Lame af but if there is nothing else out I still will not see it but I hope it does good enough that they keep WW August release date asvthat is something I want to see.
Well I saw it. Trying to get my head around it. Anyway. Here we go
[SPOILER - highlight to read]: It starts at the Ukrainian opera house that you see in the trailer. John David Washington plays a character only ever known as protagonist who is an intelligence operative on a mission to extract a high value target and an object from an attack at the theatre. During the mission he sees a bullet that has been inverted in time. His team are killed and he is captured by a Ukrainian unit who are trying to get information on his colleagues. Rather than give up the information he chooses to kill himself by biting a suicide capsule. He awakens to find out it was a test and that it was to see if he could be recruited to the programme that are investigating the increasing number of time inverted objects being discovered.
He uses a metallurgical analysis of the inverted bullets to trace their origins to a rich businessman in India but it is actually his wife who is the real head of the operation. She finances his operation to track and meet a Russian billionaire arms dealer who is the true source of the inverted ammunition.
It turns out the Russian was born in one of the Soviet union's secret cities. When he was young there was a partial detonation on a nuclear weapon which destroys the city. He forms a company that is the only one to bid for the contract to recover the undetonated plutonium buried under the rubble of the city.
In the future a female scientist writes an algorithm that can reverse entropy. After its discovery she is described as being like Oppenheimer at the end of the Manhattan project and having second thoughts. She encodes the algorithm in 9 pieces which she inverts and sends them into the past. Her employers in the future use the nuclear detonation at the secret city to employ the Russian in the past. He uses their knowledge to build 2 entropy turnstiles where he can go forward and back in time. He uses the technology to become extremely rich. His purpose is to find the pieces of the entropy device and trigger it to destroy humanity in the past. His employers from the future believe they have solved the grandfather paradox and can kill humanity in their past to stop them from destroying the planet via climate change. The protagonists way to meet with the Russian is by using his wife, who hates her husband because of family issues with their son.
Turns out that the person and object that was to be extracted at the opera house is the final of the 9 pieces of the entropy device and was lost to the Ukrainians. The protagonist devises a plan to hijack the piece but the Russian uses his turnstile in Tallinn to perform a temporal pincer movement where he has teams tracking the protagonist forward and backwards in time to retrieve it. The protagonist deceives him and hides the piece but is captured and taken to the turnstile along with his wife. The Russian shoots his wife with an inverted round and orders the protagonist killed but they are rescued by the protagonists partner (Robert Pattison) who has a team on standby led by Aaron Taylor Johnson. They decide the only way to save the wife is by taking her through turnstile and travelling backwards through time until her wound heals. During this they discover that the Russian's purpose is to assemble the entropy device and kill himself. The algorithm is set to run on his death which is triggered by a dead man's switch connected to a heart rate monitor on his wrist
His men have taken the entropy device back to his destroyed home city and are set to trigger a nuclear bomb, burying the device as it's set off. That explosion is timed to go off at the same day and time as the attack at the opera. The protagonist, his partner and team and the wife all go back through time. The team to the day and time of the explosion/opera attack and wife to the day before. This will allow her to get to Vietnam where she was on vacation with her husband on his yacht. She remembers it as she tried to save her marriage but saw a woman diving from the yacht as she was returning from the shore and thought her husband was having an affair.
Her new role is to stop him from killing himself as that is when he was to trigger the entropy device and destroy the world.
The team launch another temporal pincer movement at the secret city as a distraction in order to get in and disarm the entropy device before the explosion but the Russian already knows what they are planning and sends one of his own men to prevent it. Robert Pattison's discovers this as he is on the reverse team and switches his own timeline to prevent the Russian's man from stopping them extracting the device.
They complete the mission despite the wife killing the husband too early because she wanted him to know his plan to destroy humanity will fail.
At the end you discover that the protagonist actually recruited Pattison's character in the future and his role was to travel back through time and that the events of the movie are only a small part of things they have done in the future.
There's other details I'm leaving out important to the story but my mind is pretty boggled trying to remember everything. Like the protagonist fights himself at one of the Russian's turnstiles, one version of himself traveling forward through time and other backwards. Pattison realises it and prevents the protagonist going forward in time from shooting himself going backwards in time. The woman that the wife sees diving off the yacht is actually herself after she's travelled back through the inversion that heals her.
I'll need to watch it again.
It's high concept stuff. It borrows heavily from Primer which is equally as mind bending with its time manipulation stuff.
Anyway. The acting is great. The cinematography is great. The action during the battle at the end is astonishing.
It's not related to inception as some theorised.
