Tenet (2020)

What bugged me was that Tallinn was doubling as a location for Kiev, but the script places several other scenes explicitly in Tallinn. So why bother having Kiev in the script at all? Maybe it's just from living in this city for a while that I'm the only one that noticed

Deleted because I forgot I'd already posted it.

Edited by TwinBird on Oct 7th 2020 at 10:11:54 AM

Did Nolan actually think he was going to single-handedly save the theater industry, or was it just a piece of promotional hyperbole to get people to go to the movies again? Because I don't think that very many people were going to see an overlong cerebral James Bond ripoff full of techno babble and an inscrutable plot in a moment in history where people have many other things to think about.

And he released it in the middle of a pandemic ..

I think his concern was that the movie simply wouldn't do so well in home viewing, it was made for theaters foremost. That could be a different problem, much like Avatar its main selling point is the IMAX image. Mulan apparently did okay (controversies aside) but that had an enormous family appeal, which Nolan's fan base may not be as loyal.

Joker once said Gotham deserved "a better class of criminal."

Taking him at face value I want to ask if Sator would fit in that paradigm assuming the Joker was referring to motives when he said that line. Am I just overhyping/overthinking/overplaying Sator's character by trying to connect him to Joker's philosophy?

I asked this back in page 1 but no one answered and the thread quickly went to next page so I'm asking this again on the next page.

Anyway besides that just how much of a problem did any of you find the sound mixing in the movie?

I didn't have any problem whatsoever with the sound mixing. I watched it with subtitles, but I made a conscious effort to assess the sound mixing with regards to being able to hear the dialogue the second time I watched it since I had read complaints about not being able to hear what the characters were saying, and I didn't have any such difficulties.

Edit: Wrong thread, pls ignore.

Edited by TheAirman on Oct 31st 2020 at 5:56:13 AM

So I watched this movie (the way it was meant to be watched, on an old PC monitor rigged to a mini DVD player) and after all the confusing exposition, chilly flat characters, and scenes that appear to be purely for gimmick, the question I’m left with is: what’s the point of the story? Does it have a theme? A moral? An arc? Or is it just a bunch of FX concept skits strung together?

Inception had a theme after how dreams AKA movies influence us and the making-it-up-on-the-way experience of being on a film crew. The Prestige had a theme about the cruelty and pain that’s the making of the sausage behind the wonder of fiction. The Dark Knight Rises I dislike a lot because its theme about wealth imbalance I find morally objectionable, but it’s a theme that coherently expressed throughout the plot. Tenet doesn’t really seem to have anything to say about life behind it. It feels hollow.

I think Chris Nolan and a lot of his fans just kind of have their heads up their asses in general, honestly. I realize that sounds kinda rude to the latter and I do think the former can make things come together in some of his movies, but I agree that stuff like TDK just isn't anywhere near it's cracked up to be and I can't find much drive to give this a shot.

I still haven't seen Tenet, but I must admit my opinion of The Dark Knight Rises politically speaking has fluctuated over the years. I still love it as an entertaining movie. Bane's mob is definitely coded as left-wing populism, but I think the populism aspect is focused on more. This is especially notable, given that Trump is a right-wing populist, and a lot of Trump era things were my mirrored by things that happened in the movie. Some of his speeches were similar to Banes, and the obvious battle at city hall mirrors what happened on Jan 6th. Not a perfect analogy at all, but still I feel the parallels are there.

I do have HBO Max, so I should check out Tenet...

If you can see TDKR that way, more power to you to enjoy something. I can't because no matter what way my mind might attempt to frame it, the cultural fears the film draws on are those of masses of poor people, the incarcerated, and Middle Eastern-coded terrorists swarming the "feeble" billionaires and cops, which was the complete opposite of the Capitol riot and how many of its participants were wealthy and connected to cops and the military. If anything it exemplifies how many populist right-wing nightmares are projection of acts they themselves want to do, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 2nd 2021 at 8:12:36 AM

Yeah while that's not too much on the topic, I think it's pretty hard to read TDKR in any that's not a reactionary wet dream. Bane didn't attack Gotham using a rethoric that Gotham is ruled by a cabal of pedophiliac, immigrant loving satanists who eat babies and rig elections, he attacked Gotham using a rethoric that Gotham is obscenely unequal and in need of a radical social change.

