The story really doesn’t make any sense, which is a pretty significant drawback. It’s a bizarre combination of somehow being way too long while leaving out critical plot points.
I liked it, because it made me think a lot about how it worked and what it meant. Fuly agreed on the sound, it felt like an assault. That was kind of the Point, but it didn’t make it more enjoyable.
Extremely good Question - what does time Travel actually do? In this case, as I understand, what the antagonists try to do is completely reverse time, because they destroyed it in the future beyond repair. What that would actually mean is interesting to contemplate, but that is what they tried to do.
Washington being bland did not help, even though I liked him. I gathered the idea was that he is bland right now because he will be the big mover and Shaker in the future. But he could still have been a stronger character now, I agree. What still boggles my mind is how Long has Robert Pattinson been going in the past for him to be able to be at this Point and do all the stuff? I like this Kind of theorising, but Can totally understand it being dissatisfiying 
They “invert entropy”, often called the “arrow of time” in physics. Most things in physics are mathematically reversible (chemical reactions, motion, etc). Everything except entropy. i.e. an egg won’t unscramble itself. But now it can!
I have to say, I really like Tenet the more I watch it.
I’ve now seen Tenet once, at home with the closed-captioning on (thanks, all, for the warnings about the muddled sound mix), which helped. I enjoyed it, although not as much as I had Memento, Inception or Interstellar. I thought Washington was just fine in the leading role, and the rest of the cast too (great to see a snarky Michael Caine at tea, in particular, but Branagh’s Ruthlessly Evil Russian Plutocrat character was almost identical to the one he played in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit). Great scenery and cool action sequences.
I’ve read the Slate and Vulture explanations posted upthread and now think I understand about… 80% of the movie. I’m sure I’ll see it at least once more, and that might up my percentage.
The Wiki article is worth a look, too: Tenet (film) - Wikipedia
Ha!
More seriously (go to 3:12 for Nolan’s own statement on the controversy):
This is fair. Nolan’s choice to emphasize ‘what happens, happens’ was infuriating because it leads inexorably to the question why should we care about what we’re watching?
Yes, but it didn’t matter because their skin didn’t touch. Apparently.
And that was another sign of the sloppiness of this screenplay: they set up a Rule and then the Rule turns out to be irrelevant to the plot.
I just saw this movie (it finally came to cable) and had reactions very similar to many who posted in this thread.
I like many of Nolan’s movies, and I see Inception as an actual work of art. He famously worked on that screenplay for years, and the claim is believable: it all hangs together. Moreover, the Inception screenplay gives us a reason to care about the characters.
None of that applies to Tenet. Nolan claimed about this one, too, that he’d worked on the screenplay for years—for twenty years, as it happens. Which is a very convenient number, considering that Primer came out in 2004.
Nolan obviously wanted to head off criticism that he’d stolen the main idea for his movie from another movie.
But: yeah. Stolen. Science fiction movies are notoriously likely to use ideas already in circulation, but Tenet’s level of “derivative” is beyond what Nolan is willing to admit. Nolan turned Primer’s single box (enabling time travel) into two boxes (the ‘turnstile’ and then a shipping container or other place to wait while you ‘live backwards’ for a while), but otherwise it’s very, very similar.
Which would be forgivable if Nolan had come up with a profoundly moving center for his story, as he did in Inception. In that screenplay, we are confronted with the question of crippling guilt, and with the possibility of healing, in the context of an exciting fantasy premise.
In Tenet we are invited to ponder the question of—what? doing what your bosses tell you? It’s not even as though the screenplay examines reasonable story questions such as ‘should you refuse to do what your boss tells you?’ or ‘is it more ethical to walk away from an order?’ or anything along those lines. There’s no ethical dilemma at all in Tenet.
There are some major problems with the screenplay which I won’t go into in this already-lengthy post; suffice it to say that I don’t believe Nolan put enough effort into this. He instead relied on the excitement of car chases and special effects and impressive international locations. Those things can be part of the pleasure of a movie—but they need to be underpinned by a coherent and emotionally-involving story. And we don’t have that, here.
I read an interview with Nolan where he mentioned he had been working on the Tenet script for years, and he pointed out that the opening scene of one of his first movies, Memento, featured a shot of a bullet flying backwards into a gun.
More than half way through it. Not sure if I’ll watch the rest.
Just that.
