Tenet Reviews/Reactions [Possible SPOILERS]

Christopher Nolan's time inverting spy film that follows a protagonist fighting for the survival of the entire world.
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Friend asked me about this film recently, and the best way I could describe it to him is

If you stuck your hand into a box labeled "Christopher Nolan movie" you'd probably pull out Tenet.

It's like all the best and worst things about Nolan as a director and writer.

It's frustrates me to no end, but I can't stop watching it.

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I'll admit when I first watched Tenet, I was very lukewarm on it, and immediately afterwards, it seemed to myself, if I was being brutally honest, that I was trying to convince myself that my favorite director's film wasn't a dud.

But I've watched it couple of times since it's been on HBO, and I like it much more. I still have issues with it. But being able to put subtitles on and rewind certain scenes, and just watching the film understanding what it's about or trying to convey has allowed me to enjoy it a lot more. It still is towards the bottom of Nolan's filmography for me, but I now considered it a good flick.

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After seeing Oppenheimer three times now, I went back and watched Tenet the other night for maybe the seventh or eighth time since it was released, and I think the context of watching Oppeheimer makes Tenet even more of a masterpiece. In fact, I'm inclined to say that Dunkirk/Oppenheimer/Tenet is basically Nolan's "War Trilogy."

Dunkirk is Pre-Atomic Age (1940)
Oppenheimer is Atomic Age (1945—Present)
Tenet is Post-Atomic Age (Present—Future)
It's the concept of war seen through the lens of Past/Present/Future.

Also, Tenet is so much heavier and crazier and scarier than people give it credit for. Nolan needs to stop fucking around and make a horror movie ASAP.

Tenet is about how WW3 is fought in the future. Maybe 50+ years from now (?), after global warfare and environmental destruction, the world realizes that further nuclear war would likely result in total Armageddon and therefore they "can't bother pressing the button" anymore. There has to be a new type of warfare if they're going to have an upper hand on adversaries. Scientists discover a breakthrough in technology that governments can exploit, and this sends humanity into the next Atomic Age: the ability to invert an object's entropy so it moves backward in time, but it's too new yet to really understand how it works or its implications and so there are speculations of grandfather paradoxes and Armageddon-type scenarios. But they use it anyway. It's probably being used in the future all the time. They might even be coming back and changing things now (the Mandela Effect) and going backward even further. We don't know. But we know that there's a group of "good guys" in the future called TENET that helped discover this technology, and they're communicating messages to the CIA and they relay them to a small military faction and train them. They're also part of TENET. That's where WW3 comes in.

Kenneth Branagh's character Sator is a billionaire Russian arms dealer who is being sent gold and messages from the future from the Russian military, or some kind of faction that selected him from the future, so they also have this inversion technology, not just TENET. And they've been communicating to Sator since he was a boy living and working at the Stalsk-12 site in Syberia cleaning up debris after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's when they started sending him capsules with instructions on how to build a literal timebomb in nine parts using different types of plutonium. Once the nine pieces are together and it's detonated, instead of inverting an object, it's enough power to invert the entire world and send everything back in time, and scientists don't really know what would happen if we tried that, just like with the Los Alamos test with Oppenheimer. It could either work and we go back in time, or end all time as we know it.

So Sator is willing to "press that button" and build this timebomb and detonate it, he's willing to be this new Atomic Age's Oppenheimer, because they tell him he'll die of pancreatic cancer in the future, he has nothing to lose, and they're making him rich beyond his dreams by sending him gold and probably stock market secrets. So he can die a rich man and if the world ends, who cares? And the bonus? His wife doesn't love him and had an affair, so he can "kill her" by ending the world when he presses the button, because if he can't have her nobody else can. So if this bomb works and they go back in time successfully, Sator's leaders on the villain side have a new type of weapon that could win WW3: inverting time itself and alternating entire world events, not just single objects. And they have it before the US. This is the new arms race. And that's why Sator is the most powerful arms dealer in the world. BUT, there's also the chance like with Oppenheimer, where pressing the button could be end the world.

This is horrific, horrific stuff and I didn't appreciate it as much until having seen Oppenheimer three times. It completely changes my perspective of Tenet. This is what the movie is actually about. The movie isn't really about JDW's Protagonist because he doesn't need to be anyone with a specific name. He is us, the audience, navigating this world and we're along with him. Of course he wouldn't be the main focus any more than we would be. He's one tiny part of a much larger world.

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I don't really post much anymore, but I just wrote an essay for Tenet I'm particularly proud of for Bright Wall / Dark Room so I thought I'd share it:

Tenet was never going to be the savior of cinemas. Christopher Nolan’s impressionistic sci-fi action love-story is the most abstract, challenging, frustrating, uninhibited, dissonant, dude’s rock hell-yeah movie of his career. If Memento’s plot structure is the shape of a hairpin, Tenet’s is temporal spaghetti, full of narrative loop-de-loops to the point where cast, crew, and even Nolan himself couldn’t always explain his impenetrable screenplay. The Protagonist and Neil’s grim, beautiful romantic friendship—Tenet’s one anchor to raw emotion—is only made fully apparent in the precious final minutes. For a movie so concerned with rewinding time, it’s either idiotic or sheer genius that it’s almost uniquely designed to gain depths of feeling on rewatches that it can’t possibly have the first time around, reminding us that rewatching a movie is its own kind of time travel, and how a bar order of Diet Coke can turn from a symbol of intimacy into a totem of loss.

Full essay: https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2023 ... enet-2020/


-Vader

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Vader182 wrote:
August 31st, 2023, 7:32 pm
I don't really post much anymore, but I just wrote an essay for Tenet I'm particularly proud of for Bright Wall / Dark Room so I thought I'd share it:

Tenet was never going to be the savior of cinemas. Christopher Nolan’s impressionistic sci-fi action love-story is the most abstract, challenging, frustrating, uninhibited, dissonant, dude’s rock hell-yeah movie of his career. If Memento’s plot structure is the shape of a hairpin, Tenet’s is temporal spaghetti, full of narrative loop-de-loops to the point where cast, crew, and even Nolan himself couldn’t always explain his impenetrable screenplay. The Protagonist and Neil’s grim, beautiful romantic friendship—Tenet’s one anchor to raw emotion—is only made fully apparent in the precious final minutes. For a movie so concerned with rewinding time, it’s either idiotic or sheer genius that it’s almost uniquely designed to gain depths of feeling on rewatches that it can’t possibly have the first time around, reminding us that rewatching a movie is its own kind of time travel, and how a bar order of Diet Coke can turn from a symbol of intimacy into a totem of loss.

Full essay: https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2023 ... enet-2020/


-Vader
Thank you for what I think is an intricate piece of writing on your part for a film that manages to make me ponder about philosophical and emotional implications time might have, for example, when seen (or experienced) from different perspectives like thinking about the movie from end to beginning. How this makes me wonder about TP and Neil's friendship as both ending and beginning as well as a short but long relationship too at the same time. Your writing, I think, tries to appeal to that idea as well and impulse readers, those who want to, to immerse with Tenet again by inverting our minds and experience its world and story that way. And that if we do, I think we gotta remember: we are inverted, the world is not. :)

"Look, don't get on the chopper if you can't stop thinking in linear terms." - Ives

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