Troy Stiffler

Has anyone really confirmed that this movie makes coherent sense? Even if it is dense and complicated. I suspect it might just not be logical. We just get convinced it makes sense because it’s so good to watch.

Inception made perfect sense and was never too much. I’ll watch this a few more times. But I suspect it still won’t make sense.

maxfisher

Yes and no. I mean, there are lots of cool little touches, but the nature of the plot makes it so it buckles under its own weight if you look too hard. One little thing that bothered me is that Neil should’ve been moving backward at the symphony. Also, if you’re hurt by something inverted relative to yourself, I don’t think it makes sense for you to start feeling pain beforehand and then be ‘unhurt’ by the injury. That said, it’s very clever and the broad strokes work well enough that I find it wildly entertaining after multiple viewings.

Dr. DVD

Finally streamed this last night. Visually and story wise in was quite interesting, but thank god I had on the subtitles or I would have been even more lost.

My big takeaway from all of this is :

-I guess Neil lives life like Merlin in Once and Future King; he lives backwards in time?

It's interesting that we have a movie that requires you to think to keep the plot together, but in order to fully enjoy, you can't really think about the the logistics of everything involved.

DieselsDen

The film is cleverly made, but too needlessly complicated for my tastes. I would re-watch this movie to figure it out, but I don't care enough.

csant

Finally got around to watching this and my brain hurts. Very interesting stuff and visually stunning. I have to watch it again for sure.

jpcamb

any idea when and where this will stream for free?

DJariya

HBO Max by summer is where it will head next.

Troy Stiffler

You can rent it for $5.99 now on Amazon etc. You cheap bastard.

That might have just updated. I had to pay $20 to own it last month.

DJariya

By summer 2021, no one will care about this movie anymore. Movie theaters will hopefully be open again and new stuff will be out.

clckworang

I finally broke down and bought the UHD. I had been good and avoided any spoilers or much of any information about it. Glad to see my initial reactions echoed here. What the hell did I just watch? This movie should have been titled MacGuffin.

Also relieved that there's nothing wrong with my ears as I found the dialogue very difficult to discern. It also doesn't help that there were so many accents. With the dialogue already hard to hear, it made it even more difficult to pick up any vocal patterns to help make things out.

I started guessing a lot of the things, like the fight rehash, but I found I thought about the plot in a very on the fly way because I was more trying to understand the basics of the inversion, in particular the bullets. I never did figure those out.

Once I convinced myself to not focus so much on that, I finally better understood what was going on. I think. Of course, that was also toward the end of the movie. I definitely need to rewatch at some point, likely with subtitles.

So I guess I liked it, but I don't find it surprising that it didn't turn out to be the box office behemoth amid a pandemic that I think the studio was hoping it would turn out to be. It was just too dense, too difficult to understand and follow. That being said, it would have been really interesting to see what its box office had been before the pandemic.

Kennyx

Tried watching this last night, and couldnt finish. Like others, couldnt understand a damn thing - visuals were nice though.

I'm going to take a few weeks or so, because based on what I saw I really have no interest in trying to rewatch this, other than liking Nolan's other works. So I'm going to give it some time and try to convince myself to potentially waste some time to watch something that I didnt enjoy the first time around - this times with subtitles though.

GoldenJCJ

The sound mixing was definitely off. There was a scene in a quiet restaurant where two characters were talking and the score was so loud it drowned out a lot of the dialogue. That being said, I didn’t have that hard of a time understanding it.

Deftones

May 1st release on HBO Max

Pointyskull

Watched the blu last night (first viewing) and I am "glad" to see the other comments about the sketchy dialogue mix. My home setup is pretty solid and I was a bit bothered by the difficulty I had making out lines of dialogue - though I feel I certainly picked up the gist.

Loved that I was pretty confused as to what was actually happening for the entire film and didn't really care about that. This is marvelously ambitious film, and I was never bored or distracted. The supplemental content (essentially an 01h:15m "making of" goes into some detail on how the fight scenes were shot and it made me want to watch this again (which I will soon).

Really loved "Tenet" - just don't ask me to explain it to you.

OldBoy

I’m glad this thread was brought up. I really want to see this again. Think I’ll be just as gripped first time and at least know what’s coming and try to have even a vague understanding.

OldBoy

Oscar winner baby!!

TomOpus

This is on HBO Max now.

Josh-da-man

Tried to watch this last night on HBO.

I bailed after about thirty or forty-five minutes.

Ye Gods, it was the dullest, most dreadful movie I've seen in a long time.

