Hacker Cinema
Tenet
2020 · Film · 150 min
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
17 positive34 negative9 mixed58 neutralfrom 118 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
125 comments on Hacker News
Exactly. It’s like making every movie Tenet. I have to actively watch and piece together the plot.
Much of the VFX and CGI industry is already in India.
Movies and shows like Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Tenet, Dune 1&2, Odyssey, Chernobyl, Foundation, and The Last of Us were VFXed in large part by Indian companies like Prime Focus, Makuta, Phanton, and their subsidiaries.
A number of these overlap with HPC and Distributed Systems with a number of major players in the space coming out of the GPU design space like Raja Koduri (AMD, Apple, Intel). Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple, and others having dedicated GPU design teams in India since the early 2000s also helped.
I think Tenet was an absolute garbage movie, and Interstellar was mediocre at best. Honestly, I'm not planning to watch Odyssey because those two movies were so underwhelming.
As someone who enjoys (especially when I was younger) lucid dreaming, I found Inception well researched, and definitely dove into themes like consciousness, agency, and the reality (or unreality) of cause+effect in human behavior. These are universal themes but quite difficult to explore concretely without resort to contrivance like lucid dreaming (Inception), time reversal (Tenet) or amnesia & reverse narration (Memento). Memento was much more focused on the mental state of both the protagonist and audience, and in that sense was a better dramatic film. Tenet and Inception were much focused on the universe model. Interstellar seemed to be an attempt by Nolan to put human connection and emotion at the center, specifically the transcendence of love, but that approach wasn't a good fit for Nolan's personality or his technical skills.
Michael Bay is much more an action filmmaker than Nolan, and yet he also arguably has a much better feel for satiating people emotionally than Nolan. For the most part both make movies with greater appeal to men, but Nolan's more intellectual approach comes closer to being of cross-gender interest, IMO.
I wouldn't call Nolan's movies fantasy at all. At their core they're pure sci-fi, more than most sci-fi films. He starts with some curious bit of science (biology, physics, etc), rigorously maps out a story that sticks close to the science except for a single conceit, and builds a blockbuster around it with a dramatic structure that serves the exploration of the technical details more than the human drama. But Nolan has a unique style, and he's also clearly pursuing some very technical interests wrt movie making at least as much as the details of the story. So his movies are difficult to categorize beyond being, for most of his career, blockbuster-scale action flicks, for which he also has an excellent aptitude, which is still a skill, notwithstanding that it's considered crass.
I’d agree, but would argue that Nolan has a unique (almost Delphic) talent - for better or worse - amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations, and this alone makes his work more interesting, and worthy of critical attention, than your comment seems to imply if I have interpreted it correctly.
I think that’s just as true of his lesser films (Tenet capturing COVID’s barely comprehensible, antiseptic-psychedelic temporality, for example) as in his stronger work, and makes him - to me, at least - a very interesting artist within the Hollywood structure.
Memento, Inception, and Tenet are just action movies? It's interesting you use the word, succession, because all three of those movies explore the thematic, cinematic, and psychological meaning of that word.
The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.
I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.
There are only 3 screens in the UK; I've accepted I won't be going. I'm glad I got to see The Dark Knight Rises and Tenet in the BFI IMAX, though. The latter was during COVID and we had a whole row to ourselves. I don't even mind that these aren't the greatest films. IMAX is more of a spectacle in its own right and a great film will still be great on any screen.
watched it on IMAX and I thought it was great. personally I love movies and I've been a big fan of Christopher Nolan and the only movie I didn't like from him was Tenet.
also lots of reviews online about it being woke, if this is you then skip it...this is art from an artist and if you don't like his vision then skip the movie. no one is forcing you to watch it
And yet most reviewers praise it. So either they are all wrong, or you move in very snobbish circles. Because 'an embarrassment' is extremely strong language that should be reserved for very bad movies and im quite sure this isn't.
I didnt care for Tenet at all, which i thought wasted a good concept, but i would never call the movie an embarrassment because it was clearly very well made. I just didn't like it.
But he dared take on The Odyssey, so suddenly everyone is a classical scholar who read it in the original language and has enough knowledge of ancient greek and pre-greek societies to adequately judge it. Because clearly showing disdain for a reinterpretation of a good work makes you a sophisticated person.
>three Batman movies
The first batman movie was a paint by numbers reimplementation of The Shadow (1997). You can find comparisons online, nearly shot by shot and most of the same plot beats. The second and third went sort of back towards a very mechanical batman representation that reminded me of the planned low budget Iron Man movie where he wouldn't have had the ability to fly. Just stomping around punching badguys like a Power Rangers extra. The new Bat Mobile seems to inspire some of this reputation
>Inception
Inceptions pretty flat for a film about dreams.
>Interstellar
Neuro-Diverse level of detail until the bits with space magic at the end.
>Tenet
I couldnt sit through 10 minutes of it. Its like the antifilm. It didnt want me to observe it otherwise it wouldnt have emitted such a piercing screeching noise.
>Dunkirk
He has an old period watch, and he recorded the ticking. He overlays the ticking constantly. Also he tells the story out of sequence for some reason. But theres lots of practical effects if you include the stupid watch.
>Oppenheimer
Between tenet hating me on a physical level, and the perfectly servicable fat man and little boy film from the 70s I just havent seen it to comment.
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
Yeah half of his films are super flashy and quite watchable but you really have to turn your brain off to avoid thinking "what? that makes no sense" constantly. Inception, Tenet & Interstellar at least.
Watch out for any show with Christopher Nolan as director. He is notorious for terrible audio mixing, and having actor mumble and otherwise dictate horribly.
As an american and English as my only human language, even I need subtitles.
And the movie "Tenet" was so bad that I ragequit 30 minutes in. Horrible horrible audio.
Tenet is the only one that I have issues with, but that movie sucks anyways.
Have you seen Tenet? Almost the entire movie is impossible to understand, and it's a film that depends heavily on exposition.
