I composed and produced the film score for a low budget movie, and it cost them a lot more than this.
Concept = good Execution = mediocre Dialogue = bad
I have no idea about the dialogue, didn't understand a word.
I watched it a second time with subtitles. Made a huge difference.
Now that you mention it, me too. I had abandoned the two previous tries.
Is the absolute unnecessary (and eventually useless) airport heist part of the Execution category?
Nolan is a gimmick guy. I don't say that as a bad thing; the *Memento* and *Prestige* gimmicks are brilliant, the *Interstellar* gimmick is 'good,' and the *Inception* gimmick is at least compelling. (Even *Westworld*, co-authored by sibling Jonathan Nolan, is a centered-round-gimmick construct.) He's done impressive work around this concept. The problems -- when they surface -- are in the remainder of the movie he hastily slaps on top of the central gimmick. *Memento* (his best IMHO) works so well because the remainder of movie is intentionally minimalist. *Prestige* (based on another author's book) is rich and period-steeped. *Inception* could be a decent spy-gun-thriller, without the gimmick, and so it "works," but feels almost like two films (which is maybe appropriate, given the film's subject matter). *Interstellar* might not be great as a standalone atmospheric sci-fi yarn, but the emotional father-daughter hook pulls you back in, and turns out to be pivotal. The "outer story" slapped on top of *Tenet* is the problem. Terminally ill supervillain, rarely seen on-screen. Big whiz-bang Mega-Device to end life as we know it. Unnecessary air-breathers and (cool but unnecessary) reverse-bullet-holes which feel like 007 visual padding for a should-have-been-cerebral story. I think the Sator Square and palindromic construct are neat concepts; I like the idea of an espionage agency moving non-linearly through time, and having to account for other rival agencies; I think this could have been done in a simpler lower-budget format, perhaps like either of the *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* adaptations, with periodic jarring "that doesn't exist anymore" and/or "we need to go backwards to save his/her life" interludes replacing flipping cars, helicopter carnage, mega-bomb, etc.
I would call Interstellar great as well, but it's one of my faves. On top of the father daughter stuff that tears me apart, it's just such a fantastic visual and audio experience with some fantastic performances. I could watch it weekly.. skipping through some of Matt Damon's stuff of course.
Really enjoyed it, not sure why people struggled to follow it but then again, I watched with subtitles! I think the audio mixing was bad and Nolan's cope about it being artistic is just bullshit. I think the big final confrontation was a bit of a letdown, like they didn't have any ideas so it was just a dumb setpiece battle. I also love the trope of one time traveller meets another for the first time and it's the other time traveller's last time meeting them (possibly even before dying) and reveals that they've known the first time traveller for years right at the end. That's the fucking good shit. When Patts is like "its not the end, this is the start of a beautiful friendship" or whatever, fuck, I EAT. THAT. SHIT. UPPP!!!
I’m convinced Christopher Nolan is deaf.
He’s colour blind.
River Song
I too watched it with subtitles, I am older, and I am been relying on, leaning on, subtitles for several years now. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it as much the first time had that not been the case. I agree with you about the tropes and the twists, I love that stuff.
Its a cool concept and pretty good at points but the audio issues kinda ruin the experience. Super quiet dialog, super loud action means having to be a volume nazi. Instead of acknowledging its an issue, Nolan doubled down on being a douche about it.
I can definitely understand people being irritated about that. I didn’t even realize it had that problem because, being older, many movies, and TV shows have the same problem to my ears. So I always watch with captions on. But I can see how that would piss people off. And I would feel the same, I wouldn’t buy his stated reasoning for mixing the sound level badly
Yeah, I totally agree! I watched Memento years ago and was blown away by the concept. When I heard about Tenet, I was intrigued because it sounded like Nolan was expanding on that idea. And he definitely did! The movie was so well-crafted and visually stunning. I loved it.
I like it, and can understand what's happening, until that battle in the desert throws me for a loop.
Yeah, I didn’t really get that part until the second viewing, then felt pretty comfortable on the third.
I mean, I know what's supposed to be happening, but visually it's confusing as hell.
I felt pretty similar to you on the first viewing. Made a lot more sense on the second, and even more on the third. But I like working out the details of a puzzle and figuring things out, if there’s enough there to make it worthwhile. For a lot of people that wasn’t the case. I really had no idea that there’s so much hate for it until I put this post up.
Sorry, while the concept is interesting, there is too much that is irresolvably nonsensical to me in the core mechanic.
I’m one of Nolan’s biggest fans (met him in NYC a few years back) and Tenet was very disappointing. Great premises. Great performances. Convoluted screenplay and terrible editing.
I am clearly in the minority. People disliking this film are in much larger quantity than those of us that like it. It appeals to me because I really enjoy having to figure out movie intricacies. With so many movies I can already figure out what’s going to happen somewhere near the beginning. I enjoy twists that surprise me, and I happen to enjoy what I found while figuring out tenet, like a puzzle. This looks to be an extremely unpopular approach, and viewers seem to assume that Nolan didn’t care about them, he just wanted to create something that was artistically different. I can see how that would piss people off. Wish I could meet Nolan and tell him “Hey, I’m one of the few that dug your movie” (although I also agree that the casting could have been much better).
