Tenet
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2020 5:12 pm
I've been a big fan of Christopher Nolan, especially with his superb efforts like The Dark Knight, Inception and Interstellar. And I've been looking forward to this for almost a year. But my first theater experience since Covid was something of a disappointment due to both conceptual and technical problems that interfered with presenting a coherent story. From the opening sequence in the concert hall (which they never really explain), to problems with understanding the dialogue due to voices being muffled/distorted by gas masks and competing ambient noise, not to mention accents and diction, is a recurring problem throughout the film. Things might be better with headphones, but I suspect not much.
The other major problem is how it deals with the idea of time travel or reversal of time. They talk about the grandfather paradox, where someone goes back in time and kills their grandfather, but they never declare how that might be resolved. I think, if the movie accomplishes anything, it shows that such time travel would result in rationally unresolvable chaos-which I guess you could say, the movie portrays pretty well. Yes, observational travel back in time may well be possible, where all you can do is watch, like replaying a video. But interactive time travel in our 4-D universe is apparently not possible. Taking the grandfather paradox to it's extreme, someone from 10 billion years in the future could figure how to go back in time and cancel the Big Bang....(sigh).
It's a stellar cast, with Elizabeth Debicki being a dominant presence in every scene she's in; and Denzel Washington's son, John David, is excellent, especially given that he has the best diction of the lot-something I probably wouldn't normally have noticed.
As for plot questions: I never understood the significance of Plutonium 241, or what exactly the role of the woman from India was, except that she was the antagonist to Washington's protagonist.
On the positive side, the visuals were as excellent as the audio was garbled. Some of the action sequences worked despite the time-vector confusion, and the scenes with the hydrofoil sailboats was a visual highlight of the film. I regret that I can only give this a 6/10.
Summary: The unintended consequence may be that it disproves time travel.
The other major problem is how it deals with the idea of time travel or reversal of time. They talk about the grandfather paradox, where someone goes back in time and kills their grandfather, but they never declare how that might be resolved. I think, if the movie accomplishes anything, it shows that such time travel would result in rationally unresolvable chaos-which I guess you could say, the movie portrays pretty well. Yes, observational travel back in time may well be possible, where all you can do is watch, like replaying a video. But interactive time travel in our 4-D universe is apparently not possible. Taking the grandfather paradox to it's extreme, someone from 10 billion years in the future could figure how to go back in time and cancel the Big Bang....(sigh).
It's a stellar cast, with Elizabeth Debicki being a dominant presence in every scene she's in; and Denzel Washington's son, John David, is excellent, especially given that he has the best diction of the lot-something I probably wouldn't normally have noticed.
As for plot questions: I never understood the significance of Plutonium 241, or what exactly the role of the woman from India was, except that she was the antagonist to Washington's protagonist.
On the positive side, the visuals were as excellent as the audio was garbled. Some of the action sequences worked despite the time-vector confusion, and the scenes with the hydrofoil sailboats was a visual highlight of the film. I regret that I can only give this a 6/10.
Summary: The unintended consequence may be that it disproves time travel.