Dark Knight is an edge case because Christopher Nolan is a special kind of retarded when it comes to mixing his movies. He literally refuses to accept that people want to understand what characters are saying. [0]
But here's the thing: Most movies are mixed for 5.1 or more surround setups, where the front middle speaker has most of the dialog. Just boost that speaker either via setting or in a stereo/virtual surround by a significant amount and add some volume compression and you get something that's reasonable on a home theater setup.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen-christopher-nolan-interstellar-sound-mixing
A few recent Warner Bros films / coproductions
Imagine if these had not had theatrical releases, or, had only had 1 week limited releases just to qualify for awards..
Tenet
Dune
The Batman
Barbie
Furiosa
Twisters
Minecraft
Sinners
Superman
Weapons
One Battle After Another
I think it not only varies by the words, but also the movie genre/director.
Every Christopher Nolan movie would need every word in boldface. Can you even hear (or understand) what is happening in Tenet?
Big part of Tenet (Nolan movie) plot line
Tenet, like the Nolan movie.
I loved that about the film Tenet. It's very grounded compared to say Terminator (not that I don't like Terminator)
Yesterday something happened to me with Google (well YouTube) that makes me think the movie Tenet is based on reality: Google's software gets better as time goes backwards.
TL; DR: forced localization of YouTube video titles to the language of my location despite language being set to English ("Oh I'm sorry, that's just for the UI"?)
You might just not like big-budget movies - there's definitely a correlation between the size of the budget and a lack of novelty. Take a look at Wikipedia's list of most expensive films, almost every single one on there is a big franchise film - often late in the franchise too. I think the first one on there that isn't based on previous material is Avatar at #41 and I think the only other is Tenet at #62.
This makes sense - if you're funding a movie you want a return on your investment. You could make 20 risky $10m movies or one that's $200m which has to succeed or else. When you put your money into the $200m movie you want to make sure it's as inoffensive as possible and appeals to as wide an audience as possible, so you want a franchise that's proven to pump out hits in the past (or a director who does the same, like Cameron for Avatar and Nolan for Tenet).
I liked that in Oppenheimer, even though the plot of the movie was a similar sort of high stakes mystery heist movie, instead of the macguffin being a random piece of metal like it was in tenet, its the literal atom bomb. For that reason I enjoyed it more than some of his other movies.
I would enjoy a Wes Anderson movie that just moved the whole aesthetic over to something new. It can still be a Wes Anderson movie but just different in one important new dimension.
> E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
As a Russian I will explain my vision: one of the oldest Western traditions is to demonize Russia and Russian people. You can find plenty of examples in the Western literature from 100 years ago, from 400 years ago, and right now on CNN or Bloomberg or in any Hollywood movie.
E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.
It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.
Regarding building of power plants, I've studied the information I could find but very briefly. Including some interviews with Czech people who built those reactors.
> Czechs were last in europe to have uranium mines, some of mines were used as slave labor camps for dissidents / political prisoners (60 000 i think) under soviet occupation (pre1989). They were mining radioactive ore with bare hands and lived in buildings without heating. ( clergy was big part of political prisoner population, connection with clergy man Mendel )
Yeah, that's exactly what is called "propaganda". Just like the movie Tenet starts showing "life" in Russia/USSR where in some "typical Russian city" "typical Russian people" gather pieces of uranium on the streets with their bare hands. Yeah, this is exactly how we live and always lived. /s
in my experience, this is just a very individual thing, warying from person to person. i watch a lot of movies on my own, and when i watch movies with others, i'm sometimes very surprised how much troube some people have understanding a movie.
i mean, Inception is one of those movies which is a tiny bit more difficult to understand, but i've watched it with people who had zero clue what was going on.
enough trashing other people - i loved watching Memento, but i must confess that i should watch it again, as i didn't really understand the full story while watching it.
then there are movies like tenet which just feel complicated as a gimmick, reminding me of the rick&morty copypasta, "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand X"
in summary, some people are good with abstract thinking and understanding, others are not.
I always watch The Matrix on NYE. The ending just makes me feel like "Alright, bring it on New Year." It is the greatest movie of all time.
Don't watch Inception, if it hits you like it hit me it is emotionally debilitating and you'll be sad until February. Tenet is cool.
Ex Machina is unsettling but good.
"Devs" is a short series that is Ex Machina-esque in feel. Weird but good.
The 5th Element is best for beer drinking fun NYE.
- Ghost in the Shell (1, then 2)
- Children of Men
- Stalker
- Solaris
- Blade Runner 2049
- Devs (a brief tv show, but just one shot the whole series)
- Contact
- Under the Skin
- Paprika
- Annihilation
- Arrival
- Ex Machina
- The 5th Element
- The Substance
- Primer
- Tenet
- Upstream Color
- 12 Monkeys
- Her
I agree very much that it's made to be rewatched. I found it highly unusual in that I'm a film student and have rewatched so many films and continue to rewatch a ton of favourites endlessly, but I can't remember another movie that revealed new layers and characteristics like this did over 3 watches other than Mulholland Drive. I suspect it will continue to evolve on the next couple watches at home, too.
Also agree it's a love letter to classical theatrical traditions, and I think that's where Coppola's heart has been the whole time, calling way back in time.
The movie is one big play with time as a parable with creativity, almost like Tenet but I would say it's much more effective and powerful here.
I think this is a great movie and likely a masterpiece, but it's a fascinating movie to talk about and great to see appreciation of it confirmed in others. It's a fascinating viewing experience packed with meaning, no doubt. It does many things very differently while being able to fully engage and fascinate on first watch. There's not many movies in history like that. The rest will play out as people continue to critique the film over time, and I'll be fascinated to see how that evolves.
I love that aside. The most interesting thing about Italy in the "grand political" sense (I love their culture and art) in recent history is that relatively speaking it flew under the radar post-WW2, and continues to hold deep respect for Britain through stories of great empires, lingering fixations on that kind of story that many still identify with. I'd encourage you to expand that in longer form if you are able, no doubt it would make a good read.
Finally, just to note I didn't have my account configured correctly so didn't see any notification of comments. Please excuse the late reply.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
I feel like the understanding curve for Tenet is an opens-downward parabola.
The first time you're just along for the ride
The 2nd, 3rd time you're piecing it together.