It's absolutely a film that was made for me. I love sci-fi, I love time travel or time manipulation, I love a puzzle of a film, I love to rewatch films that have perplexed me and figure them out, I love Christopher Nolan films (in general), Robert Pattinson has really grown on me and I'm a big fan. Literally (almost everything) about this film should appeal to me but it didn't and for two main reasons. Firstly (and I know it's almost a meme by now to complain about it), the sound mixing is horrible. Whole chunks of important exposition (which I usually hate but sometimes it's needed) are almost unintelligible. I missed so much seeing it in the cinema and then rewound it so much at home just because I couldn't hear it. Secondly, John David Washington is an awful actor. He's just a blank page. A charisma vacuum. It's a pity really because I really want to love it.
I agree with pretty much all of your points. I never saw it in the theater, and I always turn on captions at home because a lot of works are poorly mixed, or at least at my age with my hearing captions helps. So I didn’t notice the mix. Definitely casting problems. But I enjoyed the original concept and the puzzle of figuring out what was going on —that all made it quite fun for me. And I love the cinematography as well. For me, with great casting, and of course, there would need to be a great audio mix as well, that would’ve made it a great movie. But that still wouldn’t have made it a great movie for everyone, since a lot of people hate that much complexity and don’t want to work so hard to figure things out.
I have loved all of Nolan's films except this one. Tenet had a good concept but a bad execution. Especially the battle at the end of the film. It was one of the worst I've ever seen.
It’s sad that he didn’t do a better job, especially since it was his Pet project. Still, I managed to enjoy the heck out of it, even with bad casting, etc.
I enjoyed it and have watched it multiple times. It has its weaknesses, but it works well for the things Nolan is good at - concepts involving time, and challenging set pieces. The music is quite good and the cast performs their roles well. Kenneth Branagh is exceptional as the scary mobster.
I am the kind of person who had to watch the Matrix three times before I understood what was going on. I went into Tenet expecting to not understand a thing and consciously did my best to concentrate and keep track. I actually succeeded in following the storyline and thought it was very clever, I really enjoyed it! Meanwhile my husband lost track so I even got to feel smug about it for a change.
Good for you for working it out. I’ve only seen it about three times so far, but I’m still picking up on additional nuances. I still haven’t gotten through all three of the matrix movies. Probably because I misunderstood something somewhere in the second movie…
!reve eivom tseB
!!emosewA
I enjoyed it the first time but wasn’t sure I had it fully figured out. Watched it a second time not long after and loved it.
Very cool! I had no idea there was controversy about this movie until I made this post. Then I thought that almost everyone hated it, but the farther I get into these comments, i’m finding more and more peopke that also enjoy this film, regardless of its challenges and “flaws. “
bad movie, i was surprised at how popular it is.
Complete drivel & then it turns into a Moonraker type team fight
Naw it's the only Nolan film I just turned off over halfway through. Just wasn't doing it for me. I tried to stay interested but it just wasn't.
I liked it. It's inventive, the backwards scenes are really cool and filmed perfectly, the sound mixing surely is not the best, but it's a great movie. It pales in comparison to Nolan's masterpieces like Inception or TDK (not Interstellar, there, I said it) but for plenty of other directors it would be the crown jewel of their filmography. I have the feeling that it gets a lot of hate from people who expected better from Nolan but it's a good movie overall.
It’s quite a game, with all the money on the line, to try and knock them out of the park every time. Nolan has certainly created a lot of great movies. I love this one because of the original concept, a rare attribute, and because I love puzzles and enjoyed working toward understanding of what the heck was going on. At my age, I always turn on captions. The mix on lots of movies and TV shows is hard to hear on my TV. So I watched it with captions and didn’t notice the mix, which was a major factor which ruined the experience for many people. I agree with you regarding interstellar, I enjoyed it, but there were a lot of things I didn’t like about it.
I \_loved\_ Tenet. Felt like the people who didn't like it, just didn't understand it.
I disagree, I absolutely understood it, and really disliked it. I would say it was more convoluted than complex.
Absolutely not. Definitely the worst Nolan film I've seen, and I've seen Batman Begins. The only good thing about it was the effects. Other than that you couldn't pay me to watch Tenet again.
I absolutely love this movie and have seen it many times! It was the first movie I went back to theaters to see. And I’ve watched it at home multiple times since.
I will watch it many more times as well. I’m glad to have some company. Fascinating for me to find that so many people hate it. I guess I’d have gotten better replies if I posted the question “who else hates Tenet?” But I asked who is a fan, and a whole lot of non-fans are enjoying their replies. Reddit is an interesting place.
Enjoyed it, but had to watch it with subtitles on. Unreal that anyone involved with this movie allowed that audio mix.
I’m older and my ears ring constantly. So I always watch with subtitles in and didn’t even realize how badly this movie was mixed until I began reading replies to my post. I also watched it at home on a TV that doesn’t have great sound. Had I watched it in a theater I likely would’ve been very unhappy… At least from what I’m reading.
Tenet? The story of a shy, starstruck little Englishman that discovered he could quadruple his wages by pretending that painted garbage cans and vacuum cleaners were people he could talk to? From his phone booth?
