r/MovieDetails • u/MajorNoodles • 10d ago
šµļø Accuracy In Tenet (2020), blue and red represent inverted time and normal time, respectively. The armored truck transporting the algorithm piece is blue. The firetruck used to steal it to prevent it from being used is red.
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u/Scro86 10d ago
Is this supposed to be like Doppler shift?
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u/MajorNoodles 10d ago
It's actually a lot simpler than that. The "normal" side of turnstiles are always illuminated or labeled with red, while the inverted sides are illuminated or labeled with blue. And at the final battle, the forward team wears red armbands while the inverted team wears blue.
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u/Scro86 10d ago
Yeah I understand but I am wondering if Nolan specifically picked those to correlate to red shift (an object moving away from you) and blue shift (one moving toward you) as a way to symbolize moving forward and backward through timeā¦ since time and space are essentially the same thing
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u/Is12345aweakpassword 10d ago
Oh fantastic, this was the final thing I needed to understand the movie. It all makes sense nowā¦
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u/UberChew 10d ago
Dont worry the scientist lady at the start tells you that you wouldnt understand when asked to explain. Good enough for me not to bother.
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u/monstercello 10d ago
Also basically everything she says about the āwarā and whatās happening is wrong lol
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u/coding_ape 10d ago
Still confused as fuck watching this movie, but a nice detail
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u/MajorNoodles 10d ago
I was also gonna mention the traffic lights not having any red or blue on them but I think that one is better off in /r/shittymoviedetails
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u/TineJaus 10d ago
Tbh this movie just belongs there
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u/iglooxhibit 10d ago
Strong disagree, but your opinion remains valid as an opinion.
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u/TineJaus 10d ago
I appreciate that. Normally I love this stuff but I had some kind of reaction to this movie and disliked it. Social media seems pretty 50/50 depending on the thread
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u/billywitt 10d ago
Itās not a good movie for sure. And I love Christopher Nolan movies. Itās ok. Even the best have a stinker every once in a while.
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u/BeckBarlow 10d ago
Iāve never seen it, I just like to see people discuss something that means nothing to me.
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u/Haley_Tha_Demon 10d ago
I watched it twice and still don't remember most of the plot, some of the action scenes were cool but it feels like I never actually watched it every time someone brings up the movie and I have nothing to say about it
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u/GolemancerVekk 9d ago
I had to watch a half hour explanation on YouTube after the movie to make sense of it and I do have new-found appreciation for it but... I might as well have watched only the explanation.
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u/mrhashbrown 10d ago
My approach is turn off my brain and just enjoy the action. I'm of the opinion that Tenet is underappreciated for having some of the coolest and trippiest fight scenes and stunt scenes in recent history, especially since it's mostly relying on practical effects and stunts rather than CGI. I haven't really been wowed by action sequences like that since I saw the first Matrix.Ā
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u/killshelter 10d ago
Not to mention buying a fucking 747 just to crash it into a building. I loved the movie even if I still donāt fully understand it after watching it 5 times now. But I understand it a little more each time.
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u/mrhashbrown 10d ago
That was a great one. Even the scene where they ran on the side of the building had me giddy lol. Just so many memorable action scenes that were very creative.
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u/killshelter 10d ago
I think Tenet will be the closest we get to a Nolan Bond film, which is a shame because I wanna see him do one in the 2030ās with a mid-60ās Matt Damon putting on an awful British accent while not trying very hard to cover up the Bostonian.
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u/Bomberdude333 9d ago edited 9d ago
Whatās so hard to understand itās just a 4 dimensional chess game being played with time and the secret to unlocking time travel being split 9 ways hidden in time.š¤£š¤£š¤£
Time for me to go to bed
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u/LaminatedAirplane 10d ago
lol thereās a scene where the scientist explaining the process says ādonāt think too hard about itā
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u/See_Bee10 10d ago
Clever bit of lampshading. The plot works, but if you get too hung up on the mechanics of inversion you'll miss it. It's like Nolan offered you a deal, accept that time is a line that you can move forward or backwards along but the outcome stays the same. In exchange the rest of the story makes total sense.