After you think about it too much you realize that it's great cinema but parts of it doesn't work ("So the Protagonist emerges from the turnstile, going backwards in time, shoots at himself (!!!), misses, and then those bullet holes in the shatterproof glass travel backwards in time until... the glass is manufactured in the glass factory?")
(Yes? Or am I missing something? Let me know if I am - the 'bullet holes going backwards in time' bugs me. Like, why would contractors install the bullet-ridden panel? :) )
I recommend watching Tenet with the viewing guide, spacetime diagram, and FAQ from /r/tenet.
The theory doesn't make any sense; unlike The Sixth Sense, the main character in Interstellar interacts with a lot of people. If he's dead, so are they (or they're just figments of his post-death experience).
The journey doesn't make any sense as a post-death experience, since none of the events are tied to his life (before the events of the movie), so there's no deeper meaning to the wave planet, or the ice planet, or falling into the black hole.
Also, Nolan doesn't do meta-contextual films. His specialty is the technical aspects of storytelling (see, e.g., Memento, The Prestige, Dunkirk, and Tenet), not in imbuing deeper emotional meanings into his works. Indeed, one of the big critiques of his films (excluding Dunkirk and Oppenheimer) was that they generally lack any emotional depth.
Have you watched the movie "tenet"? That's basically the main premise of the movie, to a degree.
>However, the fact that destruction was used is disrespectful to those items nevertheless. After all, the items were produced from metals unsustainably extracted from the earth, and are a gift to us borne from the pain of the planet.
Nobody complained when Christopher Nolan crashed a Boeing 747 into a building and then blew it up, all for a movie. Arguably that's worse than whatever was destroyed in Apple's ad. What's the reason for the discrepancy?
[1] https://screenrant.com/tenet-christopher-nolan-plane-crash-stunt-real-explained/
I never thought I would say this, but... I guess I will recommend you watch the movie Tenet.
Well there are movies which were technically well executed with poor stories, and great stories with poor execution. And there were movies which did well in both areas.
For example Tenet. Cool story, poor audio mix. (I don’t buy the explanation that Nolan had any reason other than expediency for this.) If we use “AI” to fix the audio after the fact, that’s a win in my book.
I’m not a film buff or a purist though. I watch movies with subtitles which is certainly not what the director had in mind, but that’s ok.
Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar.
Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading.
I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.
Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.
Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.
Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.
(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)
Not entirely sure what time reflection is, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean anything related to anything going backward in time. Here I think it's explained better https://spectrum.ieee.org/time-reversal-interface
Edit: Now that I've read a bit more, it seems to me this is just reflecting light back but "all at once". Like if a light signal were a train going right and the first wagon is A (>>>[D][C][B][A]>>>), a normal mirror would make it bounce and the train would go back going left and wagon A arrives first (<<<[A][B][C][D]<<<). A """time reflection""" would make the train return backwards and wagon D arrives first like this (<<<[D][C][B][A]<<<). I understand it is like reflecting each wagon at the same time so the train comes back reversed. This looks cool but I think the article deliberatively makes it confusing so it sound like the movie TENET when it starts talking about entropy
I think you’ve actually understated the rather precipitous drop off of 007’s campiness. It wasn’t a mistake, the intention was to reboot the series in the same vein as Batman Begins, where he becomes an unbearably gloomy figure who exists as a morally ambiguous antihero brooding among the gritty backdrop of a fully corrupted world.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of both franchises, and enjoy the gritty Bond on its own terms, without tying it to the frequently almost farcical source material. I can easily understand why the “gritty realism” action genre trend didn’t last long, and why some folks do not enjoy it, it quickly becomes somewhat oppressive to endure. I think that’s why Taika Waititi’s Thor movies were so well received, they offered a lot of the fun-for-its-own-sake set pieces that were more common in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s action films.
Patrick H Willems did a really good YouTube video where he talks about “vibe films” [1], where things like plot details and character development are prioritized behind an overall mood and sense of style. Examples cited include Miami Vice, Bond films, and more recently Tenet.
[1] https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4?si=GSecJKBdbzMcQDVF
GPT4 explains it pretty clearly, I think:
"Tenet" is a 2020 science fiction action-thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The story revolves around concepts of time manipulation and inversion, making it a complex narrative that can be challenging to understand on first viewing.
Here's a basic summary: The protagonist (referred to as "The Protagonist", played by John David Washington) is a secret agent who gets involved in a mission to prevent World War III. He is introduced to a concept called "inversion," where the entropy of people or objects can be reversed, making them move backwards in time.
His mission leads him to cross paths with a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (played by Kenneth Branagh), who is collecting pieces of an algorithm that can invert the entropy of the entire world, effectively reversing time and destroying the present in favor of the future.
The Protagonist also meets Kat (played by Elizabeth Debicki), Sator's estranged wife, who becomes a crucial part of the mission. The Protagonist and his partner Neil (played by Robert Pattinson) use inversion to their advantage in several action sequences, including a car chase and a final battle at Sator's secret city, where they successfully get the algorithm and prevent the destruction of the present.
The twist at the end of the film reveals that Neil was recruited by a future version of The Protagonist, and that they have been working together for much longer than the duration of the film's events. This means that the organization "Tenet", which they work for, was created by The Protagonist himself in the future. Neil's character is seen sacrificing himself to ensure the mission's success, highlighting the theme of fate and predestination in the movie.
"Tenet" is a complex film that uses its time manipulation concept to construct a narrative that loops in on itself, with events and characters revealing their true significance only as the story progresses or even after the film ends. Nolan's movie plays with the concepts of time, fate, and free will, requiring viewers to actively engage with and decipher its narrative structure.
So you have the film Tenet. If you wanted to make a version that ran the story in reverse, how would you name it ?
A film not a show, but Tenet is notorious for this.
Noteworthy point:
> Meanwhile, 70 mm IMAX film releases like Oppenheimer don't come often, and when they do, only 30 theaters in the world can support them, CNBC reported, and not necessarily all of them will (Tenet's 70 mm release, for example, was limited to 11 theaters due to pandemic restrictions, CNBC said). That makes any need for upgrades and overhauls less urgent.