I really really wanted to like it because I think a movie that is a palindrome is a cool idea but didn’t like this. It just seemed like a movie that had its head up its own ass and was pleased with itself but there really wasn’t any “there” there.
Yes. I really wanted to like it, too. Nolan has the ability to make movies that delight the intellect and also satisfy the emotions—but achieving that takes work. With this one, I just don’t think he put in the work.
I liked it after a few watchings, but I also agree with many of the criticisms in this thread.
One thing I think Nolan did well with Tenet was to create a sort of unsettling, claustrophobic setting. A sort of constant sense of ominous foreboding.
Question -
Was the Magne Viking (the big yellow Tenet ship) inverted? The Protagonist and friends were. But to get from Pont A to Point B wherever they were going to launch the final battle 10 days ago, wouldn’t they also need to be on an inverted vehicle traveling from A to B ( or in a verted vehicle that left B 10 days ago and picked them up at A)?
I agree. Certainly no one would argue with the proposition that Nolan is a highly-skilled filmmaker—one of the best.
But as has been said up-thread, it may be that he didn’t get much feedback on this screenplay, as compared with earlier works in which he did seek advice. (This is famously the case with M. Night Shyamalan, too.)
Nolan has said in interviews about Tenet that he wanted to make a sort of “James Bond” movie. But somehow he failed to notice that his JB movie lacked the characteristic essential to JB movies. Tenet has the outward marks of a JB movie: lots of action taking place in exotic locales, showcasing wealth and power, with plenty of explicit or implied sex and violence.
But the essence of a James Bond story isn’t any of these things. It is, instead, the fantasy of getting to do exactly as you please–including both killing and screwing whomever you please–under color of ‘doing your patriotic duty’—under the orders of someone else.
In other words, the essence of Bond is the common human daydream of doing subversive, id-agreeable things, without accountability. You do what you want and you face no consequences.
And that is not present in this movie–in fact, Nolan appears to be trying to hang the entire emotional weight of Tenet on ‘being a noble person who sacrifices himself for the common good’—which is nothing to do with Bond.
They were in a shipping container on a Rotas cargo ship. At one point, the container moves around quite a bit, and one of the characters mentions the shipping container is being loaded on a truck.
I liked the movie overall, but I have a few reservations:
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I did not buy Washington as a tough guy (he sounds like his dad though!). Possibly it’s his height and possibly they didn’t sell it well enough during the restaurant kitchen fight scene. Pushing some plates at me will not make me go away. “Is good with fists for diplomat” Heh, not really.
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“Do you like Opera?” So the guy you were about to kill says this line which means maybe he knows about your whole deal of getting paid to deliver the time inversion formula to the future, and you decide not to kill him anymore. Why? Shouldn’t you want to kill him even more? I didn’t get that.
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The implication of understanding the story is that we (the present people) destroyed the world for the future generations, so the future generations are trying to change history in their timeline so that they can have a non-destroyed earth. And we the present people say “hell no you can’t do that!”. Doesn’t that make you a little uneasy? It did for me.
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The implication that all this is time inversion, not time travel, so if you invert your timeline, you have to live in inverted time for as long as you need to get your mission accomplished. Robert Pattinson would have had to spend decades in inverted time, breathing through a respirator from the non-inverted time world. How?
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Elizabeth Debiki’s bum is magnificent.
Here’s another thing about that fight scene, and I’m going to call this phenomenon the “unfair DnD turns fight scene”. Protagonist has three bad guys standing in touch distance to him. He gets punched in the kidneys from the back. Then has his hand forcibly placed on the bench where he is about to get his hand smashed. He pulls away from the attack, elbows the guy behind him twice, smashes a glass something in to someones face and makes two small punches at the last guy, which totally defeats him. How many turns did he get in this fight and how many turns did his enemies get? He got all the turns. His enemies got none. Kind of John Wickish. Completely unbelievable.
I thought the implication was that Washington, not Pattinson, inverted back to have founded Tenet. Either way, though, as long as you had turnstiles to “refuel” at, you could travel back in stages. And since he’d be able to use the turnstiles to move forward and backward as needed, he’d be able to set up the turnstiles he needs “before” he gets there.
I think.
Honestly, the more I read this thread, the less I understand the movie.
I don’t mind a complicated movie, but I’m not sure what else Tenet had going for it.