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u/anhtice 10d ago
amazing soundtrack too!
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u/mrhashbrown 10d ago
Agreed, absolutely love the soundtrack and how it plays with the direction of time.Ā
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u/workingtrot 9d ago
It would have been a really cool short film I think. Didn't really work as a feature length
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u/Supersumo2 10d ago
The action and fight choreography was so good in this movie but I really didn't enjoy anything else about it. Didn't seem nearly as confusing as everyone says, and the dialogue was just really bad to me. Maybe I didn't "get it" but I feel like I did and just didn't like it.
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u/The_Confirminator 10d ago
I always tell my friends that this movie isn't particularly deep, it's not particularly amazing or particularly amazing acting... If you think about it too much, it all falls apart. But it is a fun spy movie, and definitely radiates Nolan's cinematography.
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u/paranoid_giraffe 10d ago
The movie also leaves very little to speculation story-wise. My wife and I like to talk during movies and speculate what something means or what will happen; some things may be foreshadowing or Chekhovs gun, etc.. Every time I figured something out in this movie, it just explained it within the next five minutes anyways. You donāt have to be smart to understand whatās happening.
The only thing I have to say for people who donāt understand the movie is that they just arenāt paying attention, like at all. An āintelligentā viewer will only be about 2-5 minutes ahead of you in terms of movie knowledge.
Itās an absolutely fantastic action-spy movie though, youāre right about that. This movie may have been the first and only movie I have seen where a scene with a (or The) protagonist running is actually running fast instead of āslow-fast acting running for moviesā if you know what I mean. It adds to the intensity. Helps that The Protagonistās actor was previously a football player lol
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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc 9d ago
JDW became my favorite actor after watching Tenet. He's a natural and very athletic so his action scenes feel very real.
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u/twirling-upward 8d ago
Who?
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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc 8d ago
The actor who plays the protagonist in tenet, his name is John David Washington.
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u/DW496 10d ago
I didn't realize just how confused I was by the movie until reading this detail. I'm like...they were stealing an algorithm?
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u/MajorNoodles 9d ago
Yes, but at the time they thought it was the plutonium core of a nuclear weapon. It's the same thing they were trying to retrieve in the opening scene.
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u/See_Bee10 10d ago
It's a palindrome. If you look up the Sator square, every word is a key plot point.
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u/JoeViturbo 10d ago
My biggest complaint is the final battle when Nolan had the perfect opportunity to do the coolest thing of all time: a mixture of time-inverted/non-time inverted soldiers fighting another mixture of time-inverted/non-time inverted soldiers. In the actual battle, you hardly ever even see the opposing forces.
I guess it would have been technologically challenging to pull off, not to mention expensive.
However, it felt like that was what the film was building too, particularly since we had seen a one on one fight between a normal person and a time-inverted person already play out from both perspectives.
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u/pancreas_consumer 9d ago
Exactly! That's why I felt something big was horribly missing from the Stalsk-12 sequence. It just felt like they were shooting at nothing.
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u/Rad10_Active 9d ago
This is a frequent problem in Nolan's movies. His gunfights are usually (but not always) super weak and vague. You can't really tell what, if anything is actually happening in the fight. In Dunkirk I don't think you ever see a German soldier until the last scene (although this feels like a stylistic choice). In Inception most of the shooting is the agents just shooting off into the distance at implied bad guys we never see.
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u/Scapadap 8d ago
Yea I seen the movie a few times now, I enjoy it. I can follow everything pretty well, until they get to that last battle and all hell breaks loose. What the hell is happening in that scene lol. I get overall whatās happening, but in the moment to moment gun fights and shit Iām so lost.
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u/softstones 10d ago
This is probably the most confusing movie that I liked watching, I will always be confused though
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u/baldude69 9d ago
So deeply weird. I keep thinking every time I watch it that Iāll understand it better, but still donāt fully understand it even after watching it three times. Worth it for the crazy inverted fight choreography alone.
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u/PMmeYOURcombos 10d ago
Wow people really didnāt like this movie.
One of my favorite films.