God I hope it doesn't end up like Tenet. Has to be one of the worst movies I've watched.
It's standard practice for me to watch films w/ subtitles as the sound (as the article suggests) is all F-up.
I take my films seriously and my Mrs just bought ticket to 'Oppenheimer'. First question out of my mouth was "Is it in IMAX"? No, but it was on sale! Ugh. I re-iterated that Nolan produces movies for IMAX [0] with very good sound systems. Apparently only 30 theaters WORLDWIDE [1] are capable of showing that film in the correct format! Fingers crossed, it will be somewhat acceptable.
Inevitable with all of Nolan's films, I re-watch them at home with subtitles because I need to know wtf is going on. (Tenet was next to impossible without them).
[0] "Christopher Nolan explains best ways to watch a movie, which theater seats to pick" https://www.mywabashvalley.com/news/national-news/christopher-nolan-explains-best-ways-to-watch-a-movie-which-theater-seats-to-pick/
[1] "Oppenheimer: IMAX 70mm Screening at Only 30 Theaters Worldwide" https://ymcinema.com/2023/06/05/oppenheimer-imax-70mm-screening-at-only-30-theaters-worldwide/
> Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.
I've got a few relatives I simply can't watch movies with because it's like this the whole movie. It's like they can't remember anything that happened over 2-5 minutes ago. "Who's that character?" "Where are they?" "Now who's that?" "Is that the cousin or the uncle?" "What are they doing now?" "I don't understand." OF COURSE you don't understand! You've been on Instagram the whole movie! They come out of a standard brain-off romcom and they don't really know what it was about, except that the ending was sweet and romantic and they liked it. Put something like Inception or Tenet in front of them, and they're going to just sit there totally befuddled.
tenet featured a real plane blowing up (a B747), and that's a 2020 movie.
So I guess they can crash planes.
And I hope the public makes the difference between a Christopher Nolan movie and what can happen to them on their way to Hawaii.
I saw the Vibes movie video too - and loved it.
And I loved Tenet too - but I did go back and read a lot of explanation about it.
It's in there.
---
British-American director Christopher Nolan's 2020 film Tenet, incorporates all the five of the names from the Sator square:
The main antagonist is named Sator.
The artist who created the forged Goya drawings was named 'Arepo'.
Tenet is the title of the film as well as the secret organization that works to save the world.
The opening scene is set at an opera house.
Sator owns a construction company called 'Rotas'.
No mention of the film Tenet in the Wikipedia article.
A strange random combination of rewatching the Future Sound of London Papua New Guinea music video: https://youtu.be/wfWMv8Y1V5E
And then Patrick (H) Willems a video on the film Tenet:
TENET And A Celebration Of Vibes Movies https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4
Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Made me think of the scene from Tenet where they pretended to steal gold from airplane.
Then I read the text - and it seems even more like the movie.
I bet we will be seeing an “inspired by real events” movie about this.
Thieves going around stealing gold bars and maple syrup.
You make a good point. I found Tennet to be easy to hear but I know there were meme reviews about it being too quiet.
So I looked one up
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-christopher-nolan-sound-technology
Interestingly in the case of Tenet the claim is that cinemas intentionally were playing the movie too quiet.
It brings up the usual issues of audio mixing and cinema and home is vastly different. But puts Tenet down to cinemas turning it down to avoid loud explosions.
So is this a case of cinemas turning down well mixed movies because movies are coming out too loud?
But really this is just the same problem over again. Sound engineer mixes audio intending for a high end cinema. Some cinemas plays it poorly, people watching at home have no chance to play it properly...
" it's literally like playing a movie in reverse" seems overly authoritative for something we haven't observed. I have seen Tenet, but it's a work of fiction.
Have we observed reflected gravitational waves? In reverse-time, where would they originate from if they presumably rippled out into space and didn't collide with anything in forward-time?
The Nolan film "Tenet" is based entirely around the idea of reversible causality.
Inception and Tenet both do not follow this (you can try and stretch Cobb's narrative _a bit_ there but "in familiar situation and now not" is definitely not the thing).
Harry Potter is not this.
Despite what you might think, I think most Marvel movies don't really follow this! Sometimes a single character follows this and they end up being the tragic character.
Not a movie but I think we get to Romeo & Julliet and this doesn't work.
Jurassic Park is not this. Terminator is not this. The Terminal is not this.
Avatar _is_ this I think! Kind of.
Another movie that does this is Tenet. There is this massive action set piece at the end, people are literally fighting for the fate of the world. Then you have people running around, shooting at nothing.
Are massive set pieces with hundreds of extras just not economically feasible anymore?
I can't stand captions being on. I tolerate them for foreign language stuff, obviously, but otherwise they really reduce me enjoyment of the material.
The funny thing is I'm someone who finds it difficult to hear people in noisy environments. But I never seem to have a problem with films or TV. Even films that many people seem to have trouble with, like Tenet.
My girlfriend always wants them on, though. I don't get it. But I have at least a couple of theories about why this is.
Firstly, she's a way faster reader than me. She reads easily twice as fast as me. But reading always takes priority in my brain. I can't not read a caption if it's on screen and that increased mental burden reduces my enjoyment.
Secondly, we watch things in different ways. When I watch something, it has 100% of my attention. Anything else is background noise, which I don't like. I'm much more selective about what I watch for that reason, as it's a bigger commitment. That means my listening circuits are fully engaged, but also I'm fully immersed in the film which means I benefit from additional context which is super important for listening.
> Some recent ones that come to mind were Tenet and the Invincible tv-show.
It is a known issue: [1]
> Every time a new Christopher Nolan movie comes out [...] one complaint which seems almost universal at this point is that the sound mixing in many of his movies has resulted in dialogue that is frequently muffled and sometimes even downright inaudible.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/577777/christopher-nolan-sound-mixing/
>To the contrary, it is realistic -- no, you wouldn't understand them in real-life either.
Yes, I absolutely would, because, in practice, people speak in a way that others can understand them, or else they have to quickly adapt. (If they’re not comprehensible, there will be a contextual reason why.)
>Movie speakers aren't slurring anything, as any audio engineer could easily prove to you.
