Tenet

[peter]

I watched this Christopher Nolan offering for the second time yesterday and must confess to being as confused at the end of it as I was after the first viewing.

Something about technology that can reverse the passage of time falling into the hands of a super-villain born out of the fall of the Soviet Union, the twists and reversals of this tale were simply too involved for my rudimentary grey cells to absorb. At the end I found myself frustrated that a story that I knew should hang together eluded me; there is coherence in there, I know it - I simply can't grasp it.

For what it is worth, the film is well made, it looks great, the fx as you would expect with Nolan, are stunning, and the parts are well played by the leads without exception. Kenneth Brannagh was I felt, slightly miscast as the aforementioned Russian bad egg, but he rose to the part and was suitably nasty in the now rather tropish way that post Soviet gangsters are. The rest of the cast did their jobs well enough to boot. But all of the obvious effort put into this was for me somewhat wasted - because from minute one I just didn't know what the frick was going on! Normally in these films, they start off confusing, and then things start to slowly come together. Sometimes you have to do a bit of thinking after the event in order to sort things out (take the brilliant film Mother as a classic example) - but generally you manage it.

Not however in this case (or not for me at least). Here you are simply bewildered, and a second run through does nothing to make things any better. Having said this, the film is good enough that I am prepared to put in the footwork to set it right. I'll do something that I don't normally like to have to rely on; I'll go to YouTube for one of those 'breakdowns' and see if I can throw any light on the issue by so doing. If I'm successful, I believe that there will be a fine film to experience (in the light of a full understanding) at some point in the future. It's always fun to go back and watch these films again when you have the full facts under your belt - so much that you miss the first time actually reveals itself in the future viewings. In this case I'm really looking forward to it; I just need a little help is all!

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

[…]

I just need a little help is all!

I've not seen it, but based on what I've heard, the general 'twist' of the film is that events occurring later in the film can retroactively alter events which have already been viewed by the audience earlier in the film. The effect being that what one sees is not necessarily set-in-stone vis-à-vis the finalized story-arc.

Helpful?

[peter]

This does indeed seem to be the case Wos - but knowing so just doesn't make it any easier I'm afraid!

I did indeed go to YouTube looking for help as I said above, selected a fifteen minute 'explanation' vid presented by a guy who indeed did seem to have a handle on what was going on....... and ended this not one jot more enlightened than when I started.

No. Actually, not true. I now know that the time reversals in both the forward and backward directions are occurring to the different characters in the film at different - and multiple - points, so that the stage for the film is essentially a swirling mish-mash of interwoven events with the players dancing back and forth in time and effecting the events that occur as they do so. There is essentially no past or future, other than a block of time bookended (from what I can see) by two specific events.

This kind of time traveling jiggery-pokery has been done in films before, but always as far as I'm aware such that the traveller hops back in time, but then lands in a place where time runs in the same direction - the 'arrow' of time is not reversed other than when the jump occurs. Here the difference is that the time flow of the individual in reversed, while all around him the flow continues in the correct direction. A sort of 'Bebjamin Button' writ large. And it's very confusing. So confusing I'd say that the average viewer stands not a hope of pulling it together excepting following multiple viewings, making notes and cross-referencing the various clues given in the scenes presented (eg a glance up from a character showing a person walking over a bridge might be that very person himself in a reversed time-flow).

I like the film - I like knowing how the idea works, but I'm not sure if I like it enough to go much further down the route of making every scene coherent. I think Nolan has maybe pushed it too far. It's clever - but too clever for its own good.