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u/biograf_ 10d ago
I just couldn't understand what anyone was saying.
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u/baldude69 9d ago
Way easier to understand on a system with a proper center channel speaker. The mixing for stereo listening is terrrible, but when I finally got my surround system set up I could instantly understand the dialogue much better.
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u/loitermaster 10d ago
yeah I'm shocked it was impossible to understand for so many, it's a difficult concept if you're writing it but not so much if you're watching it happen. I think guns specifically threw everyone off
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u/Thesadcook 10d ago
I mean... of course it's impossible to understand... because it is science fiction. A character in the movie, a scientist, even, says "don't try to understand it".
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u/loitermaster 9d ago
is every movie with magic in it impossible to understand?
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u/Thesadcook 9d ago
Does the magic make sense or is it a literary device?
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u/loitermaster 9d ago
magic can't make sense that's why it's magic
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u/Thesadcook 9d ago
The same concept applies to science-fiction. When the science people find ways to break laws of physics they have to do it with science "magic"
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u/loitermaster 9d ago
you find all science fiction fantasy supernatural all marvel movies harry potter movies impossible to understand good luck bro you must be confused a lot
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u/LeroyoJenkins 10d ago
I absolutely loved this film, probably my favorite Nolan, along with Inception!
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u/Skreamie 10d ago
I really fail to see how people get so confused over this movie
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u/Wabusho 10d ago
Inception is legit more hard to understand than Tenet imo
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u/Buddy_Dakota 7d ago
No issue understanding, itās just dreadfully boring, and the action sequences feels really underwhelming for a movie about stuff moving both backwards and forward in time.
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u/Electric_Emu_420 10d ago
Am I literally the only person who understood this movie the first time?
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u/Aphemia1 10d ago
There isnāt much to understand, the movie tells you very early on not to bother understanding.
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u/chrib123 10d ago
People legitimately don't pay attention to movies, and this one had bad audio in the theatre.
It was fairly straightforward and explained well enough, IF you paid attention.
Some people turned their brains off for a movie and it flew over their heads.
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u/LookinAtTheFjord 10d ago
Yeah that's all fine and great but it doesn't mean that the movie actually makes any sense. You can understand the ideas being presented but "time inversion" as shown in this film is just nonsense. Complete and absolutely pollywoggle poppycock. I say this as a huge Nolan stan. My fave director blah blah blah. He even put a line in the movie about it being nonsense but to just go with it, lol.
It's a cool action movie but it's definitely his weakest film. Even being that, still a solid 6.5/10.
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u/chrib123 10d ago
So you didn't completely get it, that's fine.
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u/SilkwormAbraxas 10d ago
Since youāre clearly so much more intelligent than the rest of us, you can perhaps explain it to us all in a simple, digestible fashion.
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u/LookinAtTheFjord 10d ago
lol k
Pretentious as fuck. šš
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u/KrazzyKoopa 8d ago
calling a fun sci-fi movie concept ānonsenseā and āabsolute pollywoggle poppycockā is pretentious lol.
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u/baldude69 9d ago
I understood it well enough. There are some minor details that I still donāt completely understand after three watches, but the general plot is not hard to follow, as long as youāre using closed captions or have a good sound system with a center channel speaker for dialogue.
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u/paranoid_giraffe 10d ago
This is one of my criticisms about the movie too. It was (1) easy to understand and predict what happened/was going to happen, and (2) it literally explains everythingā¦ if someone says they donāt get it then they are literally incapable of paying attention, or straight up really, really dumb.
If something mysterious happens in the movie, you only have to wait 5 minutes before the movie will explain exactly what happened.
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u/ManWithBigWeenus 9d ago
Iāve watched it many times. I have watched explanations on YouTube. How did they go back in time?
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u/skrillex_sk2 10d ago
Guess I'm the only one who loves this movie.
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u/baldude69 9d ago
Iām actually surprised at the positive reaction ITT. I too loved this movie but seems like people haaaated it! Itās a very challenging engaging movie, and doesnāt always make perfect sense, so I can see how people who want a fun romp wouldnāt like it
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u/bradbull 10d ago
I'm convinced everyone who was confused by this movie were only half paying attention to it. You had to adjust your thinking of time being always linear and they prepare you for that, but once you do that then it's relatively straightforward.
