disappointing was that Well,
I love Christopher Nolan movies, but that one sucked ass.
Omniscient hits it with points 1 and 2. It’s confusing, and I say that as a guy who thought “Inception” was really simple and straightforward and I don’t understand how it could confuse anyone. This movie is just so baffling I cannot explain where to begin. They do a terrible job explaining the concept.
And yeah, I missed every fourth word. It was like watching someone act out a grunge album.
Took me a minute…
Just saw it, and wanted to post an opinion before googling an explanation.
But Omniscient basically said everything I wanted to say, but better than I could phrase it. So I’ll just cut to the conclusion:
To me the whole thing felt very self-indulgent. I think enough people have been telling Nolan how smart he is, that he exercised little restraint in terms of editing, or making the movie a self-complete unit. I think we’re not supposed to get it immediately, and so need to go google certain details, watch it a second time, etc. I have no issue with a film being complex enough to require that, but I think a film should at least make an honest stab at being clear, and potentially digestible within one viewing, and I don’t think that this does.
And BTW the things I didn’t get were about the plot, setups and character relationships. The actual time travel stuff was no issue for me, and I have enjoyed many movies with complex time travel like Primer and Time Crimes. (I’m just saying this to head off any potential retorts that I need to think non-linearly, or open my mind or whatever. The time travel was not the thing that made it confusing for me)
Good nuanced review by Mark Kermode here.
As he puts it: [I’m quoting from memory, so not word perfect] “I had many questions, but the questions were mechanical, rather than philosophical. And the best Nolan movies make you ask philosophical questions.”
I haven’t seen the movie yet but plan to this weekend. For those who have, do you think this might be the rare instance where the movie may be more enjoyable if you read the entire plot summary ahead of time, complete with spoilers and explanations? Sounds like it is very difficult to process on first viewing which was frustrating and took away any enjoyment of what was going on.
I might bite the bullet and read what I can about the story and watch some “TENENT explained!” youtube videos just to see if it helps.
Any risk of spoiling anything major for myself or is it really such a incomprehensible mess that this might be the way to go?
I think you’re fine. I can’t think of anything that I could tell a past me that would spoil the story.
There’s a minor character reveal at the end, but it’s not “he was a ghost all along!”… It’s something pretty trivial and I don’t think it would matter at all knowing that thing from the start.
Not really, no. The general thrust of the movie isn’t really anything new.
Agree that it probably wouldn’t spoil anything going in knowing the ending, but I’m not sure it would help either.
Saw Tenet in a regular theater last weekend. Everyone in my group enjoyed but we were confused by a lot of what happened and we agreed that much of the crucial dialogue was muffled or garbled or whatever.
But we were anxious to see it again, so this weekend we saw it in IMAX.
Wow, what a difference. This time we all loved it because the the stuff that didn’t make much sense the first time around was totally logical during the second viewing. And the dialogue was crystal clear for the most part, we all agreed we could understand all of the conversations. (I’m wondering if Nolan mixes his movies specifically for IMAX theaters and they sound incomprehensible when run through a regular theater’s sound system.)
Little details I missed the first time made so much sense, like the main character describing two guys he’d fought as “two antagonists”…and I believe this was before he called himself the Protagonist! That’s something you couldn’t expect to pick up on the first time around.
The end temporal pincer battle. First time it was a chaotic mess, this time all the pieces of what was going on fell gloriously into place!
So, if you kind of enjoyed or are on the fence, I strongly suggest giving it another shot. I think you’ll be surprised.
My two cents.
Agree on a lot of points. My biggest gripe is I didn’t understand probably 25% of the lines. That’s inexcusable. I really wanted subtitles. I also didn’t understand what the hell was going on for the first half of the movie. When the lady with the bullets said “don’t try to understand it” I kinda just checked my brain out and pretended it was nothing but an action movie.
I don’t think you should be confused during half the movie. First 20 minutes, maybe. Not more than an hour. I feel like Nolan is baiting you to watch the movie again, which I am not going to do until it’s streaming somewhere. Some subtitles and repeat knowledge would help.
At this point I’m definitely gonna wait for the DVD or streaming so I can have the subtitles on.
Did they ever explain how “inverted objects” help people in normal world? As far as I could see all they did with them was parlor tricks?
Anybody feel this movie was just an excuse for Nolan to run footage backwards? Seems old-timey.
