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
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
I think the eco-fascists are more the Kenneth Branagh boys who are willing to take a chance of living in a permanently reversed time world, which would definitely wipe out people who live in the past/present- rather than fix their current world.
Then it raises the question if the Kenneth Branagh boys definitely live in a shitty overwhelmed world can the CIA/anyone change the world's trajectory. I think the Protagonist (lol) believes he might be able to change it.
Then again I'm just as uncertain as you, the film is simultaneously the simplest Nolan film in a broad plot & character arcs sense, while being the most inaccessible to actually, y'know, understand.
I think part of the problem is that our information about the future of the film and what would happen to the present is mediated by the characters own imperfect knowledge and their own description of their motivations. We only know what they tell us about the future and that might even be somewhat contradictory. Similarly, they can only really speculate on what will happen if the antagonist's plan succeeds. As I remember it, the film kind of ends up glossing this to increase the dramatic tension of the closing scenes - so we go from uncertainty about what will happen to the present world will 100% be destroyed.
I think I probably had a relatively idiosyncratic reading of the film because I like Benjamin so much and am particularly interested in his writing on history. Watching it, I couldn't help but think of this line: 'every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably'. I think that led me to think about the film less in concrete terms of the exact events on screen and more in terms of it expressing anxieties about the ways in which any future will come to rewrite the present in its own image.
Lol, now I kind of want to watch it again to work out exactly what is going on!