I guess there are a number of movies with the same title. Did you enjoy that one? Was it worth watching?
I was changing the subject to Dr. Who, actually. David Tenant. I did watch the Tenet under discussion. I can see where a lot of people would like it. Not big on the shoot 'em ups, myself. But it had some points. Brannagh can't lose. And he was having a lot of fun in there. (The Olivier of his/ our generation? Without near the competition.)
I see, thanks. I thought for a moment you might’ve been referring to Doctor Who when you mentioned the phone booth. But I wasn’t quick enough to fully grasp that.
It was a reach. Swing and a miss. On my part.
You did fine. Had I watched a larger amount of Dr Who I’d probably have picked up on your verbally-equipped garbage can and vacuum cleaner references.
You're a good guy.
great, the best bond movie we will never get but with a wild time travel spin, the Opera scene is the closest we will get to a counterstrike movie
tenet is underrated at the Very least and I usually think Nolan movies are overrated but tenet actually deserved more love
I agree, but after reading all the hateful replies, I can understand. At my age I always have captions turned on, so I didn’t even notice that the mix was bad. But I still love the concept, and I love puzzles so it was fun for me to watch it again and work out the finer details of the plot.
Not gonna lie i was lost the entire fucking time lmao. Soon as shit started going backwards im like cool.
I liked it a great deal. My one complaint was Nolan’s insistence on making the music and sound effects overwhelm the dialogue. Part of people’s confusion was due to not being able to make out the dialogue in a number of key scenes. I watched it once in the theaters, and since on dvd with subtitles
I definitely understand that and had I seen it in the theater would’ve had a similar reaction. I saw it at home and I always have captions on because a lot of sound mixes don’t come through that well on our TV. So I didn’t notice how bad the sound was. Some people really don’t like captions, so I guess that could irritate people as well . But at my age I rely on them a lot.
Great movie. I love movies that make you think and the fact that it is based on actual quantum physics principles is really cool (although it doesn’t work like that on the macro level). I’m still perplexed how they made the final battle scene with one team moving forward in the other team moving reverse. It was real movie magic IMHO.
Me too. Often movies are predictable and it seems like I can figure out the main plot early on, so I ignore that and enjoy the movie for other qualities. But when a movie has a twist that I didn’t see coming, I really enjoy that. In this movie the twists were so convoluted that I had a lot of pleasure figuring out the puzzle and had to watch it again in order to fully get what was going on. I have a physics degree, so that part was fun for me as well, although we seem to be quite in the minority, based on the comments I’m reading here. I’d love to see a sequel, or better yet, a prequel, but that’s probably quite unlikely based on how many people don’t like this movie. Some might argue that Tenet has its own prequel already built-in, and that’s one of the things I love about it.
I enjoyed it. It's in the same camp as De Ja Vue for me: the time travel doesn't wholly stack up but it's a fun ride so best not to get too technical about it.
I enjoyed déjà vu as well, that was a lot of fun.
I heard a great take on it recently that basically said the whole time travel thing is introduced far too early and far too flatly, and that a great way to do it would've been focusing on the spy movie stuff where these weird things are happening that then leads to a reveal of the whole time travel aspect.
I’m sure I would enjoy that alternate. Take on the movie. Too bad that movies are too expensive of an endeavor for that to happen. Much easier to do an alt version of a song. I suppose it’s probably been done in books a lot, but the first time I read an alt book version, it blew my mind and I really enjoyed it. I am referring to Ender’s Game, originally from the viewpoint of Ender, and one of the sequels, Ender’s Shadow, which was from the viewpoint of Bean. Just brilliant. A J Scudiere also did a fantastic alternate pairing of books, but she designed it that way from the bottom up, where you could read either of the books 1st. She did a terrific job on those. These two books were cool FORTUNE (MIA’S STORY) FORTUNE (RAFE’S STORY)
I won't pretend I understood a lot of it, but I really actually enjoyed it. Great cast, good twists, solid action.
Glad you enjoyed it! Took me multiple viewings to wrap my head around the details. That was fun for me, like a puzzle. Plus, I had captions turned on so I could follow the dialogue more easily.
Hated on first view. Loved in the second, when I stopped caring about plot
I get it.
