#at least something different. at least utilising its medium cleverly

[mapsofnonexistentplaces]

i need to catch up with the dunmeshi anime i’ve only seen like the first episode but man it sure is an adaptation that makes you think “wow! i wish i was reading the original manga instead” i think it just fails at getting across all the lore and more vitally all the details about the food preparation and the small diagrams of the monsters and stuff. like yeah that shit’ll flash on screen for a second or two but that doesn’t give it the same time of day as the manga does and the whole commixing of episodes really loses the whole one meal per chapter narrative gimmick that gives the manga its really tight pacing even if the whole chapter’s slower or more character focused. like idk. i think dunmeshi’s skeuomorphism to a proper cookbook and the way it sanctions its timing is very special and uh. good. and the anime missed out on that so it’s not very uh. good

[offworldcolony]

Tenet, 2020 - ★★★

Top Spot of cinema this film aint. But how do I review you Tenet? How did I feel about you? Did I like you as much as I did simply because I hadn't been to the cinema in 9 months? Is it because, in the cinema, I was able to streth my legs and be two full seats away from the public whilst also having amazing seats? My dream-cinema-going experience?

Let's find out.

First off this film is Prime Nolan, it is a quintessential, distillation of Nolan. If you squeezed him, Tenet would fall out. It certainly has one hand firmly gripping the origins of Nolan's love of the cinema format; one which moves inexorably, like time, forwards, and can change speed and be moved around or edited, like memory. This forged, early in his career something like Memento. But Tenet also has its foot firmly stamped on the expensive and loud and thrilling big-budget blockbuster, where 200 million dollars can be used to tackle complex (if a little arid and cerebral) subjects not unlike his more recent endeavours such as Inception.

Inaccurate comparisons to Bond (although this is much more like a Mission Impossible film) and to Inception aren't unwarranted, they're just slightly off. Tenet is a counterpoint, a reflection and an anti-Inception, which may, in some way, have been Nolan's intention, knowing that he calculates and enjoys building a fourth-wall shattering element to all of his movies.

What does that mean? Well, whereas Inception was a very simple puzzle told awkwardly and in a convoluted way, Tenet is an awkward and convoluted puzzle told very simply, if at all. Where Inception prided itself on the over-explanation and exposition dumps inherent in genres such as the heist-film, Tenet tells you almost nothing, (in fact when it does, I'm looking at you Shipping Container scene, it's incredibly out of place and unwanted) it wants you to play catch up, and the Hitchcockian lines between what a protagonist (cheekily called The Protagonist here) and what the audience knows are blurred, which does actually feed directly into the plot of the film. So he's using the medium here to enhance or back up the story he is telling, as usual, and that is certainly clever and welcome.

The first two-thirds (despite Nolan's usual confounding and blisteringly loud opening sequences he favours) is a genuine riot, I loved being taken on a ride without ever knowing where it was going to end up. I enjoyed pieces of the puzzle slotting into place slowly, I enjoyed Robert Pattinson very much and John David Washington who was simply exquisite.

John David Washington was a charming, steely, human actor with the poise of knowing something well, but being slightly out of his depth, which I imagine was him channelling his part on the film with Nolan as the architect from "the future" mirrored in the film, and he, the Protagonist. A bit too clever for its own good this one? yeah, maybe. But Washington cements himself as one of my favourite actors by doing very little here but doing it exceedingly well. He the most is watchable of all Nolan's protagonists so far, and I'm sure the enjoyment I had in the film hung at every turn on his ability to act like a smart, fun, deep character, completely out of his depth (or out of his time??!!??!!) Hah.

The standout fight of the movie (incidentally I would love to see if it takes place both times at the same point of the movie's runtime mirrored, just a thought) is a really cleverly conceived and executed one, it's half-Matrix, half-Jedi powered and it's a much more exciting idea than a rotating hallway. It has the potential to really start a kind of genre of it's own; it may even be the bullet-time of this generation except the scope of it is limited to films that actually have time travel as a conceit which is a shame, but Nolan could really utilise this technique many more times in a myriad of exciting ways, if he wanted to make a sequel.

Which leads me to one of my gripes I suppose, and, like this film, it's a strange fourth-wall kind of one. Because Nolan has such a singular (and wearing thin?) vision and style, doubled-down instead of evolved, over his filmography, his films have been cutting-edge and completely of their time. Unlike another artist-filmmaker like Wes Anderson who, with Grand Budapest, let himself become immersed in his own style and went full-Anderson, he was ahead of his time, and so his style has settled into be likeable and welcome now. Nolan, on the absolute precipice of now, means his style, revolutionary in the mid-late 00's, is still stuck there. His imitators have been and gone and even they have changed their styles and their films. But Nolan's style is still stuck in 2010.

Because so much of his IP is controlled by him, there's little hope for a Tenet sequel, and even less-so, one handled by a different auteur. Whereas something like The Matrix should be handled by the underground, sub-culture Wachowskis to bring a vision to it that we can't expect, nor should we, a 'franchise' like Tenet would be amazing to see handled by a different director; the conceits of a future war, inverted entropy etc. (not wanting to give too much away!) have so much scope, and yet this one and done, half-baked film will be all we ever have. Nolan needs a protege; not unlike Peter Berg to Michael Mann, DJ Caruso to Spielberg (yes both of those filmmakers aren't exactly stellar) but some young buck with ideas of their one to be taken under Nolan's wing to be able to play around within his framework. Whether we ever see Incenet or Tenception, I'd still like to see a Ryan Coogler, or a Benh Zeitlin, or a J. C. Chandor or Ava Duvernay or Damien Chazelle or even Shane Carruth take on board this franchise with the same kind of budget. With John David Washington in the Lead again, of course.

