The film is so revealing of boomer/reactionary anxieties about the future. It's literally about protecting the present order at all costs, even if that means consigning the future to disaster

    • RandyLahey [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Also none of it makes any fucking sense even within its own time travel rules, but it doesn't even matter because the smug shithead director deliberately mixed the audio so you can't make out a word anyone is saying even in the walls of exposition, so it's just some big dumb explosions (some in reverse!) and other assorted spectacle but with a veneer of "acktually my movie is just too smart for you dumb peasants to understand"

      I have never hated a movie as much as I hated Tenet

      • WalterBongjammin [they/them,comrade/them]
        hexagon
        ·
        4 years ago

        Totally agree. It's surprising how unexciting a lot of the spectacle is. It feels cold and mechanical. Yeah, I ended up watching it with subtitles so I could understand what people were saying.

    • sunneonix [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      there are like a dozen dramatic or action sequences before the finale, so you're completely wrong. Dominoes are also awesome to watch fall, and it was awesome at the end where you watch the super long synchronized thing happen twice in different directions. just the concept of having a military maneuver where the forces are simultaneously inserting and withdrawing is worth the set piece. btw, that's basically the structure of a movie: Introduction, development, Climax, re-encapsulation, coda. you could say the same thing about Jin Roh or Parasite or Come and See, honestly "Wow, the movie doesn't have stuff happen until it does"

      • WalterBongjammin [they/them,comrade/them]
        hexagon
        ·
        4 years ago

        I was being hyperbolic about the film's structure, but I broadly think that my description is accurate. Obviously, things happen during the earlier parts of the film, but overall I found it to be cold and mechanical. My feeling watching it was that the film is more interested in its structural complexity than in its dramatic content, with the result that its characters feel like the component parts of a machine rather than genuine characters. I do find that interesting on one level, but I also think that it's kind of dull. Particularly as it isn't clear that Nolan has anything to say about the ideas around the relation between future and present that he's engaging with - hence the ending focusing upon the undeveloped relationship between the protagonist and Kat. Honestly, you can read the protagonist as a kind of author insert (after all, he's the person who put the events of the film into action and devised the overall plot just as a director does) and the film as ultimately just about how smart Nolan is for coming up with its structure.