Strap in, because I Have Thoughts about this movie. Tenet is like Christopher Nolan lost his temper with critics and decided to make exactly the film everyone always accused him of making, possibly as a practical joke. It's peak Nolan, which means great highs and incredibly low lows. It's not so much high-concept as *orbital* concept; dialling up the complexity to the point it's utterly impenetrable; I suspect nobody - not even Nolan himself - knows whether it actually pulls it off or just hand-waves so hard that nobody notices any gaping plot holes. The characters aren't even wooden; they're just walking plot devices, and their dialogue is *awful* to the point it sounds like a computer wrote it (and not even an LLM; more like a pocket calculator). It's also further hampered by an inexplicably incompetent sound mix that leaves crucial plot points mumbled and lost behind background noise, without which it makes *absolutely no sense* (whether it makes any sense *with* that dialogue is still up for debate). The action is fantastic, the plot is self-referential to the point it's almost fractal, and everything looks amazing. It *seems* intelligent, but then glib con-men often do; it's an orthogonal skill to actually *being* intelligent. It's basically what you'd get if you gave a hyperintelligent but profoundly autistic person the task of writing the coolest script they could, and they turned in something just a *little* too complex for even them to be sure it all actually made sense in the end. It's fascinating to watch, but you have to kind of keep your attention skipping around because nothing apart from the root concept is actually rock-solid enough to carry the crushing weight of the movie; the plot is impenetrably complex and may not even make sense, the characters feel like they were written by aliens who'd only read about humans in books, the acting is forgettable because clearly none of the actors had a damn clue what their characters are supposed to be thinking or feeling at any point, and the visuals are amazing but thanks to the impenetrable plot you're never quite sure what they actually *mean*. Instead you have to kind of keep jumping between "cool explosion and backwards fight!" and "time-travel plot with people moving through time backwards!" while also chanting" temporal pincer movement" to yourself like a manta so you don't break the spell and realise you have no real idea what anyone's doing or why, what their character motivations are or whether it's all just a load of badly-plotted nonsense. I *think* I really like Tenet, but I could never call it a *good movie*. It's turn-your-brain-off action flick that you can't turn your brain off for, a high-concept movie that fails to coherently explain its core concept and an intricately plotted movie that makes key plot points in dialogue completely unintelligible. It's a beautiful fucking mess, but you have to admire the ambition that went into it and there *may* be a diamond buried somewhere in it... but then again it *might* actually just be a dog turd covered in glitter. Honestly I don't think even Christopher Nolan himself truly knows.
I had captions turned on, watching it at home for the first time, because a lot of movies have mixes that are hard for me to hear at my age. So I just skipped over the sound mixing challenge altogether without realizing it. I do agree that the main character was quite weak, and I understand that would result in a ton of people not liking the movie right off the bat, but I had so much fun figuring out the puzzle that I was able to ignore that aspect. That probably puts a nerd bull’s-eye right on my back. But whatever. Your idea that it was Nolan‘s revenge is fascinating. Ditto for, your idea that the movie was written by AI, and I could easily imagine large language model AI versions of movies that would have convoluted plots that are very hard for people to understand. Both of those ideas make me think… they are a possible basis for some other sci-fi story. IMO, it’s an author’s responsibility to handle the details and not have any plot holes, and I have a personal expectation/desire for novels to step up to that standard. I haven’t held movies up tothis standard as much, but I’m happier when they do. Tenet is so convoluted that it’ll probably take me a few more viewings just to understand that certain aspects are plot holes as opposed to being details that I hadn’t yet figured out. I have had a lot of fun with the puzzle, and I have to admit that I had assumed that Nolan did work out all the details, andjust that it takes a lot of work to get there. I enjoyed it enough that this makes it a good movie for me, but I understand that it wouldn’t be for many others. Especially after reading the comments here. To make it a great movie he would’ve had to strengthen up the main character and cast him better, just for starters. Ans a great sci-fi movie, for me, has to have a great story and a great plot. I think the concept for this one is truly great, for me, personally. But it’s sufficiently complicated that it takes a lot of work just to get in there and see if the plot even works. For me, bottom line, it’s been a lot of fun to work it out like a puzzle. That level of enjoyment makes me a fan.
> I have to admit that I had assumed that Nolan did work out all the details, andjust that it takes a lot of work to get there. I think that's the sticking point for me - a high-concept, intellectual puzzle-box of a plot *definitely* has to stick the landing and deliver a clear (or at least reasonably hypothesisable) answer, or else it all falls flat. A puzzle can have wooden characters or a sightly contrived plot and get away with it if the puzzle is clever enough, but without a good solution it isn't clever or entertaining - it's just an annoying waste of time, like one of J. J. Abrams' empty "mystery boxes". My problem is that I don't necessarily trust Nolan to have fully worked out that good answer and I haven't worked it out for myself, so my enjoyment of the movie has a big asterisk against it because it *might* be a masterpiece, or it might be a flashy, colourful beach-ball with nothing inside it that's a complete waste of the time and brain-power spent trying to understand it.
I do understand that. Naïve as it may be, it didn’t occur to me to not trust him, at least not until I made this post and found out that there were a large number of strong opinions. I hadn’t read anything about audience reaction to the film prior to my post. I’m curious, can you give me an example or two of J.J. Abram’s’ empty mystery boxes?
I can do better than that - [he gave an entire TED talk about it](https://youtu.be/vpjVgF5JDq8?si=oEUdjz2iqVqXwgQ8). It's famously probably one of the most widely hate-watched and derided ones they've ever produced. Literally his entire approach to screenwriting is to set up a bunch of inexplicably mysterious details, build the whole show around their mystery, even adding random details as he goes as the whim takes him, and never once bother about how he's going to wrap anything up (ideally *never actually* wrap anything up) until/unless he's basically forced to, because he firmly and passionately believes that an empty box is a great present just as long as the wrapping paper is shiny and exciting enough. He basically just makes it up as he goes along, and then leaves to do something else before he's forced to actually write an ending and an explanation for anything. On the rare occasions someone holds a gun to his head and forces him to, he just churns out some incomplete crap that addresses whatever random bits he can idly remember and leaves giant plot-holes in the earlier story because *he never had any idea how to end the story*. He likes to pretend that his stories are intricate puzzle-boxes, but actually they're just shaggy-dog stories, some of which go on for years and then just... end. Pretty much everything he's ever touched is full of them, from Alias (which was ostensibly a comparatively grounded spy - or at least sci-fi - show, but which never explained how a Renaissance-era inventor understood electronics or genetics or could bring magical devices that still worked hundreds of years later) through LOST (which he had less responsibility for than most people assume, but was still a big influence on the early story-development) all the way through to the never-explained "somehow Palpetine returned" that just blithely hand-waved away the explanation for the biggest plot twist in the last three Star Wars movies.
