BF2S Forums Rate the last movie you've seen

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

I keep seeing reviewers calling it cerebral. Is it really cerebral, or is it just a mess of obfuscated storytelling?

It's probably unfair of me but I feel like if I'm not motivated to watch the trailer, what good is the movie going to do me.

The plot was confusing to follow and becomes almost incomprehensible in the final third. I made fun of people not understanding Inception when it first came out because that plot was fairly simple. Interstellar was also pretty straightforward. Tenet meanwhile is a mess. I had to read stuff online to clarify what I just watched.

You will find out in the first 20 minutes of the film that time travel is a thing in this movie and time travel almost never works in a movie. There is one cool mystery in the movie that I think is a more interesting thing than the casual time manipulation in the film.
Spoiler (highlight to read):
Basically people in our time find objects traveling from the future into the past. Weapons and machine parts. They believe that these things are the aftermath of a nuclear World War in the future. The protagonist is tasked with finding the origin of these objects and stopping World War 3. We find out half way through the movie that a cold war/spy war is taking place between "people from the future" and a deep state organization in our time trying to stop to the "people from the future" from triggering an Armageddon like event in our time. Basically many generations in the future, climate change has wrecked Earth to the point that future people want to use a device to reverse the flow of time because whatever effect that will have is better than living in the reality they live in and they also want to punish us living in the good times for destroying the planet before they had a chance to live in it. Pretty neat idea that people from the future are trying to straight up destroy themselves and the past using time travel rather than trying to Skynet or 12 Monkeys change the future for their better. It would be really cool to see what a world like that many generations into the future would look like to cause people to get to that level of nihilism.

It is time travel but it's also kind of different. Basically there's two parallel flows of time, one going forwards (our reality) and one going backwards - which starts happening as soon as you enter the time machine. To be clear backwards time still feels like it moves forwards for the protagonist, but he's moving into the past and what he does in this time reversal affects the past & thereby current time/the future.

Visually it's extra confusing because you see both forward and backward time play out at the same time in the same frames while it feels like things 'move forward' from both perspectives. But for people in the current time those who move in the past appear as though they're going backwards. There's also added layers of confusion in how time travelling objects work or how people moving forward into the past are affected by their surroundings.

I thought it was neat and well executed. I think the negative reviews are more because it's convoluted by design and hard to wrap your head around. Not a very suitable movie for the general public really. But it's nice that Nolan takes the big hollywood $$ and just does what he wants with it, pushing it into a project that normally wouldn't leave small scale arthouse cinema.

After this I do wonder if he still has any more time manipulation up his sleeve. From memory loss, to blackholes, dream-reality, to straight up time travel - he's done most of it now. I want to see him do something else.

Last edited by Larssen (2021-02-21 08:07:34)

uziq wrote:

robert patt said that he didnt understand his own role or what was happening in tenet for 3 months on set.

he speaks with a lot of candour about his roles, especially all that twilight stuff and how it was just such bloody nonsense.

of course there’s a corner of the internet and nolan fanboys who will take a statement like that from a lead actor as a sign of the director’s ‘sublime genius’ or whatever. nolan just 2 smart 4 u. christopher nolan fans are like that person in your friend group who keeps trying to use long words in conversation and using them wrongly.

I assume Robert Pat was playing a flamboyant gay man in the movie.