Aaron Taylor Johnson's accent is horrendous.
I'm not going to score it until I see it another couple of times
__________________ Sweating on the streets of Woking
Last edited by jaden_2.0 on Aug 26th, 2020 at 11:09 PM
I just braved the movie theaters to see this and its an interesting take on tine travel...[SPOILER - highlight to read]: using entropy manipulation over obscure quantum physics is a nice subversion I feel like the performances from the main leads were great when compared the lacking character motivations they are given to work with.
One thing that does stand out that confuses me is [SPOILER - highlight to read]: If Neil is from the future supposedly like Sator, how was he able to travel decades back to save the Protagonist without aging considerably himself?
Admittedly not Nolan's best work but possibly his most ambitious yet. Though that sound mixing was...really weird.
[SPOILER - highlight to read]: Sator wasn't from the future. He was only recruited by people from the future who inverted gold, information and technology to allow Sator to acquire the resources to reassemble the algorithm and use it for them. (Which he finds in the case buried in the rubble of the closed city) Neil is more complicated. Either the protagonist recruits Neil in the future and gets him to invert and meet the past version of the antagonist or the antagonist inverted himself and recruited Neil in the past without the past version of himself knowing so the version of the protagonist we see in the movie doesn't know he hired Neil as that hasn't happened yet from his perspective.
__________________ Sweating on the streets of Woking
I might have lost that detail with Sator due to the aforementioned sound mixing but that clears that up at least. [SPOILER - highlight to read]: I still curious as to how the Dead Man Drop was supposed to stop Global Warming and leave enough of humanity alive to rebuild. Also you aren't normally supposed to interact with you past self due matter annihilation shenanigans though that hall way fight at the airport was still able to happen without protagonist or Neil suffering from any side effects
I'm probably going to watch this movie again to fill in gaps...though not now due to Labor Day Weekend in the States.
[SPOILER - highlight to read]: The Sator stuff is briefly explained in him saying he formed a company that were the only bidders on a contract to dig through the rubble of his home city after the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon in order to find the weapon's remaining plutonium and all the other companies considered it a death sentence. He was 17 years old at the time.
I don't think anyone was meant to be left alive. The people in the future were going extinct anyway and were taking a chance regarding the grandfather paradox and that killing their own ancestors in the past wouldn't kill them in the future yet somehow stop the people in the past wrecking the planet. Unless they were to have a number of people in the past already inverted who wouldn't die when the algorithm is triggered. Maybe something to do with the breathing inverted air thing. I'll have to watch it again as well.
But yeah, as usual, the sound is not good. Or at least not optimised for the majority of cinemas and only for ones with compatible sound systems. There were a few lines in it I think I missed due to the mix that would've helped my understanding better. Usually lines Neil whispers at a few key moments
__________________ Sweating on the streets of Woking
Last edited by jaden_2.0 on Sep 3rd, 2020 at 01:15 AM
saw it yesterday. the concept was very cool to me but i honestly don't see myself rewatching it. i'd rank it somewhere in the middle of Nolan' catalog.
I'm the opposite. IMO this one lends itself well to rewatches. It was his most complex film to date, and I liked it as much as I did Inception, though not as much as Interstellar, Prestige, and the first two Batman movies. Still top 5 for me though. It was confusing as shit and I had to watch it a second time to get most of it.
I do have some complaints though. First is that this was a b*tch in IMAX when it comes to the dialogue audio. My first time, I saw it in IMAX and made out maybe 50-60 percent of the dialogue. That was rough.
My other complaint is the characters not having much personality this time outside of the main character (who I realized my second watch was never even named). I really liked the Protagonist and Pattinson, but outside of them I couldn't find myself caring about anyone else. This one was really missing that human element from some of his prior movies.
Tenet is a 2020 spy film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who produced it with Emma Thomas. A co-production between the United Kingdom and United States, it stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The plot follows a secret agent (Washington) as he manipulates the flow of time to prevent World War III.
Nolan took more than five years to write the screenplay after deliberating about Tenet's central ideas for over a decade. Casting began in March 2019, and principal photography took place in Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and United States, starting in May 2019. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot on 70 mm and IMAX.
Delayed three times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tenet was released in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2020, and United States on September 3, 2020, in IMAX, 35 mm, and 70 mm. It was the first Hollywood tent-pole to open in theaters after the pandemic shutdown, and has grossed $53 million worldwide. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances and action sequences, though some criticized the confusing plot, impassive tone, and sound mixing.
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Jun 11th, 2020 05:09 PM
Thanks Scribble!