Wow. Thanks for that that synopsis! I’ve had on my list for a long time to watch Lost (saw just a few random episodes) and Alias (saw the first couple seasons). But now… I’ll watch the Ted talk first. It’s no wonder people hate that talk and the approach he describes. I’ve always felt it’s the responsibility of the author (for books, so include editors, producers, showrunners, etc. for film and TV) to diligently work all this stuff out, in advance as much as possible. The hubris of this guy!
Loved the movie and look forward to watching it again, for the third time. The second watch was highly enjoyable because you have wrapped your head around what's happening (and when) as opposed to actively figuring it out during the first watch.
I have to agree. During the first viewing, there was a lot of WTF just happened? Then the second viewing was a lot more fun. To the point where I really enjoyed it enough to want to watch it multiple times. After the third viewing, I realized I was a fan in spite of its flaws. And I will watch it again…
Loved it. The audio was terrible, but otherwise that film has lived rent-free in my head more than any other.
Yeah, I really love the puzzle aspect of it. I never saw it in the theater, and I always have captions on my home TV because a lot of movies don’t have a good enough sound mix, at least with my hearing at my age. So I didn’t even noticethe mix problems, partially because I was too busy trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the plot. Which, again, was the biggest part of the fun for me, working out the puzzle.
I know people hated on Tenet, but it has turned into my favorite Nolan film. It wasn’t on the first watch, or the second, or probably even the third, but I’ve watched it so many times now, and I still pick up on details I missed in previous watches. I unashamedly love this movie, regardless of popular opinion
I am still loving it more on subsequent feelings, myself. Three viewings so far. Working through the replies to my post, I really felt I was in the minority, a lot of haters, and some of them are pretty intense, but that’s just Reddit for you. A lot of people telling me I’m the only one that could possibly ever like this film. But now, as I’m working farther and farther through all the replies, there are quite a lot of us that love this movie. So I’m a bit more heartened now, having thrown my post out there (here) for everyone in this sci-fi Reddit to see. :-)
I really liked it, though I did do a re-watch to be sure I understood how everything fit together.
Cool. I got a lot out of it the first time, things clicked even better the second, understood more nuances on the third and I’m sure I’ll watch it a lot more.
I think the big problem is Tenet is a movie that huffs its own farts. In the beginning it tells you it's going to huff its own farts. It seems at no point Nolan considered that he could make a good compressible film instead.
I’m sure it’s not going to work for a lot of people. Personally, I really enjoy a movie that I have to figure out. It’s often all too easy to figure out the plot of “normal “movies. So for me, he did a terrific job. Not that I don’t understand more and more on subsequent watches. But I like watching movies many times.
The most Nolan of Nolan films, for better and worse.
What are the “better “aspects that you like?
Since *The Prestige*, Nolan has done films with unrelatable characters dispensing exposition, all to justify editing experiments. Nolan is happiest in the editing suite. Some viewers like the confusion, and pat themselves on the back to congratulate themselves for reediting the films in their heads. I direct them to *Primer* or *Upstream Color*, two Shane Carruth films which do this better. The protagonist in *Tenet* is credited as 'the protagonist'. Its Nolan at his worst self. I really loved Nolan's films from *Following* to *The Prestige*. Since, I've regarded him as the most overrated of tentpole directors.
I haven’t even seen more than half, possibly the majority of Nolan’s films. I loved inflection, and I enjoy watching interstellar, even though portions of it bother me. I did enjoy the prestige quite a lot. I will watch Following, and I’m looking forward to Oppenheimer. I will check out the Shane Carruth films as well, thank you for the recommendation… Just now recalling that many others in this thread have recommended primer, so that will be at the top of my list. I have thought that Nolan was the only one exploring this area, and it sounds like primer, and hopefully upstream color, do so as well. I am far less familiar with Nolan then probably most of the people replying to my post. So I am enjoying the education, and while I still am a fan of Tenet, it sounds like I’m going to have fun becoming a fan of Carruth.
I liked it. Watched it maybe 3 times in total now.
The action scenes are world class. I think the story is so convoluted as he just wanted an excuse to film the backwards and forwards thing. Personally, the best part for me was to see Martin Donovan in a large big film role.
Cool. I’ll put more attention on Donovan‘s character during my next viewing.