That wasn’t what I was saying. My point was that conveying sound through speakers has inherent differences from a person actually being there, and our ears/auditory processing are optimized for the latter, taking advantage of things that aren’t present with speakers. So playing “the same” speech is going to be inherently less comprehensible, requiring some kind of compensation.
These brilliant sound engineers, as judged by actual audiences, are turning comprensible speech-situations into incomprensible ones, some way or another.
>My mother complains about how she can't understand anything when there are Irish or Scottish or even northern English characters in a show.
That’s a separate issue, whern there are genuine cultural differences with between the listener and the situation. That’s not what’s happening in Tenet.
> But that's what subtitles are there for.
No, it’s not. Most sound engineers would consider it a failure if someone had to use subtitles for their own dialect, and most cinemaphiles consider the presence of subtitles to be a failure in itself, and everyone agrees that having to read off the screen to follow worsens the experience.
I think this is the article you mentioned: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-christopher-nolan-sound-technology
Exactly, I saw Tenet at the cinema I really couldn't understand the dialog.
being on the wrong side of 40 the CC was to me always available. I always hated them.
So now I hate it double. Either can't understand dialog, or need obnoxious un-immersive subtitles turned on.
So most of the time watching I have to have make an effort to my eyes stay away from the bottom part of the screen, only to "check the cheat sheet" when they start mumbling or ruin the movie with terrible mixing.
It's not the viewer. It's the content.
It seems like most content now. Tenet is just the parody of it, ironically parodying before most of the phenomenon had bloomed.
Interestingly nobody in France needs subtitles. But when I watch english movies and shows I do need them. I was surprised when I realized that Americans used subtitles to watch American shows as well. It reminded me of China.
I still remember watching Tenet and feeling like it was just another movie I couldn’t understand because I didn’t have subtitles. And then I realized that even native speakers couldn’t understand it.
True, but most museums also keep the bulk of their collection -- except of course for the crowd-pleasing hits -- in storage. I think their motives are mostly better but the end effect is often the same: a work of art is rarely, if ever, seen live by humans.
One fun thing about The Broad (pronounced "Brode") in Los Angeles is that you can peek into the storage and restoration area where the staff is often moving pieces of the collection around for cleaning and so on.
The movie Tenet has some fun with the freeport idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyoI7_C6N_s
+1 for Edge of Tomorrow!
As a Cruise film, it may fall off many people's radars, but it's got some really well worked out trippy stuff in there.
But I'm a sucker for non-completely-dumb time travel stuff. If you are too, be sure to check out Tenet and Predestination, if you haven't watched them already.
Both are well done, evoke consistent atmospheres, and didn't get the attention they deserve. Predestination is more physical in a Cronenbergian sense, while Tenet is pure Nolan administered intravenously.
If someone just wants a single fish, just give it to them. Don’t make it into a lesson about learning to fish.
Dude doesn’t want to watch every movie backwards, he wants to watch TENET backwards.
Haha. I've watched Tenet 3 separate times now and I STILL couldn't tell you what really happens in that movie. A car driving backwards on the highway? And other cars driving forwards but in the same direction at the same speed, but going back in time, and throwing briefcases to each other? Shit makes approximately zero sense to me.
I started watching Netflix regularly over the last couple of years, prior to that I mainly watched good film and the occasional series like breaking bad or game of thrones.
I feel so burnt out from Netflix series, they are all the same, crime, murder, replicas of game of thrones (vikings) etc. And the majority of films they list are mediocre, all the good ones I have seen multiple times.
I can't remember the last new good film I watched, maybe Tenet. I lost track of new things coming out.
Definitely a known Nolan issue.
I will go to my deathbed attesting that Tenet was the absolutely worst sound mixed movie of all time!
Christopher Nolan's Tenet was a prime example of horrible stereo translation. I could hardly understand the dialog. I've never changed volume so much during a movie. IIRC he refused to produce any audio mixes aside from those meant for the most premium 7.1 stream theatres. What a shame.
Several of my personal friends are wondering if Putin has a cancer diagnosis or such that the world does not know about, and now he's scrambling to secure his legacy.
I'm trying to imagine if he would be the person to go "the world has never appreciated me, so if I go out, may as well take the world with me". But in now writing that out, I realize that's literally the villain's motivation in the movie Tenet, so probably a bit too one-dimensional of a motivation (although that character is coincidentally a Russian oligarch).
I didn't like Tenet either, but it was the first major movie released after the pandemic and had a very troubled rollout for that reason. Not really a fair example.
Uh no. Nolan used a ton of CGI in all the Batman movies he made, in Interstellar, in Dunkirk, Tenet and especially in Inception. Yes he likes to use practical when possible, but the idea that he doesn't use CGI is ridiculous. Everyone uses CGI. Even when it's simple compositing stuff. Everyone conflates CGI with doing a shot/scene entirely digital. Some films do that, but most don't.
also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game
This is simply wrong.
Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.)
On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years.
Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself.
Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.
I think Tenet could stand on its own regardless (plus Star Wars is really more in the Fantasy genre).
But I whole heartedly agree that the new Star Wars films are an absolute travesty.
> For every Spider-Man: No Way Home, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, No Time to Die, Dune, or Fast & Furious 9 that brings in big bucks, there’s a Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, Tenet, or Raya and the Last Dragon that fails to turn a single penny of profit in theaters.
Tenet made plenty of money in worldwide box office sales, not counting DVD/Blu-Ray or streaming: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Tenet-(2020) "worldwide box office is 1.8 times production budget"
Raya (budget $100m) also made money in theaters alone (worldwide box office $116m) despite being released in March 2021. Phew, I was going to be sad for a moment that Raya was some kind of failure, as if being included in a list that contained the new Space Jam movie wasn't bad enough.
Whoever wrote this article doesn't seem to know what they are talking about.
Lots! It made $363 million off a $200 million budget [1]. That's probably lower than the studio expected for such a big movie, but still a solid profit and especially good in today's post(?)-covid box office.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenet_(film)
Did Tenet lose money? That was a great movie.
