Tenet

[Robyn]

hmmm

John David Washington Says Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet' Will Dictate The Next Decade Of Filmmaking

The excitement around "Tenet" continues to reach new heights, even if the desperation to release the film in theaters is causing very confusing release date announcements. The latest trailer answers a couple of questions while introducing a whole lot of new ones. We are shown more of "inversion," the concept at the center of "Tenet" which seems to allow time to travel backward, and some of the ways the film will use this for exciting action sequences.

READ MORE: 'Tenet' Trailer: Christopher Nolan's Quantum Cold War Teased, But The Release Date Details Are Now Non-Committal

But outside the new trailer, the stars of the film have also been building up the groundbreaking action sequences in the film. In a "Fortnite"-hosted interview following the release of the trailer, John David Washington was surprised about the "nuggets of information and just breadcrumbs of information about the movie" that Nolan revealed in the trailer (even if they don't explain a lot about what's going on). "We're familiar with [Nolan's] films, but this seems like something different," Washington said. "It seems like this is where he's about to take us for the next 10, 15 years of filmmaking."

This sounds like incredibly high praise, and though it's hard to predict how the film will impact the future of filmmaking, there's no denying how influential Christopher Nolan has already been. From his darker take on Batman that became synonymous with the character's cinematic output, to countless "Inception" references and homages in the years after the film came out, "Tenet" is building up to be another unparalleled thriller, at least according to Robert Pattinson.

READ MORE: Warner Bros. Changes Logo For 'Tenet' After Accusations of Christopher Nolan Stealing Design From Bike Component Company

In an interview with GQ, Pattinson described the film as "so insane." The actor described one of the many set pieces in the film, "They had a crew of around 500 people, and 250 of them would all fly together, just hopping planes to different countries. And in each country there's, like, an enormous set-piece scene, which is like the climax of a normal movie. In every single country." Comparing that to the two or three stand-out set pieces from Nolan's previous films, and if Pattinson ends up speaking the truth, "Tenet" will be one memorable blockbuster.

https://theplaylist.net/john-david-washington-tenet-trailer-20200523/?fbclid=IwAR0QGuD-1uCFJ-N0m1kSVcKAU3vbCxIlIFz6jVxZMEDqDep-AteitgDSo00

[Robyn]

I am truly rooting for this film to be as fun as inception, so I hope they're right about the set pieces. but to say that it will "Dictate The Next Decade Of Filmmaking" is for sure overrating nolan once again

[Sleepless]

[Jeremy Blackman]

https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/1276540253801594880

[polkablues]

Can't wait for this movie to actually be released in theaters so I can finally watch it on my phone.

[Jeremy Blackman]

The fact that this was envisioned as the blockbuster hit to resuscitate movie theaters (unfortunate timing aside) is very funny. I guess you shouldn't bet against Christopher Nolan, but I dunno. I think this movie is too confusing for general audiences. It has an improvised vibe that makes the scenes of exposition feel sudden and disorienting, on top of the dialogue being delivered underneath masks or in heavy accents or being drowned out by music. Mostly it's not the sci-fi that's hard to understand; it's the spy stuff. (At least for a while.) Think DePalma's Mission: Impossible but amplified.

I kinda like all of that, though. It's very Nolan. I think Tenet pulls off the trick of making you feel like you're always catching up, then wrapping things up quite comprehensibly.

The sci-fi premise can be explained in a sentence or two. On paper it's pretty simple. But here's what the movie does really well — it unfolds that concept visually in a number of different iterations and setpieces quite beautifully.

Another thing Tenet does well: it lets Elizabeth Debicki be tall. A whole lot.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Can't believe Tenet almost convinced me it's not really a time travel movie, only to reveal it's absolutely a time travel movie. I think I respect that.

[Jeremy Blackman]

Heard someone say that Tenet isn't really about anything. Can't shake that, because it's true. It's just a very fun and immaculately-constructed popcorn movie. I would say it's more fluffy than Inception. Nolan might have reached his peak about-something-ness with Interstellar.

Spoiler: ShowHide

You could argue Tenet is about self-sacrifice, and it is, but that seems pretty basic.

[polkablues]

A movie that finally answers the question that has plagued humanity for time immemorial: "Wouldn't it look cool if things went backwards sometimes?" I've never seen a movie that gives less of a fuck about why its characters are doing what they're doing at any given moment. Truly groundbreaking levels of narrative indifference. I loved watching it, and I will forget it entirely in a week's time.

[Drenk]

At least, you loved watching it. I've always thought that Nolan was mediocre at best when directing action sequences, so I thought it was...nothing once filmed backwards. It looked like a gameplay mechanic without any level design done.

But John David Washington is the perfect post-human actor for our post-human director. Not that he should keep filming humans; I actually would appreciate Nolan filming, like, Dubaï or something, pure corporate space filled with things.

[Robyn]

So the point of no return bro was like the actually point of the return?

Spoiler: ShowHide

I honestly thought this film was pretty good

[WorldForgot]

Not a review and I can't write much more about this until I either try to write TENET x DUTY FREE ART or SUSPIRIA x CAPITALIST REALISM first.

That is to say, I need to really outline my thoughts and re-read Halfborn to see how best to publish these analyzes on Xixax, but I want to share a handful of pertinent quotes from Hito Stereyl's text, before stepping on my toes with a full-on scene by scene reading.

Opening with a scene that can't, in my opinion, be only coincidentally similar to Aurora's Dark Knight Rises tragedy -- TENET argues our responsibility to environment and 'posterity' exists right now. As intention. Toward art, "national" considerations of space and war, and the design of how we kill + will kill. On top of also just being a fun Bond-riff.