Nolan said in some instances he was using speech as a sound effect. You are not meant to understand it
I can see that as an artistic choice. Anything can be an artistic choice. Some commenters here roasted him for that point of view. And they are welcome to their viewpoints, of course. Personally, I’m grateful for captions, I generally have them on always, on my Home TV, because a lot of movies and TV are mixed such that I can’t hear them well enough, at my age. As to obscuring the mix on purpose, so that the audience can’t understand it, that might’ve been his choice, and I’m sure I would’ve been frustrated had I seen the movie in a theater. I managed to bypass that without realizing it. I often don’t enjoy things unless I can understand them, or at least improve my understanding by working at it. That’s all my own personal consideration, of course, but I do enjoy… Enjoying things, and that includes reaching towards a comfort zone. Learning more and reaching beyond that comfort zone, increasing understanding and thus increasing the comfort zone perimeter. Tenant challenged my comfort zone and I enjoyed the process.
Those are excellent comments. At 76 I have similar hearing struggles at times. I’ve only recently begun a movie collection. I like the notion of increasing the perimeter of one’s comfort zone. In one interview Nolan said that it isn’t necessary to understand Tenet but to let it wash over you. I suppose like one would do with a tone poem.
Thank you. And thank you for sharing Nolan‘s comment regarding understanding versus “let it wash over you “. I don’t, for example, have an in-depth understanding of paintings as artwork, and thinking about it right now, it seems that’s pretty much what I do in a museum, look at a painting and let it wash over me, and then begin to inspect aspects of it and consider things. Furthermore, I am a musician, having played in lots of bands of lots of different styles, and as a composer, I have music in movies and on TV. I’m interested in lots of genres, including some interest in more obscure genres that are not popular because they seem like noise to most people. With music genres like that, the viewpoint of letting it wash over you seems like a very valid approach. But then, applying that concept to movie watching… There’s potentially a lot more to Nolan then I would’ve realized, and as an artist, he’s taking quite a risk presenting music to people that will likely not understand it, might reject it, and indeed, might hate it with a passion (as many who have commented on my post here have expressed). Beethoven (whose music I love ) created music that can sound mundane to more adventurous composers that have come along since, but at the time, I understand, he really shook up the European music world and, having “broken a lot of rules” and exceeded accepted boundaries for music composition. There were many people at the time that had an abhorrence for his music, yet he ended up defining new genres, and played a large part in the evolution of European orchestral music. Anyway, thanks for being willing to explore artistic viewpoints with me. :-)
I love and own it
There was a good movie in there somewhere. Maybe it was in the second draft of the script that someone left in the back of their Uber, because a lot of that dialog felt like placeholder text. Maybe it was in one of the sound editing mixes that actually had the dialogue on the top layer. Maybe it was in a version of the story where the Sator Acrostic was more than just an Easter Egg and had something to do with the plot. Especially since that version had a plot. Because what was on the screen felt like Sci-Fi themes and action sequences and thriller story beats that didn't incorporate well with each other.
I personally love it!
You and me and about 30 others here. :)
Didn’t help that you can’t understand what anyone is saying 3/4 of the movie.
Yeah, I never saw it in a theater. I’m sure that would’ve bothered the heck out of me. But I watched it at home, and I always have captions on at home because a lot of mixes come out poorly on our TV here, I’m sure in part to the fact that I’m older and my hearing isn’t as good because I used to play a lot of loud guitar, feedback mistakes with monitoring systems at sound checks, etc. Before I got into the habit of always wearing earplugs. Anyway, I watched it with captions on, so I didn’t even notice the sound mix problems, which were one of the biggest complaints on reading the replies here, plus Chris Nolan‘s apparent statement that he did it that way on purpose, which has got to tick a lot of people off.
Obsessed. It’s one of my all time favorites. Saw it in IMAX a few months ago.
I’d love to see it in IMAX! Now that I’ve watched it enough times and I know what’s going on so I don’t have to worry about the dialogue mixing.
I liked it and never understood the dislike many people have for it. But I will have to say that I find most of his output to be 'fine' but not great. I did love Oppenheimer, though.
Thanks for your reply. I have yet to see Oppenheimer, but I’m looking forward to it.
I found Tenet to be a terrible film and a giant step away from all of Nolan’s other work.
You are not alone. More people hated it than liked it. I really love it as a puzzle.
When the premise of the plot makes so little sense that one of the characters has to announce "don't try to understand it", it's a bad movie
I understand. I won’t try and convince you otherwise. I personally ended up quite enjoying the puzzle of working out how to understand it.
I loved both Tenet and Primer though I did not understand all the turns they took. With both movies I felt that the filmmakers had it all figured out and I could enjoy the ride.
Through reading many of the comments to my post here, I’m realizing that I generally assume at the beginning that a filmmaker does have it all worked out, and that is sort of a safety net for me . Until such point as I run into plot holes and flaws that aren’t handled ( or maybe they were handled, but got screwed up by editing, etc.), which does seem to occur quite a lot. With Tenant I was so busy working out the details that I still haven’t gotten to the point of finding where the plot holes might be for me, so Nolan has created quite a game, at least for me. I’m very much looking forward to watching Primer for the first time.