I saw Tenet this year. Great movie, though very confusing in ways I can't say without spoiling it. I really enjoy Christopher Nolan's work and I think this may be one of his best (though it's hard to choose).
I don’t think I felt dumb for not getting it. I did feel confused. It was like those magic eye stereograms. I used to not be able to see those (still difficult, but I get one now and again). But before I could, I would hear everyone exclaiming how cool it was and I was like, dammit why can’t I see what they are seeing.
One day that clicked too and my mind was blown.
I had the same experience in a different way with the movie Tenet. I love Chris Nolan, but I simply didn’t get that movie on the first watching… or the second, or the third. But I could tell there was something there I was missing and I was determined to figure it out.
On the fourth viewing I sat there with an online guide to the movie in my lap and paused anytime I didn’t get something. Right around three quarters of the way through, that one clicked for me. I finally was getting the logic of the film’s premise. All the scenes that looked like a crazy ballet of action that made no sense to me suddenly made perfect sense… and it felt great!
Love that feeling of finally understanding something you were having trouble groking.
> And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot.
This one is definitely not just you... I'm not sure Christopher Nolan himself understood the plot beyond "Inception, but for time machines".
Understanding every word seems to be a personal preference and if that is someones preference don't see a Nolan movie. Most of his movies fool around with timeline, visuals and speech to create some disorientation. Memento would be a screaming example of that. You could find the dvd chapter order and watch it linearly if you wanted to. But that would seem to me to completely avoid the purpose of the movie.
When I watched Tenet I had to let parts of my thinking go and just let it wash through me as it went without constantly trying to think too hard about what was happening. Dark corners were later illuminated, some weren't, but ok. My wife couldn't handle the start of it as there was too much not understood. I thought it was great and worth another watch.
For other movies, as discussed in the piece, there is more going on with dialogue quality that isn't intended. That's the real shame.
> I rarely watch movies without subtitles nowadays
Thank you. I've been in England for 8 years now and I've become fluent with any type of accent, yet I've still been watching movies with subs at home and it's been a crutch hard to get rid of; it made me second guess my ability to understand spoken English.
I have no issues in real life, or when watching YouTube, but movies, man... there's times I miss some words or I don't understand what's going on and I am unsure if I missed some kind of plot-crucial idiomatic joke whispered 30 minutes ago. And let's not speak of Tenet. Nolan is one of my favourite film-makers, but I hated that movie because I couldn't understand half the dialogue and the plot.
I'm happy to know it's not me, nor my ears failing.
I watched Tenet at home with subtitles, and had no problem with it. Between wife going "what are they saying?" halfway thru many movies, and getting kids to read fast, subtitles are just left on all the time now. I'm a bit annoyed at my own propensity to stare at them instead of the action, but it's better than "wait, what?".
Tenet was just unintelligible; we ended up just turning it off. It had nothing to do with masks (we couldn't understand the non-masked sections either). It was purely sound mixing and a bad call from Nolan.
I won't be seeing another Nolan film until he changes his mind on the importance of voice quality, as I like to enjoy movies and not strain to have any idea what is going on. His choices in sound quality and mixing completely breaks any sense of immersion for me...if they were outstanding plot-wise I would possibly struggle through. But without that sense of immersion, they're just not worth watching imho, as his films are all about the immersion factor.
I tried to watch Tenet at the cinema and had to walk out after a minute or two and get a refund. The sound was cranked up insanely loud. I don't know if the people who sat through the full running time were at risk of hearing damage but it certainly felt that way to me, and that is not something I care to risk.
The staff said that the requirement to play it at this volume had come from the distributors and ultimately from the director, in response to complaints of inaudible dialog. No idea if that's true but they also said they were now getting loads of complaints about the volume and having to refund tickets, unsurprisingly. What a ridiculous mess.
Anyway, I eventually watched at home with subtitles and it seems I didn't miss much. Michael Spicer summed it up beautifully [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/s2FXfFeRtJo
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that struggled understanding Tenet. I think it's almost impossible to understand that movie without subtitles (I've watched Tenet over five times and still struggle at parts, especially the end). Interesting point to is with subtitles it identifies the main character as the Protagonist. Just watching the movie with subtitles is very difficult to come to that conclusion.
FWIW a couple of friends of mine really enjoyed tenet watching it in the cinema
They all wanted to rewatch it so we saw it in my home cinema and I put on subtitles, and everyone agreed that once they could actually understand the dialog, it was not a very good movie at all…
This is the part that bothers me:
"I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask, and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real," he says. Presumably, that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises," in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines.
Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?utm_campaign=clip
---If that is the case, that the director does not want us to understand the dialogue then why make it so important to the story? Why make it so dialogue heavy then?
I chose sleepy mood and got recommended Tenet. Not the easiest movie to follow when you’re half asleep.
Again, isn't this "the youths these day" argument again with no data to back it up? I mean, to put a quick example, Tenet requires a level of attention that other movies don't require.
Also, from the movie it's not so obvious that shields only block fast things. To me it looked like they work like a strong fabric held by a force field, but that can be penetrated if enough force is applied.
yea interstellar would be my top movie pick if i was stuck on a desert island that also had a working dvd player
what about under the skin? edge of tomorrow? ex machina? arrival? bladerunner 2049? tenet?
but maybe you mean that they were flops, ie not huge box office hits, or that you didn't enjoy them
BtTF was a standalone movie, then a trilogy with only two sequels, not either 1) a multimedia franchise like many of the works I've mentioned or 2) an Inception or Tenet type Nolan blockbuster that requires infographics to tease out the plot.
Another observation, if we had two different timelines that end up in the same exact state, then this could be an explanation on why time isn't reversible: when we go back in time there's multiple possible pasts, and by looking at the present state of the world we don't know which timeline is the real past (if there's ever such a thing).
The many-worlds quantum interpretation says that, likewise, when we go to the _future_ we also have multiple timelines, and nature somehow just pick one arbitrarily, and this becomes "our" timeline. Then to reverse time, perhaps it's sufficient to employ the same mechanism, but in reverse. (Perhaps there's already beings that live backwards in time, it's just that "their" timeline works that way. Like the movie Tenet). Or even, perhaps each time the timeline splits in the future direction due to quantum phenomena, it also equally splits when going in the past, in the exact same way.