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u/AlfaHotelWhiskey 10d ago
I feel like I should watch this movie again but I also feel like I donāt really want to watch this movie again.
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u/BeMancini 10d ago
Good detail.
This is still the lowest tier Nolan movie, not because itās bad, but itās his most clinical film.
Usually, a high concept movie like this sets up the premise to later deliver the fun and games. Up until this movie, he was an expert at doing that, but this movie is like āokay, this will take a lot of time to set up the premise, and what youāre going to get is something that looks, while impressively done, kind of goofy, and in a lot of ways not that fun to watch play out. But it was definitely hard to film, so be impressed.ā
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u/West_Prune5561 10d ago
I think Nolan fell into the same trap that a lot of time travel/shift movies get into: paradox trap. A director/screenwriter thinks that they can make the perfect time-shift movie that finally does it legitimately and explains how/why there are no paradoxes.
The price Nolan had to pay was he had to explain it to the audience. He got about 2/3 of the way through and suddenly had several remaining paradoxes to explain and ran out of science/logic. So the end gets smeared with plot logic and whitewash and writes off misunderstanding on the viewer "not getting it."
TBF, it's tough because IMO by definition it's not explainable. So time spent trying to explain it is wasted script. Russos got away with it in Avengers: Endgame by not explaining it. There's the scene of Tony Stark in the cabin and he says something about "this time, use a Mobius strip, but reverse it." and voila...time travel. No other effort in the script to explain.
I DO like Tenet. Up until this I had written off Robert Pattinson as a wannabe teen-actor. He was great in Tenet and I've gone back and watched a lot of his prior work (Lighthouse, The King, etc) except Twilight. He's a great actor. Can't wait for Mickey 17 to hit streaming.
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u/LookinAtTheFjord 10d ago
TBF, it's tough because IMO by definition it's not explainable. So time spent trying to explain it is wasted script.
Which Nolan knows and is why he put the line in there about not thinking too hard about it.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 10d ago
He got about 2/3 of the way through and suddenly had several remaining paradoxes to explain and ran out of science/logic.
Can you be more specific?
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u/qorbexl 10d ago
You cannot logically have clean time travel where people are able to move forwards and backward. It will result in an unsolvable paradox unless nothing happens.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 10d ago
There's some standard bootstrap paradoxes. But I can't think of any unsolvable paradoxes in the film.
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u/qorbexl 10d ago
Well go ahead and describe an unsolvable paradox. What's the difference between a bootstrap paradox and a normal one?
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u/Alive_Ice7937 9d ago
In terms of timetravel, you have the bootstrap paradox and the grandfather paradox. The grandfather paradox is unsolvable because if you kill your own grandfather, that's an action that prevents your existence. Conversely, if you went back in time and saved your grandfather from being killed, then you have ensured your existence. This is standard fare in timetravel stories where cause can come after effect.
In Tenet, we aren't told the origin of the turnstiles. Given that one of the main goals of the Tenet organisation is to suppress all knowledge of the turnstiles, it's possible that the first team to build one did so entirely independently. If that's the case, then all the other bootstrap paradoxes are solvable imo.
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u/qorbexl 9d ago
But youre moving backwards in time, nothing works. The idea that cars uncllide means you wouldn't be able to see: photons would stream from your eyes and bounce off something and be sucked up by the sun.Ā Ā Ā The idea that you could build the turnstile and go backwards into a history where it doesn't exist is just meaningless. The origin can't be in the future anymore than you can go back in time and be your own parent.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 9d ago
But youre moving backwards in time, nothing works. The idea that cars uncllide means you wouldn't be able to see: photons would stream from your eyes and bounce off something and be sucked up by the sun.Ā
That's not a paradox. That's you nitpicking the "physics" of an inherently absurd premise.
The idea that you could build the turnstile and go backwards into a history where it doesn't exist is just meaningless.
