re: "Tenet" Official SPOILERS Thread

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Made them hate all of his other movies too.

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Well that’s dumb

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Also, I wonder if JDW is dead the whole movie.
Kinda like Leo might be dreaming in inception.
The protagonist bites the capsule in the first 10 mins then wakes up and is told about tenet. Did he die? Who knows.

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I like this interpretation. And I think the very 1st thing that guy says to him upon waking is “Welcome to the afterlife.” In some ways, it would actually make the movie make more sense.

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The meeting with Caine was supposed to be brief. JDW needed a way to get to Sator. Priya had a source inside British intelligence that could get him close to his wife. The only reason he met with Caine was to be briefed on his meeting with Kat.

Kat invited him to dinner because JDW brought up Arepo's name (who had been practically killed by Sator). So she knew he was lying and was there to see her for something more important, but also knew he had connections if he showed up with a Goya painting claiming it was from Arepo.

He's invited to the dinner because JDW literally tells Kat to invite him so he can get close to Sator. JDW brings up the Opera seige because he knows Sator was behind it, which piques his interest. So they decide to have a private conversation about it while sailing the next day so no one could listen in.

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I have no doubt that it all makes sense on paper. I’m sure if I read the script and had time to marinate over it, go back and re-read some things, etc...it would be infinitely clearer. But the audience is not afforded that luxury, which is why I thought a lot of things just felt unearned on screen.

Someone above mentioned the girl at the beginning (I’m assuming he meant the hot chick from In Bruges) says something to the effect of “Don’t even bother asking questions...” I hadn’t remembered that. I remembered Pattinson bringing up the Grandfather Paradox to The Protagonist (a brilliant thought experiment due to its simplicity in helping a layperson understand the complexity of backwards time travel).

The Protagonist says something like “Well, what’s the answer” to which Pattinson replies “there’s not one, it’s a paradox” and laughs it off. At first I thought it was a kind of cheap cheat to preemptively absolve the film of any upcoming unresolved paradoxes. But combined with what the girl says, I think they both may Nolan’s nod(s) to the audience that he gets all this shite may not make perfect sense, but frick it, suspend your disbelief and let’s go on this really cool ride I’ve created for you. Now, I think it may just be brilliant.

Speaking of brilliant, are you (Cs) Christopher Nolan? Not because you’re defending the film (which I don’t think you are as much as simply answering questions and explaining things, which is much appreciated ), but because I don’t know how you’re able to have comprehended it to be able to explain it so thoroughly. Unless you’ve somehow managed to get your hands on the script or have just seen it several times, I tremble in awe of your brilliance. Please tell me you haven’t simply seen it just once—I would feel really bad about my intelligence, or lack thereof as the case may be. And I have enough self-loathing as is.

I dozed off for a few minutes.

Did I miss the explanation for how they saw the inverted people moving backwards?

seems like you would only cross them for an instant

When do you stop seeing them going backwards?


I liked the movie though.

I generally like Christopher Nolan's films and appreciate the complexity behind his plots. But man this one is so damn complex, I just got to a point about halfway into the film where I accepted that I was lost and wasn't gonna stress on it anymore.

I kept thinking, is this what my labrador feels like watching Inception?

Great concept, horrible execution.

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If the person is in your current timeline and is about to enter the turnstile,...

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Thanks, I am not a "That isn't the way it works" guy when viewing science fiction, figured I missed that point.

Ummmm, I'm just going to come out and admit it: I didn't get it. I haven't read the plot synopsis either (I will shortly after making this post), but I did not understand this about 25% of this movie. It felt like listening to the two Weinstein brothers talk each other when you think you are a somewhat intelligent individual and they just completely talk past you. "Look, Eric, I get the ten dimensions, but how the frick did you get to 14 dimensions? Slow the hell down. And Bret I have no idea what you're talking about on molecular structure endings either."

Like why is there a time machine in the Oslo airport? I don't get the art connections to the overall story either. I'm sure I'll like it more on my second viewing, but first viewing it just confused the hell out of me.

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I don't think it was just your theatre. The sound mixing in the movie was awful. I couldn't understand a good chunk of the dialogue

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Yeah, I had no idea what Kenneth Branagh was saying half the time (specifically at the end which added to my confusion) so that didn't help.

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That’s interesting you say that, because when I saw the end credit where Christopher wrote it himself, I immediately thought it would have been better with Jonathan’s writing it. Perhaps I’m biased, though, because I not only think The Prestige is Christopher’s masterpiece, but that it’s one of the greatest American films of all time. But at the same time, Jonathan really shite the bed with seasons 2 and 3 of Westworld, so I don’t know.

But it wasn’t the dialogue I had a problem with—I think the exposition was not just critical for the audience, but really unavoidable due to the incredibly creative and ambitious story. And I thought it made sense to present it as answers to questions by The Protagonist and Kat because who wouldn’t be confused as all frick when told about all that. If anything, they accepted everything a little too quickly. Actually, probably a lot.

My criticism of the writing weren’t the words the characters were saying, but the rapid fire way in which they were said, especially considering the extreme complexity of what was going on. I think it was clearly a choice for the pace of the dialogue to match the fast pace of the action, but it didn’t allow the audience enough time to wrap our heads around and comprehend what we were being presented, especially considering the complicatedness of what we were being asked to. I pretty much had no idea wtf was going on for the first 20-30 minutes and kept wishing we had subtitles. I see a few others mentioned the same, but they were blaming the sound mix. And maybe that was mostly it, but in the moment, I just wanted to both hear and read what was happening in hopes of making more sense of it.

I also thought relationships were advanced at ridiculous paces. He has a 2-minute conversation with Michael Caine’s character (I still don’t know who he was), mainly about the subparness of his Brooks Brothers suits, then the next thing we know he is having a one-on-one audience with a billionaire’s wife, who is all too eager to believe what he’s selling and starts telling him all kinds of things that no wife and mother would be telling someone she just met, no matter how much she hated her husband. And she knew how maniacal her husband is, The Protagonist could have easily been sent by her husband to test her. Then he’s invited to what looks like a pretty exclusive dinner party, pulls up a chair, stays for about 30 seconds, then excuses himself like no big deal. Next day he’s hanging out on their $100 million yacht, sailing what I can only assume is a multi-million dollar boat, etc...

And somewhere in there he utters some magic words and is talking to a brilliant Indian physicist (?), only I think she was the brains behind the scenes and her husband was the front who got the credit (?). And after knowing each other about 5 minutes, she tells him about the greatest invention in human history, something someone from that timeline could barely even conceive of, and the convoluted plan of a madman trying to end the world. Maybe I’m slower than most viewers, I just a lot of that was unearned.

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