(Well I'm trying to recover some symmetry here, but not sure if it works)
I really root for Nolan; I very much liked Interstellar and enjoyed Tenet, but I think he's a clear example of someone who excelled so much at a commercial medium that the get-the-most-butts-in-seats factor necessitates the exposition diarrhea. There's just enough ambiguity for the common pseudo-news-site or vlogger to make "the ending of $FILMTITLE REALLY explained" content.
I think Lynch, who's learned to "rule over small films than serve large corporate ones" [1], probably bent over a little bit to get The Return made, but I still left with as many, if not more, questions as I had coming in.
[1] https://youtu.be/GopJ1x7vK2Q?t=567
The question isn't whether life could exist in a reversed universe, but whether this universe could exist in slices within ours like in the movie Tenet.
Can you list the movies that didn't get a simultaneous digital release during the last year or so?
Tenet, and...?
I have a bunch of pre-paid movie tickets still from the pre-pandemic days. Haven't used a single one, since all the movies I wanted to watch I can see at home for around 25€.
> Also watched Tenet in a huge empty theater.
Same, what a great experience. I don't mind the experience of a busy theatre but watching a movie in a comfy centre seat all by your lonesome is pretty rad.
To add more speculation, the idea from the movie "Tenet" could be a way to effectively surpase C in long distance communications: reversed entropy matter.
You could just send a ship or some kind of vesel with reversed entropy to a star and it will arrive years later, but years sooner that it was launched.
Matter is more or less energy, what if this trick could be done with reversed entropy energy: radio, x-rays, gamma rays, etc.
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
> if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.
Tenet? No one I know in the US could watch that film, but my international friends liked it, presumably because they had subtitles.. the theater had to blast the sound to make the audio vaguely discernible
> But doesn't this defeat the goal of NFT? If you are the owner, then if it's stored by the creator or not it's irrelevant, right?
Assuming the creator is trustworthy, then I don't think so. Isn't this common in the art world? I thought lots of expensive art is stored in expensive secured vaults. Or maybe I'm thinking of the film Tenet (I don't actually know anything about the art world).
It's a recent Christopher Nolan movie. I thought it was pretty good.
https://chrisnolan.fandom.com/wiki/Tenet
I risk being shadowbanned again but this is my theory based on experience with CIA scientists.
These types of exotic technologies and new physics aren’t possible due to hard physical laws in our reality. The only way to achieve such transformative technology is in reality where the nature of particle physics changed.
According to Lawrence Krauss, there is nothing stopping the Higgs field from falling into a lower energy state. This would obviously change the mass of all particles and theoretically create a new cosmic electron. A 4th generation bosonic electron capable of occupying the same quantum wave function.
Imagine if actual infinite reality was a 7th realm, and the higher world was a 6-cube with a 4th dimension to spatial reality. If you downprojected this into a 5-cube, you would lose one spatial reality and distort time from one infinite day into 365-days, inverting the arrow of time and inverting our consciousness.
The affect of this would be the source of mystery, coincidence, romance but also self-destruction behaviors. All of this is predicated on human awareness and the ability to control emotions and separate yourself from the external world where deception and ignorance are forces of natures.
The purpose is this is to provoke conscious thought to remind us that we are downprojected from a 6-cube where actual reality exists. The goal is to write the past in the future, then have the past create the future.
This is a function of a cosmic simulation and a natural process for us to change our perception and thus transform the nature of particle physics. We build up the world through knowledge then switch it with understanding (secret of Chabad).
It’s very much like the movie Tenet. My original account was notthegov but it is shadowbanned. I explained some of this on ChabadforHackers.com in an effort to get Presidential clemency for Ross Ulbricht and Drew Jones. I’m still working on freeing them via the ODNI and President Biden this year.
Based on logging (pageviews I assume) of the website. And includes movies older than 2020. In the top 50 I only recogize one movie (Tenet) released 2020.
Found this egg from Tenet (the movie) - "Ernst Stueckelberg, and later Richard Feynman, proposed an interpretation of the positron as an electron moving backward in time"
Tenet was incredible. It’s one of the few movies lately that I spent a lot of time reading about and watching breakdowns and explanations after the movie.
I do wonder if I got some sort of hearing damage from seeing it in person. It was incredibly loud. I’ve been to many loud movies and several obnoxiously loud concerts, and Tenet was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Frankly, it was an irresponsible choice by its creators. If it physically hurts, viewers can’t engage with the movie at all. They’re distracted by pain. I can’t even call it an artistic choice because it goes so far beyond that. I would never see it in a theatre again, even without COVID.
I can’t wait to watch it at home so that I can properly digest and enjoy the movie.
> Even worse, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" – released in September by Warner Bros – basically bombed at under $60M
This is so sad, it's such an incredible movie! Were it not for covid it surely would have been the blockbuster of the year in typical Nolan fashion.
It's amazing how different humans can be.
Your grievances aren't a big deal to me, whereas lack of a huge screen and sound system are painful.
I used to see everything in theaters and almost never used Netflix except for their original content.
A Quiet Place was fantastic in theatres. The audience responded to it. Audience noises added to the tension, and we all felt it. People tried to be quiet.
I can't wait for theaters to be back. I just worry that they'll be bought up by the tech giants and studios for a bargain and turned into some stupid membership scheme that only plays a given studio's films. (This is my nightmare scenario, because I can't even conceive of a world without theaters. That's like a world without sports or restaurants.)
I've started going to the local drive in theater and it's actually an amazing experience. It's not the same sound system or crystal clear image, but the bigness is there and movies feel epic again. Tenet was really fun.
It'll be interesting to see how this effects a culture/mindset shift among large movie producers and directors. Putting aside their artistic concerns that their films are best experienced on the massive widescreen, having a big box office haul seems to be a key part of Hollywood braqfests.
If simultaneous theater+streaming becomes the norm, it would seem the days of multi-hundred-million box office gross will be past. In 2020, the highest grossing film (domestically) so far is the Bad Boys sequel, which released in January and got $204M. The only other 2020 release to break $100M is the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. And many of 2020's top grossing movies were released in late 2019, e.g. "1917" and Star Wars. Even worse, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" – released in September by Warner Bros – basically bombed at under $60M [0].