That's what my second paragraph is about. In tenet, is possible that the first team to build a turnstile did so without any knowledge of their pre existence.
The origin can't be in the future anymore than you can go back in time and be your own parent.
In a fixed timeline timetravel movie like Tenet, cause can come after effect. That's a feature, not a bug. If you being your own parent is how you exist, then that's possible.
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u/qorbexl 9d ago
That's not a paradox. That's you nitpicking the "physics" of an inherently absurd premise.Ā
Ā Ā
Okay, so that's all. That's Tenet. It's not rational. It's just a silly movie with a 15-year-old's understanding of physics and entropy and time. It's stupid fun with a fun sciencey handwaved, but it's not justifiable.
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u/brown-_-rice 9d ago
Everything you just said explains the exact opposite of what the movie is actually about.
Iām more impressed than anything that youāre this confidently wrong.
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u/hugebone 9d ago
My face watching the movie was red and I ended up feeling pretty blue by the ending.
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u/rockerscott 7d ago
Iām gonna need someone to give me the entire plot of the movie because I have never seen it and the comments are leaving me with more questions than answers.
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u/Bocifer1 9d ago
This movie just didnāt make an ounce of sense, and it tries so hard to present itself like itās āintelligentā
Iām sorry - in my opinion this was a huge miss for Nolan. Ā A movie shouldnāt need this much analysis to make sense of.Ā
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u/Jibber_Fight 10d ago
I love Nolan movies but this movie just sucked. Iām afraid heās gonna become a director that is surrounded by yes people. Itās why Odysseus could go either way. He has carte blanche now which can be a detrimental thing. The first I saw of this was Dunkirk was when he told theaters to turn the speakers up to uncomfortable levels on purpose. I have tinnitus and had to leave the theater. Tenet was just dumb. Oppenheimer was not that good at all and they bought awards through money campaigns. Just make a fucking good movie like you used to dude.
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u/johnnyutah30 10d ago
Iāll never be more disappointed in a move ever for the rest of my life I believe.
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u/Jokkitch 8d ago
This movie was so bad it's made me look at older Nolan films in a much more critical light.
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u/romulusnr 10d ago
kind of like Fringe where you had normal universe (blue), alt universe (red), 80s universe (80sy), and future universe (black)
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u/WillowNiffler 10d ago
I particularly like how, in a later scene, Kat wears a red dress in the blue inverted room to show she's in normal time despite everyone else around her.
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u/shrineless 9d ago
Is this a singular event or recurring theme? Been a while since Iāve watched the film but I donāt recall it being a recurring theme.
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u/MajorNoodles 9d ago edited 9d ago
The Oslo turnstile uses red and blue signs, the Tallinn turnstile uses red and blue lighting, and the forward and inverted teams at Stalsk-12 use red and blue armbands. Someone else in the comments also pointed out that Kat wears a red dress when being held captive by Sator who is inverted during the car chase and in the turnstile afterwards.
The opening logos also use the red blue theme.
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u/shrineless 9d ago
Wow thanks for this info!
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u/MajorNoodles 9d ago
There's a bunch of other examples too, I think. But these are the ones I know off the top of my hand. There's also an interesting detail with the traffic lights but I have no idea if that was intentional or not.
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u/outlaw_echo 8d ago
red and blue is in nearly everything included adverts.. so does it have another meaning
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u/Legrassian 10d ago
This movie is one of the coolest in visual effects, but apart from it it's just meh.
Very disappointing in my opinion.
But still, cool graphics tho.
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u/baldude69 9d ago
That fight choreography is some of the weirdest Iāve ever seen. Also there was minimal CGI which is also appreciated. So many practical effects when other movies would have used digital
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u/Legrassian 9d ago
Yeah, totally agree.
To be completely honest, I did not even get most of the story and whatnot, so damn weird and nonsensical.
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u/skywalkerRCP 9d ago
I enjoy Tenet. Have no clue whatās happening but I enjoy it for whatever reason.
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u/WillowNiffler 10d ago
I particularly like how, in a later scene, Kat wears a red dress in the blue inverted room to show she's in normal time despite everyone else around her.