@silverhawkins said:

Nolan is at his best when he's making supremely convoluted sci-fi epics. Got a lot of hope for this premise.

If you like convoluted you'll love Tenet! I usually have no problems following what happens in these kinds of movies (I only had to watch Primer once for instance), but this one gave me a headache. I still THINK I understood it all, but it's so convoluted that I'm not really sure. Came on here to see if people had any questions that I could answer or read answers for.

The movie has more in common with Memento than Inception or Interstellar, and feels both better and worse than those.

Groundhog Matrix

@Gringorilla said:

The movie has more in common with Memento than Inception or Interstellar, and feels both better and worse than those.

Inclined to think it's worse than those. Not necessarily story-wise, but in terms of cinematics. Seeing stuff going backwards just isn't that impressive in 2020 when its tech everyone has on their phone (versus a city folding in on itself).

The movie going audience seems to agree with that assessment since it is struggling to break even at the box office.(Reported budget of $205 million but with added costs of promotion etc that figure should be doubled to $410 million and with a current Worldwide gross of $239 million it is not looking too good )

He can make them as overly complex and self-referential as he pleases. Time travel doesn't have a whole lot of hard and fast rules.

Unless you kill yourself or your parents in the past ...

@Nexus71 said:

Unless you kill yourself or your parents in the past ...

technically not a hard and fast rule either.

It wasn't even the mechanics of the time travel I had a problem with, it was the characters. The entire plot hinges on the "romance" between Washington and Debicki and it was hilarious because they're so mismatched. She's like a foot taller than him. He's going through all this trouble for her why? They have no chemistry.

Branagh is cartoonishly evil, he wants to kill the whole world including his own son, because he's evil and that's about it. This reminded me in a lot of ways of Mission Impossible 2. It's a great concept but poorly executed.

Pile of rubbish. "Don't try to understand it. Feel it". Nolan is a huge BS artist.

Same night I watched Fatman too, enjoyed it much better than this crap.

@D-magic said:

Same night I watched Fatman too, enjoyed it much better than this crap.

Seconded about Fatman, that was the best thing I've seen lately.

Nolan always preferred form over content, but recently this obsessive comprehension just got worse. Screw logic, meaning, plausibility, lows of physics, these are just minor irrelevant details as long as it all looks good. He throws all that action, effects , fast talking and distortion of reality right in the face of the viewer, thinking maybe they won't notice completely childish writing. I mean, in all of his movies the main protagonists have a naive and pathetic motivations and drive purposes of a 10 year old child. Nolan maybe knows how to place and move the camera and show nicely constructed visuals, I'll give him that. But other than that he is either an infantile in his thinking or decides to treat his viewers as morons on purpose.

@cswood said:

It wasn't even the mechanics of the time travel I had a problem with, it was the characters. The entire plot hinges on the "romance" between Washington and Debicki and it was hilarious because they're so mismatched. She's like a foot taller than him. He's going through all this trouble for her why? They have no chemistry.

While I disagree that romance is never really about physical match-making, you are right that their wasn't any chemistry and it made his motivations to help her rather flimsy. I mean even Robert Pattinson (Neil) had more chemistry with her in their few minutes of screen time together.

Branagh is cartoonishly evil, he wants to kill the whole world including his own son, because he's evil and that's about it. This reminded me in a lot of ways of Mission Impossible 2. It's a great concept but poorly executed.

Actually thought he was great. His character was a typical megalomaniac who's thinking is "if he can't have her, no one can". Which applied to his son.

Overall I would be in agreement with everyone in that this was pretty difficult to follow how it all worked. Can anyone really say they understood what the woman scientist said in her explanation of inversion at the beginning? With the protagonist then saying he can control it via instinct?!

Having said that, it was still a lavish, enjoyable experience...but I would put it below Inception and Interstellar.

I liked the temporal themes... Yeah, it's a trope in most Nolan's movies, even managed to use it cinematicaly in Dunkirk, but he has a different twist on it in every movie...

Also, in this movie it makes sense, because it is the characters belief in the idea of time travel (the tenet) that even makes it possible for the plot to hold together... They're all basically deracinated strangers, apart from, ironically, the Branagh character's bond of possession with his estranged wife... So it's also a movie about human agency, faith and duty.

I think the main actor was a bit on the weak side. A bit goofy. He's certainly no Denzel. Also, the movie relied a bit too much on explaining, whereas inception, memento, intersetlar and Dunkirk where able to show the time concepts visually as well...

My friends hated Inception when we watched it in the cinema... They came around to it eventually... This isn't at that level of a movie, but it's good to see someone being ambitious and trying something new with a decent budget...

I liked it

Yeah, it was very convoluted. At a point in the last bit, it seemed like the film was all over the place, and I felt lost almost. It's one of those movies I wanted to like, but it didn't really draw me in like some of Nolan's other previous films did.