Given the huge movies that WB is planning to put on HBO (Matrix 4, Wonder Woman, Dune), I wonder if that'll spur Disney to throw Black Widow onto streaming. Apparently its Mulan release (which required a premium subscription) didn't do so well, but seems risky for Disney to sit on its hands while WB goes all in.
[0] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=calendarGrosses
Agreed. I don't watch movies or TV shows anymore except for the occasional trip to the big screen (last movie was Avengers, next movie I'll go will be Tenet).
Not to mention I don't have a credit card and can't pay for stuff even if I wanted (last tv show I watched was HBO's Westworld will probably skip next season though).
Only thing I pay for is Spotify through a family plan, relative has a credit card of course.
I dunno, the latest Bond films, Tenet, John Wick, Inception, the Marvel Series, the Kingsmen series, etc.
I think we're moving away from it.
Maybe I just haven't seen enough new movies though, that could definitely be a possibility.
For most people, renting the film and buying a digital copy are effectively the same thing. Or do you honestly expect that your iTunes "purchases" will still be viewable in 5 years? I don't.
And yes, while $30 is expensive in comparison to other companies' rental prices, I remember that many new movies (e.g. Deadpool 2) are at first only available for sale on iTunes and only later do they add rental options. Plus, for movie fanatics - who tend to be main buyers in the first 1-2 weeks, Disney is not competing with online rentals, they are competing with 4K Blu-Ray.
So if they can provide an experience that lets me watch a movie at 4K with HDR and a decent bitrate on my offline TV, I'm in at $30.
I feel like Tenet is seriously screwing up here. I'd love to see the film and I'm OK with paying $30 for the whole family. But Cinemas are closed, there are no streaming options, and they don't even have a Blu-Ray release date yet.
With that in mind, I'm not surprised that some of my friends have opted to watch a low-quality illegal cam recording of it, instead of waiting 5+ months. Warner Brothers could have monetized that impatience, but they screwed up. Let's hope Disney will do better by offering paid legal downloads on day 1, even if it's as expensive as cinema used to be.
And if you don't believe that impatient movie fanatics are a market, consider this:
https://www.cinemablend.com/new/New-System-Allows-You-To-Stream-First-Run-Movies-In-Your-Home-for-20-000-22106.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3464839/The-35k-Netflix-billionaires-box-shows-films-come-cinema-500-time-rumoured-Kim-Kayne-one-new-home.html
I do have most Nolan films in 4K Bluray but Tenet isn't available yet. Before buying the physical media I'd be more than happy to see it via streaming with acceptable quality.
> For people that hate going to the movies, this could be a new acceptable norm.
I'd pay $30 right now to see Tenet in 4K Dolby Vision/Atmos via streaming.
It's one of my favorite movies. Even knowing it beat by beat, I enjoy watching it because it is so well told. Even the narrative structure feels integral to how Nolan wants the story told. So it doesn't feel as "gimmicky" as it could be.
It also gives a nice twist on a noir murder mystery. Because the story starts with a murder, then instead of making us guess who did it, it makes us figure out why he did it. With every step giving another piece to that puzzle. So the mystery unfolds linearly while the narrative goes both backwards and forwards to meet back at the beginning of the movie.
While I haven't watched Dunkirk or Tenet yet, Memento remains my favorite Christopher Nolan film.
Some widely unknown analogy from the movies: Natural noises make the very best horror sounds for the non-expert moviegoer.
Natural wind or wave noises were introduced into modem horror movies by Kurosawa Kyioshi in the late 80ies, and had significant impact since, whilst Hollywood and elsewhere still use unnatural noises like screeches, cracks or the neverending Ridley Scott sirene from Aliens. Still in fashion, even if worn-out long time ago. Tenet had some new reverse sound effects, but still very noisy.
A Kurosawa horror movie is much more silent, but the ambient noise, used as enhanced athmo, is much more thrilling and horrific than the much louder screeches.
Natural silence can be horrific.
I guess Cinemablend isn't going to fact check this claim?
It's typically much cheaper to do anything like a plane crash in a computer (or models + computer). Even 20 years ago, when I was bidding visual effects, I bet it would have been cheaper. [Note, I haven't seen the movie, so maybe there are 50 angles of it exploding, in which case it might not be]
The cost of a mothballed plane is probably trivial compared to the daily cost of Tenet's movie set. You've got all of the actors (or maybe stunt people in this case) and crew members, so their salaries, food, hotels, costs of being on location and so on. The cost of renting the location itself. Constructing things you're going to destroy, cleaning up, etc.
My guess is that Nolan wanted to do it this way because it's more fun. Nolan knows it's cheaper to do it in CGI, but blowing stuff up in CGI is boring. He gets to sit in a desk chair and look at something blowing up on a screen instead of seeing it IRL. And he can call the shots because he's Nolan, he directed, wrote and produced the thing.
Congrats to Tenet for hitting break-even last week, despite tanking at the U.S. box office.
https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/tenet-box-office-christopher-nolan-warner-bros-1234768187/
Our (NZ's) tourist industry is in trouble, but most of the country (except for 1 city for the past 2 weeks due to a new cluster) hasn't been in lockdown for 3 months and people are taking vacations, locally rather than internationally - ski slopes are open - the govt is supporting some tourist stuff that's going into hibernation until after, there will still be bungie jumping and Hobbiton to visit when it's all over.
We've largely beaten the infection (despite what Trump has said recently), except for people coming back from overseas into quarantine, we had no new cases for 3 months, 2 weeks or so ago we had an outbreak in Auckland which is currently locked down (we do lockdown much harder than most other countries), probably until this current weekend. Apart from this the rest of us are out and about, we have some limitations on large crowds, most people are going to work, I went out to a movie on Sat (Tenet), then for a meal at a restaurant. Went to Queenstown for a weekend away a couple of months ago.
Having said that - we expect to have more small outbreaks and associated lockdowns, the quicker we can find them the quicker we can nuke them.