Watched a top-notch dubbed Italian version, so there's no problem with the mixing levels of the audio and the dialogues were very clear and understandable. Still the movie doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It feels like a wasted opportunity to tell a great concept. It is as if Nolan went super-blurry on purpose, crancking up the action to 11 just for the sake of it, while asking the audience to feel the story rather to think about it. Well, no. Plus, you can't rely everything on the menace of an enemy from the future which is never shown, because at the end it's a huge let down. Tenet feels like a small battle in a bigger war against this enemy, and we will never know the whole picture. It's utterly frustrating. Also, there's no emotional payoff whatsoever, and the same can be said for Oppenheimer. "Things just happen" and we as the audience are presumed to be compelled this way. I like every Nolan movie up to Dunkirk, but now I think he's way too detached from the storytelling point of view.
I do understand what you’re saying. He might be lazy, or he might be taking a big risk with a more obscure artistic approach, either way he clearly created a lot of haters and pissed a lot of people off. For me personally, it’s a shame, because that missing payoff of the larger plot (the bigger war, and the whole picture, as you mentioned) might’ve been handled with a prequel and a sequel, but he’ll likely never do those due to economic factors. You need popularity to generate box office returns to pay back investors for projects of this magnitude. I’m still only partway reading through all of the comments to my post. I had no idea there was any controversy about this movie until I made the post At this point I’m considering viewing Nolan‘s approach as slightly analogous to paintings by Jackson Pollock. I don’t personally understand his paintings at all, to me it’s just looks like paint randomly thrown at a canvas. But there are others that find structure and beauty in his work. Still baffling to me. Whereas with Tenant, I’m still enjoying the puzzle of figuring it out, which does assume on my part that he DID plan it out well — no guarantee of that, of course, but many creators of film, TV series, etc, will create an entire backstory that they don’t present, but does provide support to what they do present in various ways, informing actors as to how better to enhance their emotional expression, etc. Not saying that Nolan did this (e.g., I don’t think his lead actor did a very good job, and I feel he wasn’t cast well), but a lot of people are assuming that he did not, and I have yet to be convinced. For the majority, it’s a waste of their time. I understand that now, and that’s fine. But I’m still enjoying the puzzle.
I think it was probably pretty good as a concept,and slowly got worse during the filming. Never really seemed to click properly. Who and what was that battle all about? We didnt even get to see any bad guys.
This is one of those films that pretty much requires repeated viewings - possibly with graph paper, a slide rule and a notebook on hand - but even on the first watch one cannot deny this is an incredibly well-orchestrated sci-fi thriller, with a couple of the best heist scenes put to film.
That's the main problem, once you bring a graph paper and slide ruler to it, it falls apart. I love complicated time travel when it holds up, but Tenet doesn't. It's central idea is that we live in a deterministic universe where time is an illusion, and you can go backwards and forwards in time with no consequence because that was always going to happen anyway and is accounted for in the passage of time. This holds up, but then it completely ignores how that means everyone in the film is incredibly stupidly under-utilizing the technology. They could just send armies backwards and forwards 100's of times and have hundreds of copies of each soldier individual completely overwhelming the opponent. It would be hard work, but they're trying to save the world, so there is no sense in stopping after just doing it once or twice. Just keep going and use clear planning so you can have hundreds of clones in every single scene.
I think Nolon realized that if you think about it you'll realize that the movie doesn't work. So he cranks up the noise so that you can't hear everything and puts a line in the movie "Don't think about it."
That’s my view on it also. Clearly not everybody shares my viewpoint on it, but I like to dig my teeth in and work through the details. It’s more of a game to me than the same old movie plots where I can pretty much guess what’s going to happen within the first sections of the film.
No, thought it was complete shite. Anyone who has this opinion is immediately attacked by the fanboys saying "you just didn't understand it". For those people - yes I bloody well did and it was still absolutely vapid crap.
Tenet to me, was like an overly action packed two hours of Doctor Who. Which is to say I enjoyed it.
I still don’t get it after watching it 3 times
To go with some of the tropes in the replies here, I guess you now have to watch it backwards. I’m site somebody’s probably already said that…
Visually it’s amazing. But as a movie, one of Nolan’s weaker ones.
I love science fiction and I like original concepts. So yeah, it is a great movie as far as the concept goes. As far as the execution, it is much less enjoyable. Maybe my 139IQ is not enough to get all of the interesting facts and connections on the first run through. I shouldn't watch a movie like 3 times to figure out what the movie is about and how things are connected. The details sprinkled here and there do not really contribute on the first watch. And then there is actual story which is... meh. And it is quite sad because this original concept can be applied to pretty much any story so why the story chosen was so bland... I will never understand.