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" Worse cases exist all over the region. The interesting thing is not that these events happen. They happen all the time, continuously. The interesting thing is that most people think that they are perfectly normal. Disaffection is part of the overall design structure, as well as the feeling that all of this is too difficult to comprehend and too specific to unravel. Yet this place seems to be designed as a unique case that just follows its own rules, if any. It is not included in the horizon of a shared humanity; it is designed as a singular case, a small-scale singularity.

So let’s take a few steps back to draw more general conclusions. What does this specific instance of the design of killing mean for the idea of design as a whole?

Think of the artworks and their movement. They travel inside a network of tax-free zones and also inside the storage spaces themselves. Perhaps as they do, they never get uncrated. They move from one storage room to the next without being seen. They stay inside boxes and travel outside national territories with a minimum of tracking or registration, like insurgents, drugs, derivative financial products, and other so-called investment vehicles. For all we know, the crates could even be empty. It is a museum of the internet era, but a museum of the dark net, where movement is obscured and data-space is clouded."

------

"This is the role of contemporary art. It is a proxy, a stand-in. It is projected onto a site of
impact, after time and space have been shattered into a disjunctive unity—and proceed to collapse into rainbow-colored stacks designed by starchitects.

Contemporary art is a kind of layer or proxy which pretends that everything is still ok,
while people are reeling from the effects of shock policies, shock and awe campaigns, reality TV, power cuts, any other form of cuts, cat GIFs, tear gas—all of which are all completely dismantling and rewiring the sensory apparatus and potentially also human faculties of reasoning and understanding by causing a state of shock and confusion, of permanent hyperactive depression.

You don’t know what’s going on behind the doors of the freeport storage rooms either, do you? Let me tell you what’s happening in there: time and space are smashed and rearranged into little pieces like in a freak particle"

Spoiler: ShowHide

"One could think of Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death
(Dasein zum Tode), the embeddedness of death within life. Similarly, we could talk in this case about “Design zum Tode,” or a type of design in which death is the all-encompassing horizon, founding a structure of meaning that is strictly hierarchical and violent.

But something else is blatantly apparent as well, and it becomes
tangible through the lens of filmic recording. Imagine a bulldozer doing its work recorded on video. It destroys buildings and tears them to the ground.

Now imagine the same recording being played backwards. It will show
something very peculiar, namely a bulldozer that actually constructs a
building. You will see that dust and debris will violently contract into building materials. The structure will materialize as if sucked from thin air with some kind of Brutalist vacuum cleaner. In fact, the process you see in this imaginary video is very similar to what I described; it is a pristine visualization of a special variety of creative destruction.

Signal v. Noise was the title of a column on the internal NSA website
running from 2011 to 2012. It succinctly frames the NSA’s main problem: how to extract “information from the truckloads of data”: “It’s not about the data or even access to the data. It’s about getting information from the truck-loads of data … Developers, please help! We’re drowning (not waving) in a sea of data—with data, data everywhere, but not a drop of information.

Google researchers call the act of creating a pattern or an image from nothing but noise “inceptionism” or “deep dreaming.” But these entities are far from mere hallucinations. If they are dreams, those dreams can be interpreted as condensations or displacements of the current technological disposition. They reveal the networked operations of computational image creation, certain presets of machinic vision, its hardwired ideologies and preferences."

[Axolotl]

Watched it again with a bunch of friends today.

Perfect little puzzle-like plot-only movie. The only enjoyable way to watch this is at home where you pause it to try to explain what just happened to others, only to be out-explained by the movie itself at the inflection point in middle of the movie where it starts to explain itself. The entirety of the entertainment offered by this movie is in figuring out what's happening and feeling proud of yourself for getting it.

Can't emphasize enough how much of this is just pure plot

Extremely funny how nolan projected this as the movie to save theaters.

[Gold Trumpet]

The movie is a mess. But in some ways, it's fun. Many ways, not. If 2020 was a normal year, it could have avoided some of its most basic issues. First, the audio...I couldn't understand a lot of what the characters were saying. Nevermind the scenes and plot were moving at warp speed, the audio wasn't clear. This happened before with a Nolan movie. When The Dark Knight Rises was tested for preview audiences, what Bane said was also not clear. The test audiences told him that. So Nolan fixed the problem. There was no test audiences for this movie. But the issue is bigger than just one character. It's most of the movie. William Friedkin's Sorcerer also has audio problems with a very loud soundtrack. I have to watch that movie with subtitles. However, the audio decision in that movie is aligned with trying to consistently build up the tension as the characters journey into hell. For Nolan, some of it is related to themes, but some of it is just not having his bearings when it comes to basic clarity.

But even if the audio issues were fine, I still think the movie is mediocre. When some in this thread complain about Nolan being overly excited for basic things like backwards fighting, they have a point. I feel like Ang Lee and Christopher Nolan are getting too excited by special effects in filmmaking. Nolan has been a lot better at it than Lee, but Nolan has carte blanche to go all the way with his ideas. Tenet being a financial disaster may help him reign in things for his next effort. Tenet wants to feel and look smarter than it is with a backwards plot and intricate idea of time lapse that isn't fully intelligible, but Nolan isn't making a Tarkovsky film.  He isn't making a film that first asks its viewer to ponder the unknown and meditate on the what if's. He making a blockbuster action movie that has blockbuster payoffs. He has a very elaborate plot that he could only half dedicate his talent to detailing because he's trying to juggle too many things at once. The sadness in watching the movie is that you see talent everywhere. Nolan is still very good filmmaker. It's just with Tenet, he made a misstep.