Lucas

oh jesus fucking christ...

Felt exactly like last week's episode, but since it had no dumb shot teasing future episodes at the end, it's automatically way more pointless and much worse.

Ironically he also follows Ben Shapiro.

Please don't let them fuck up your color grading (lol they will)

That sounds accurate.

Very solid, not toptier, doesn't make me more or less excited. Not a lot of colors but a whole lot of sulking. Had Villeneuve's name not been on it my excitement would be midtier at best.

Ah so they're doing what I thought they would.

I would assume they're testing to make sure Pattinson didn't infect anyone. If they're all ok, could they potentially reschedule and start shooting around Pattinson to cover the scenes he's not in first?

One person is enough to infect everyone else there, it's not that hardcore to shut it all down for a while.

Damn, hopefully it won't affect him too hard.

The story of Tenet is freeing Kat from her abusive husband by lying to her repeatedly, and then her grand empowering moment after being abused for over two hours is being impulsive and making a stereotypically "womanly" mistake. I also think Nolan thought Tenet would refute the criticisms, it is astounding how much he failed. 😄

Yeah, I didn't get surprised by any of the twists the movie had. The second they're in the reversing time world and say "we have to go back to the airport in Oslo" I knew exactly what was gonna happen, and from there on out I had every twist figured out. The Protagonist is gonna fight himself at the airport, the woman Kat says she saw jumping into the water is gonna turn out to be herself. The Protagonist wondering who their boss is, is gonna turn out to be himself. The mysterious guy with the red string is gonna turn out to be the only other character we've spent any time with, big surprise it's Neil. It's the same rug-pull over and over again. I agree this doesn't have nearly as huge of an emotional payoff as Prisoner of Azkaban or many many Doctor Who episodes have when they play around with time.

Sure, all of this is my take on it. But this is the story of domestic abuse, that is the only character story Tenet has... and it's not really what I'd hope to see in a film that doesn't take itself very seriously.

Sure, but I get a lot out of them whereas thematically Nolan is very simple in what he's saying. I find Eraserhead to be tackling themes of the advancement of technology, the theory of dream logic, the fears of settling, existentialism, sexual lust, and the evils of the atom bomb - but the surface level narrative of what's physically happening on the screen is a man not being ready to start a family. Nolan on the other hand would have that surface level narrative be obscenely complicated and dense with plotting and exposition, but what it's in service for is very simple.

It was meant for the spoiler thread but accidentally ended up here, I got rid of it within 5 seconds, sorry you happened to catch it.

We gotta infiltrate this Indian billionaire's compound so we can find out there's this guy called Andrei Sator. Now that we know this we have to find his estranged wife. When we have found her we have to win her trust so now we have to infiltrate a warehouse and steal a painting. Now that we have gained her trust we can finally meet Sator. Sator apparently doesn't trust us so in order to gain his trust we have to infiltrate a truck and steal weapons-grade plutonium for him. Fetch Quest: The Movie! It is funny how instead of having to write a simple character based conversation between two human beings where the Protagonist's inner motivation is convincing Kat to trust him - Nolan decides he's not up to such a human task, so instead deflects and turns it into an overly complicated action setpiece that takes a large chunk out of the movie instead. And then he does this twice. Sure the setpieces are enjoyable in places... but they serve shockingly little for the overall narrative of the movie despite taking up so much screentime. Very little reward for so much effort.

EDIT: DELETE

It is the final boss collapse of the entire concept of auteur theory. Everything is the most Nolan thing ever and all of it is much worse than it has ever been before, it is a frustrating and soulless experience with next to zero return of investment. It is astounding how few tricks it has up its sleeve for a movie that lives and dies on its concept. There is nothing more to it than what has already been revealed in the trailers. Some months back I said Tenet looked like a parody of a Nolan movie, but I had no idea it would be to this level. It would be the funniest self-parody ever made if it wasn't so boring for long stretches of it. I feel it desperately required an Edge of Tomorrow-esque screenplay that can be creative and fun with the premise, because this is a goofy concept that can make for a great film, it just doesn't lend itself to the dry and serious thriller that Nolan wanted to turn it into. But the script as is, is flat out terrible. The scene by scene construction is laughably amateurish and clunky. There are so many seemingly identical scenes of characters walking generic streets in a dull 2-shot explaining things at each other as the camera follows. Similarly there's an absurd amount of scenes of two characters at a restaurant. At one point it feels as though Washington's character goes from having dinner in a restaurant with a character explaining things at him - to another restaurant with another character. Pattinson has what seems like a setup for a personal character conflict that might be something for him to grapple with as the movie progresses, but then it's never brought up again so I can't even assume it was meant that way to begin with. Washington's character similarly has what seems like an obvious setup for a personal character conflict, but it turns out there was flat out nothing there. What I thought I saw the beginnings of is the most basic emotional angle to pull, and the movie didn't even rise to that. The characters are the worst of Nolan's filmography so far, and so is the film. It isn't complex or abstract, it's just inarticulate. If Nolan truly was going for abstractness he wouldn't have made the entire movie exposition about what's going on. All the "clever" rug-pulls the movie has is the same one over and over again, and by the second one I had figured it all out so none of it was ever surprising or interesting. 4/10

Also a big David Lynch fan, but I see a massive difference between Lynch being complex and Nolan being complex. Nolan has very simplistic thematic statements wrapped up in very densely complicated surface-level plotting, while Lynch tends to have the surface-level plotting be rather simple but wrapped up in deeply complex themes underneath. I do hope you enjoy it though, with golden sunshine all along the way!

Tenet isn't wrestling with any interesting complex ideas, it's just inarticulate. The best complicated films require two watches to fully immerse yourself in the film's complex themes and subtle nuances... for Tenet the only thing I'm hearing from people is to watch it twice just to understand the basic surface-level plotting. That is not interesting to me, and I haven't heard anyone talk about what it actually has to say on a deeper level.

Not necessarily but I can't think of a single thing that stands out, it's all merely fine.

This isn't getting any nominations beyond the tech ones, and even then I think it only has a shot at them because of the year we're in. Visual effects, sound, and possibly score are pretty much the only ones I can see happening. Production design if they're insane, but then again they'd have to be insane to nominate the sound mix too.

Finally.

A lot of the time for me it comes across like Nolan is a guy very interested in stories about storytelling, but has nothing to say about it. Inception feeling like it boils down dream logic into mathematics when it should be showing us the power of creating the unthinkable, and his level of creativity comes down to "you must not be afraid to dream a little bigger darlig" - a slightly bigger gun. Tenet though I feel falls apart significantly more on these levels, I agree with you on the weird lack of self-awareness to all these goofy concepts. It's not made any better when --- I'm still not sure what the movie is trying to say about Nolan's go-to theme of story, but frustratingly I'm not interested enough to care this time. I wasn't the biggest fan of Interstellar, but I got it on the first (and so far only) viewing and could appreciate what it was going for.