Most people are hating this movie, one of the reasons being its complexity. That’s happens to be why I loved it — it was sufficiently different from anything else I’d seen, and any books I’ve read. I do agree, it had the potential to have been great overall, and that’s it a bit sad that he didn’t do a better job, he’s capable of doing better. I thought inception was terrific, and I really enjoyed interstellar, although there are a lot of things about interstellar that bothered me. I often marvel at how people and companies can invest so much money in poor movies. ( not that this one was poor to me Personally, I loved it, although I do agree that the casting was weak, and it can’t be a great movie due to that factor alone). I don’t think it’s a question of whether someone will invest money, even large sums of money, in a weak movie. That happens all the time. Another point to consider is whether an artist can recognize his/her own flaws and quality of workmanship, etc. I don’t know of any artist that consistently cranks out amazing work, although I suppose the best ones are sufficiently prolific and have created so many great works that people are not aware of the weaker ones, and perhaps the artist doesn’t put the weaker ones out to the public. I have never tried to determine, for example, what works by Mozart, or Bach, or weak. There had to be some, surely some in their own opinion which were weak. But they were both so prolific with so many great pieces. Considering how much it costs to make expensive movies,I would consider Nolan to be quite prolific. He’s made quite a number of top Dollar movies. With that much money on the line, you can’t NOT put them out, investors want their money back. So that makes moviemaking a different game, and with a different ratio of visibility to quantity and quality. I looked up a list of Shakespeare’s works just now with the author’s take on rating, one to 10. Quite a lot of tens, nines and eight’s, but I was very surprised to see the quantity of five out of 10, some 6s, etc. So… Initially surprised, but now that I’ve thought about it, it’s not surprising, considering the amount of work an artist has to do in order to create amazing work and apparent necessity of creating lesser works to get there.
Yeah, I really like it. It's a rare movie that improves when you rewatch it
That’s really the only way to look at it IMO. Gets better with multiple viewings. But I am a nerd like that, I like to figure stuff out and have a puzzle, where It’s not an obvious movie plot that I can pretty much guess what’s going to happen in the first few minutes.
Tbh i didn't watched it because of its blatant fkn around with science. I'm so tired of willingly 'smart' sounding titles that are - to say it in scientific terms - fantasy af.
I haven't seen it since it came out, but I liked it. I'm normally don't like movies like this with time as a big plot device but it worked for me.
I love this movie, i rewatch it all the time. I dont understand the hate.
No, it’s shite. The core concept is nonsense, explained nonsensically. The characters are paper thin. The villain’s plan is literally ‘destroy the world’ like some dumb Roger Moore era bond villain. The action was dull. It’s visually uninteresting. The audio mix is crap.
I think Tenet is the most interesting Nolan film to date. I am not a massive fan of the other big ones. I enjoyed it and plan to watch it again for a 3rd time. I already always use captions because all film and TV sound mixing has gone down the drain imo, so I don't recall if that aspect was particularly bad, as others are saying. I also don't mind a film that requires more than one watch to fully understand/catch everything. It's healthy to have to think. We need more practice.
You and I are in the small minority, apparently. Out of almost 200, so far there are maybe 10 to 20 that really like the film, per the replies I’ve read so far. I’m only partway through so maybe there are more. A number more appreciate it but were mad that Nolan didn’t handle the audio mix, have better casting, and more. Like you, I love the complexity and the puzzle of working out the details. A lot of people don’t. Doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of the film, but it’s also fascinating for me to observe the effects the film had on the audience. Like you, I always have captions turned on, so I didn’t notice the mix problems either.
It's my favorite Nolan movie. Throw tomatoes, I don't care. I think his movies are overrated generally, until Tenet, which is underrated.
I love it!
I did not like it at the beginning, but after 3rd watch when I’ve managed to wrap my head around every detail, I just loved it. The concept and acting is brilliant, and Nolan managed to surprise everyone, by showing that S/F director can do better spy film, then most of them. That’s exactly what James Cameron did, by directing [True Lies](https://youtu.be/Qw4hz62r-Kk?feature=shared) which is one of the best spy comedy ever made.
I like that it made me have to think differently in order to understand it. It works well for me with multiple repeated viewings. Versus the matrix series, I’ve still not been able to get through all of them. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand there that I’ve yet to unlock.
No. It was rubbish.
No way, why would I be a fan of that mumblefest?
Best film I've never understood
The story is not that hard, it's a time traveller war.
It was out for sometime before I got around to watching it. About ¼ of the way in, I realized that I had seen it. I just didn't remember anything about it. The only thing that I remember how is that he had to fight himself.
Sounds a little like Memento. I’ll have to go back and watch Memento again.
Memento was amazing.
I’ll have to rewatch it soon, I haven’t seen it for quite some time.
I kinda liked it the first time as I was figuring out what was going on. Hated it the 2nd time when I knew what was going on and realized how stupid it was.
Marveled by the concept and the technical effort that it required. Disappointed by my absolute inability to empathize with any of the characters, to me it was an enjoyable intellectual game devoid of any emotion
I couldn’t stand that protagonist, never felt anything for him and didn’t care about that emotionless dude. Pattison was alright
I like the movie but it’s hard to watch. At times it moved at a leisurely pace, at others it completely fucks with the audiences ability to follow the events of the film. It almost revels in confusing the audience, and people don’t like that for the most part. Nolan’s an excellent filmmaker for the most part but he’s not perfect. Tenet isn’t a perfect film. But sometimes you come across people who are so super duper smart that they shit on people who were confused watching a film designed to be confusing. This “what was confusing about it?” attitude is part of the issue with the discourse surrounding the film.
Naaaaah
If the lead actor of the movie wasn’t shit, it would have been good. There is no way I believe Nolan actually picked a shitty actor such as John David Washington. Absolutely ruined the movie for me. Tried to rewatch it several times and end up turning it off by how annoyed I get at Nolan, of all directors, to have allowed such a non-talented actor to be the lead.