Bane's whole movement is also brought to a halt by a combination of Gotham's police force and a billionaire.

It's very clearly a film rolled from the Occupy Wall Street boogeymen.

Man is that unfortunate.

In fairness, the movie never claims that Bane is wrong even if he is using legitimate grievances to manipulate people.

Heck, the League of Assassins are far less Middle Eastern-coded than their comic counterparts.

After Bane is defeated, nothing is really done with his and Selina's accusations of Gotham's lopsided society. Bane dies, his minions get arrested, Selina runs off with Bruce (who may or may not still be a billionaire), and we're just left to assume Gotham will be fine with the wealthy and cops back in power just as it was when Selina and the other poor were resenting being under their heel. So the story delegitimizes their argument by not caring to do anything about it afterward.

It doesn't say outright that Bane is wrong, but he's the villain. We assume he's supposed to be wrong by default, and the movie ends with his uprising defeated and the status quo back in place.

'ed

Edited by Discar on Feb 2nd 2021 at 8:57:08 AM

I said you can read it that way. It is notable that Trump's inauguration speech mirrored Banes Blackgate speech. I'm also not gonna pretend Bane's mob doesn't take more heavily from left-wing populism rather right-wing populism, because it does. I just felt like storming the capital and then taking it back mirrors the climax of TDKR (because the cops and national guard did have to take it back), but this is probably better for the TDKR thread...

I will also point out that the status quo isn't seen as good, which is why Blake becomes Batman.

Edited by jjjj2 on Feb 2nd 2021 at 1:03:40 PM

I think the above criticisms tie into how IMO there's a bunch of core elements of Batman in general that just haven't aged too gracefully. A billionaire who works with law enforcement to put down perceived threats? Gonna be honest, especially in this day and age, I just can't see that as awesome or heroic. Which I guess ties into superheroes in general having their conceptual flaws more and more spotlit and re-examined in modern times. But this is off-topic anyway. Maybe I'll give Tenet a watch one of these days, maybe I won't. We'll see.

Edited by AyyItsMidnight on Feb 2nd 2021 at 9:33:17 AM

Just watched it and holy shit it's bad. The soundtrack was awful and the mixing (the uneven audio between bgm and dialogue) and the concept of time being so dumbfounded that anime did it much better and clearer. And to this point rewinding doesn't feel satisfying because it's relieving what's happening. The whole bullet reveal in earlier didn't really wow because you're really not changing anything, and the whole fight in the vault was silly.

I think if I could have rewritten a scene, I would've rewritten that part where John (I'm not calling him "the Protagonist") prepares to return to Freeport while inverted. We never see where he realizes that he was fighting his own future self, and that should matter because as far as he knows Neil killed said future self a little after John exited the turnstile (even if we the audience say that Neil didn't.) So instead I would cut seeing Neil's perspective earlier, make John concerned that he might be walking to his own death, but ultimately he decides to do it for the sake of rescuing Kat's life, he fights himself, de-inverts, flees from past Neil, and just as he thinks he's about to die... he doesn't and we see that Neil realized who he was and spared him. Future Neil might've not said the truth either because he wants to prepare John for scenarios where one's future death is seemingly inevitable, foreshadowing his own fated demise.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 14th 2021 at 1:55:37 AM

So I thought everyone might get a kick out of this.

That's the way it's heard. But this is the way it was meant to be seen.

I followed that just fine.

Fuckers don't understand the real significance of Sator's character unless I'm somehow overrating him.

That said Ima spitball based on the Spiritual Antithesis entry that his character is also a criticism of how Bond treats women in his own series but transplanted onto the villain so you see the other side, gimme your thoughts now, am I trying too hard to look deeply into his character?