Film/Video Discussion Thread - The Bear and Badger

g.man

I am currently fifty-two minutes into Tenet.
I have no idea what is going on.
I have no idea who anyone is.
I have no idea what anyone is trying to achieve.
I cannot understand a single word anyone is saying.

Kow

Don't expect to be any the wiser by the end.

g.man

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!?

Kow

Well, it's about time!

Diluted Dante

g.man wrote:

I am currently fifty-two minute into Tenet. I have no idea what is going on. I have no idea who anyone is. I have no idea what anyone is trying to achieve. I cannot understand a single word anyone is saying.

Should have saved yourself some time:

g.man

Dear God. There’s still another forty-five minutes of this shite to go.

Kow

They save the worst for last too. So be ready.

g.man

I’m struggling to conceive of how it could possibly get worse.

b0r1s

g.man wrote:

I am currently fifty-two minutes into Tenet.
I have no idea what is going on.
I have no idea who anyone is.
I have no idea what anyone is trying to achieve.
I cannot understand a single word anyone is saying.

I’m sure this is the same review as Star Trek Discovery

g.man

IT IS OVER.

g.man

DEAR LORD.

Blocks100

If you watched it on VHS, the tape rewinds itself once it reaches the end. Shazam!

g.man

I think Christopher Nolan may have just singlehandedly killed cinema with this film. I'm speechless.

davyK

Any interest I had in Tenet has been well and truly obliterated by responses in this thread.

g.man

So, TENET. (some mild spoilers)
Let's cut to the chase.
This is without question the single worst blockbuster ever made.
I know we like to joke about how bad some movies are, but really, this one takes the fucking prize, then exits the stadium and runs a lap of honour round Hollywood for good measure. Jesus Fucking Christ.
Now I likes me a Nolan film. Some are better than others, but he's usually a safe bet for a spectacular and sometimes thought-provoking blockbuster. However, in the space of two and a half hours, never has a director gobbled-up and shat out every last ounce of goodwill I hold for them like Nolan has with this film.

It's a bafflingly incomprehensible mess of a film, that relies on entire books worth of exposition, all rendered incomprehensible to the ear by a bizarre sound-mix that leaves the viewer wondering if they've suddenly developed hearing loss.
This wouldn't be so bad though, if the exposition in question actually explained to the viewer what the fuck is going on, or answered any of the myriad questions you'll find yourself asking during the film, but no, it's just page after page of sheer gobbledygook.

At no point did I have the faintest idea who any of these people were, or what they were trying to achieve, or why they were trying to achieve it.
There's a secret agent man, and he's dead, but now he's not dead, and now he's working for someone new, but we don't know who, and strange stuff is happening with time, and he's trying to get someone's wife to help him stop her evil husband from doing something in the future that could destroy the past or something, and he has a friend who is another secret agent man, and he helps him do strange stuff that makes absolutely no sense. There are apparently machines that enable people to move backwards in time, but none of this is satisfactorily explained, and so everybody just constantly zips backwards and forwards in time for seemingly no good reason.
There are a couple of brief moments at the front end that are such obvious plot twists for later in the film, that you certainly won't need a time machine to see coming, and yet, when you get to their eventual pay-off, Nolan still manages to make these reveals an incomprehensible mess.

None of this is satisfying. None of this is fun, and none of this particularly spectacular. It's a time bomb.
If you manage to make it to the end of this clusterfuck, you are then rewarded with the worst climax in cinema history. A battle where everyone is simultaneously moving backwards and forwards in time, trying to achieve something bafflingly obtuse, while a clock ticks down to a deadline.
I defy anyone to be able to work out what the actual fuck is going on at this point, and it's an incredibly unsatisfying pay-off for two and a half hours spent scratching your fucking head in bewilderment.

Nolan then has the audacity to kick the viewer in the balls one last time and tease a fucking sequel! Only in 2020 could this be a thing.
Honestly, if I had the technology from this film, I'd go backwards in time and warn everyone not to waste their time watching this garbage, because this really is two and a half hours of your life that you will never get back.

fuck off Nolan

g.man

Kow

Yas, like I said - absolute garbage. By the end of the film I had less idea what was going on than I did in the middle of the film (when I had no idea either, so that's some feat).