This would lead to a slightly altered tone. For example, does Nolan know how silly some of these things appear when delivered po-faced? The almost child-like gesture for Tenet, the embarrassing spy-code-phrases, the bulldozer clunkiness of a handful of the very end sequences' dialogue, these things threaten to undermine the movie in ways that for some viewers, it may never recover from. Does he know that talking about time-travel in a movie has been done the same way for 30 years? He did that in Interstellar, if an explanation of something has been done in 1990, try and find a better way to explain it in your movie! He makes reference a few times to the awkwardness of the movie's premise and plotlines, but it's not enough and Branagh's villain is a key piece to that also, he's almost an unnecessary component to the movie and one that a better writer and another draft might have even excised.

But Nolan has to hang is emotional hat and stakes on something. So, in his typical way, instead of making it, you know, actually emotional, and using the vehicle of cinema, celluloid, editing, photography etc. to bolster and energise the emotionality, he just puts in a child and some blindingly stupid lines about Motherhood and another abused and erratic Female 'Lead'. In many ways I feel like the plot (and runtime) of his movies would do better to excise the emotionality completely, either make something genuinely resonant and impactful to me, or just make something epic and clever and spend the runtime exploring and wringing out of that concept, as much as you can. Especially if you're unlikely to ever make a sequel to it.

If you're talking Nolan, you have to talk about sound. His mixes have been getting progressively unusual; exposition delivered through masks or by non-native speakers, I get it when he says it's to get you to lean in and listen, I even defended it when Bane was next to unintelligible because I liked the concept of it, it was bold and creative. But now I'm exhausted. Does he have bad hearing? Does he enjoy bombarding people with a wall of sound? Michael Mann is another filmmaker with a terrible mix but at least his can be attributed to his new avant-garde, voyeuristic style. At least Zimmer is off this one as composer, the music, while still satisfying that Nolan blast of noise, was pumping and electronic, sometimes simpering in the background with backwards-sounding instruments, but I felt like it sat there nicely most of the while instead of overpowering or overbearing like Zimmer's past collabs with Nolan.

The budget of Tenet is silly for what it is, I'd love to see where it all actually went; when a movie's climax isn't as blistering and creative as the Fifth Transformers movie and on a bigger budget, some questions about accounting or at least on creative veracity in big set-pieces may be needed. The balance of explaining, found not lacking in Inception, but lacking here, is no-more emblematic than in its final battle; Blue-Team backwards, Red-Team forwards, is not enough to get invested in the mechanics and allow either for the turning off of one's brain or the engagement in the puzzle of it all. It's just a mess that doesn’t just seem hard to follow on first watch, but also seems unlikely to be something interesting to dissect or enjoy on subsequent watches, unlike some of the puzzles of Inception that were.

But it's not all bad, like I said, I really enjoyed the experience of watching it in the cinema, which is essentially Nolan's primary goal. Like his previous films, I acknowledge, accept and subsume its flaws into the overall experience of what I'm getting. I found the notion of the abused party having to actually keep the abuser alive rather than kill them a tremendously clever twist on the idea (although completely underbaked in execution) and a time travel movie using entropy and inversion is a monumentally cinematic twist on it. Some of the moments and scenes I do completely want to watch again, there's so much detail and life and character in some of the sets and some of the time and palindrome related easter eggs are intriguing, (the less obvious stuff and not the fact that a character is called Arepo and for the entire movie I was expecting that to have some kind of significance beyond just being Opera backwards!) and the moments of the film shown as the very early teasers were really cool when they actually surfaced in the film proper.

I found, much more than many movies I've seen, the videogame influences in this one; from the lead character simply being A Protagonist, to the Call of Duty multiplayer locations (warehouse, yacht, airport, destroyed crater), to the sterile and industrial hallways, to the way the action was shot, to the set-pieces and even the time-reversed mechanic felt like it could have been instigated by a button press. It reminded me of a Max Payne game or another PlayStation 2-era third-person shooter. I was reminded of the more recent game Control also; shadowy agencies and conspiracies, the fusion of brutalism and science-fiction, the villain.

So I guess this is why I liked it; It was an experience. And therefore it did it’s job. I want to watch it again, soon. Which is not always the case. It lives inside its own constructed world, tenet, I enjoy when these films come along with a narrow focus and it's own set of rules, I find that appealing, but alienating at the same time. I wanted to make a review that had some kind of mirrored structure to it, but the best you're gonna get is a palindrome for the start and the end. The most interesting thing about Tenet is, I'm still thinking about it, and the world it so finely crafted, which is separate and parallel to our own, is a world I'd happily step back into given the chance.

Nolan's worst film? Maybe not, despite being far from the Nolan oeuvre Top Spot.

source https://letterboxd.com/offworldcolony/film/tenet/