I saw it in an IMAX laser theater, and frequently wanted to turn on the captions. So although the first theater you went to may have had bad sound, and was almost certainly not as good as the IMAX sound system, I suspect that at least part of the improvement in your IMAX screening was the fact that you had seen it once before.
We managed to miss the first five minutes despite already being in the cinema for nearly two hours before that (it has a bar). The first five minutes was pretty important, it turns out.
The sound was an enormous problem. I don’t think it can be intentional - when you have a complicated plot, why make it even more difficult to understand by making actual words hard to hear?
Most of it’s making more sense as it sinks in a bit deeper, which is a good thing. But I kept expecting some things to be explained as the movie went on; that’s not spoonfeeding, that’s which is how storytelling usually works.
More importantly, though, I didn’t care about most of the characters. I liked Katherine, but her main personality point - as one of the main female characters - was being a mother. Sator was basically fucked up by a shitty childhood; that’s not exactly novel. Though I guess having him want the end of the world because he basically grew up at the end of the world is somewhat different - plus Kenneth Branagh did act it pretty well.
Not an important point in the slightest, but he’s looking good for nearly 60. Not buff or anything - he just looks like an ordinary man of, maybe, fifty, could pass for a bit younger. He’s literally twice Elizabeth Debicki’s age, but believable as merely an older husband rather than that much older.
With all the others, I couldn’t detect any motivation for their actions at all. That might have been intentional, but I’d have liked some sort of subtle hint; maybe there was something I missed while trying to understand what people were saying. If they hadn’t been cast well so that they were easily visually distinguishable, it would have been hard to tell their personalities apart.
Can anyone tell me how they got to Estonia from Italy by boat? You can’t. Did I miss a scene where they transferred to a plane? They were definitely in Italy, on a boat, then they were in Estonia.
Heh. Reminds me of the ending of Spy where Jason Statham’s character drives off in a boat, declaring that he’s going to Venice. The other characters opted not to point out that he was on Lake Balaton at the time.
“Ya can’t get they-ah from hea-ah.” - An old Maine coot
A bit late to the party, but both my wife and I were massively disappointed by this movie. Our thoughts on Nolan(well, my thoughts, but she is pretty much in agreement) are like this with him.
Inception is up there as one of the best movies of the last 20 years. It’s phenomenal and probably the best he’ll have in his career. A perfect movie.
Loved the Batman movies, especially the second one with the Joker.
Interstellar was good, but not quite as good as Nolan thinks it is.
Dunkirk was adequate and impressive in parts, but actually not a movie we liked very much.
My wife dislikes Memento, but Iiked it.
OK:
I think I kind of hate Tenet. It is the type of movie where the director needed to have more people watch it with him to see if they could follow it. I’m sure Nolan can follow it because he thought of it and put it together. However, no way that an average person can fully understand this movie.
Inception was a complicated movie that fully and completely explained itself as it went. By mid-movie, I was engaged and understood their world. Tenet was confusing, made no sense, and I don’t understand their world. Things can go backwards? How does that help?
Cobb in Inception had a story. His wife, his turmoil. Protagonist in this movie was “man in movie doing the things the movie says”. He has zero story.
None of the scenes thrilled me because I was too detached from everything to care.
A career low for Nolan. Beautiful, expensive, complex, but ultimately, empty.
I’ll never re-see it.
I’ve seen the movie twice now and watched a lot of “TENET explained” videos between the viewings. I thought maybe it would pay off the further you dug into it and understood it. While the storyline does come into focus better and makes the movie watchable the world building on the other hand starts to fall apart. Nolan focuses on certain things to make you think he thought of everything (you have to breathe inverted air) but he dismisses a lot more things he either missed or chose to ignore. I thing the idea of two people physically interacting in opposite moving space/time intrigued him but what ends up on screen isn’t what something like that would entail but rather what looked cool to watch.
I actually LIKED Tenet, which is a big deal for me because I can’t stand most of Nolan’s other movies. To me, Nolan is the archetypal out-of-control director who does whatever the hell he wants and has nobody telling him “no.” Memento and The Prestige were okay, but I didn’t like his Batman films at all, and I hated Interstellar and Inception.
I saw Tenet at a drive-in movie theater with the audio broadcast over FM, so I was able to adjust my car’s sound system as needed to make the dialogue somewhat clearer. I plan to watch it again with subtitles when it’s available on streaming or DVD.
I had issues with some things—like the idea that if you’re inverted, you can freeze in a fire. Physics is not my strong point, but this doesn’t make sense to me all. But overall I enjoyed it much more than I expected.