I'm not really a Nolan fan, I find most of output overwrought, plodding, and not nearly as clever as he thinks it is. His characters tend to be unengaging and banal, and the plots are overly elaborate with little reward.

Absolutely loved The Prestige, liked The Dark Knight a lot, but everything else he's done has fallen flat for me. But when I'm watching things like Interstellar, Memento, or Inception, I find myself thinking that these are interesting ideas, but I just can't being myself to give a shit because the characters are so dull and boring (they might as well be people in commercials for cars and coffee who wandered into movies) and the intricate plots just sort of meander around without generating much suspense or interest. Dunkirk might be the ultimate Nolan film in that regard, though Tenet might be a close second.

Big Boy Laroux

Finally got around to watching this. Overall, I really enjoyed it. The set pieces were cool, the temporal "effects"/scenes were well done.

I did like the cast for the most part - but didn't like Washington as the lead. Absolutely appreciated a non-white actor in the role, but he was just... Off. Something about his delivery seemed stilted/not natural.

I don't know why they had to include/go through the explanation of inverted objects (the early discussion with the female scientist). Why couldn't it just have been people moving backward through time, and the things/items they touch directly (guns/bullets/cars/etc.) are inverted only as they use them. I feel that whole scene with the bullets muddied the waters.

2 questions - why did the protagonist shoot at himself in the fight with himself? And why didn't Neil/Pattinson move backwards when the protagonist saw him at the opera house?

Artman

That 2nd one is the first thing I thought of, and I believe is the most discussed inconsistency in the film - haven't seen any explanations of it yet. Just kind of underscores my reaction to it - I loved the setup and most of the execution, but why not flesh out these kinds of details instead of trying to hand waive it away in a 2.5hr runtime, which is what I felt Nolan was doing.

Troy Stiffler

I still suspect that this movie doesn't make sense - even for Nolan himself. But it's really good. I'm more about how a movie feels than how to plays out.

Between the two Nolans, I feel like they take these complicated narratives to the brink of inexplicability without breaking. Christopher Nolan has talked about creating blanks in his movies and letting the audience fill them in. Like they're trying to out do each other with Christopher Nolan's movies and Westworld.

Inception and everything else makes sense. Tenet was so close to being completely incomprehensible.

Big Boy Laroux

Maybe he didn't want to call extra attention to himself and actually ran backwards everywhere as he was inverted, making him appear to be moving forward for normal people

tonyc3742

Watched this Friday night after browsing HBO Max and other services looking for a "new" (and no additional cost) movie to watch.
I don't *regret* watching it, but I really didn't enjoy it.

Well said! That's kinda what I was thinking but you said it much better. I normally really enjoy doing the "But if he went backward, then he went forward, and then they did this, that's how they got to X." Oh going "oh s*****...." when it clicks. But I didn't care enough about this one to work at it, and I felt that if I did, it would require way too much suspension of disbelief, or reliance on Unobtainium. And that it wouldn't really make sense, even applying the rules in the movie universe.
That was a cool explosion/de-splosion though.

I liked him a lot. He seemed to have the most robust personality of anyone in the movie (except maybe for Cat).

Yes! I was too lazy (and again, not invested enough) to turn on captions/subtitles, but between the audio mix, the deadpan delivery of most actors, the masks, and talking over other characters, dialog was tough to follow. I don't think the stuff I missed would really have mattered, though.

Very flat. He had a few instances where he had some emotion but overall very flat and stoic. And he accepted everything rather calmly.

And it just seemed way long.
The score was cool though.

C-, and between a One-and-Done and Skip on the scale of Buy/Rent/Rewatch/One-and-Done/Skip.

Rival11

Movie had way too much going on but after it was over, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

So we never get to see the current day protagonist (Washington) - just his past self before he created Tenet. Pattinson was basically there to watch over him the entire time (he was sent by Washington to do so).

The oxygen masks were there because you can't breath backwards, the car froze because the heat was reversed from the source, and the plutonium 241 was the weaponized version of the inversion technology.

I really dug (after researching when the credits rolled) that there were four groups of people in the opera house in the beginning:

The terrorists, the swat team trying to stop them, Washington's team who was faking to be with the swat team, and Pattinson who was of course watching out for Washington.

I agree, Washington didn't have the chops for this role BUT with that said, he did great for what it was, it was complex and fast moving and he did alright - I look forward to him growing and hope he does more action flicks.

E Unit

Great featurette on the camera and DP Hoyte Van Hoytema. I don’t recall seeing this on the doc that was on the 4K release.