The film is so revealing of boomer/reactionary anxieties about the future. It's literally about protecting the present order at all costs, even if that means consigning the future to disaster
it's about killing a solipsistic capitalist trying to overcome his mortality by ending existence before he can die, i.e. what actual capitalists are doing today.
Yeah, on one level I agree with you. I see Tenet as similar to The Dark Knight Rises (or many recent superhero films in which the villains are evil versions of environmentalists, black nationalists, etc.) in that respect. The villain is depicted as cartoonishly evil and as entirely unsympathetic for the reasons you describe - he is an arms dealer who has decided that he will kill everyone in exchange for power and luxury before he dies, at which point he will take everyone with him. But I see this as a way of the film stabilising the moral dilemmas that it produces, so as to defuse any potentially subversive political messaging. In my opinion, the basic dynamics that structure the film are expressive of reactionary anxieties about the possibility of historical change and the way in which new modes of living and social organisation end up erasing those of the past.
Thus, while the motivations of the primary antagonist are those that we are mostly shown as an audience, it is clear that another set of tensions (those between the interests of the present and the future) lie behind and ultimately structure his actions without him even knowing it. The antagonist admits this quite openly during the film and describes them explicitly as, (I'm paraphrasing) 'the future was fucked by climate change and so people decided that they needed to change the past in order to create a new future, even if that meant destroying the past as it was'. The antagonist is the puppet of this attempt, rather than its author. But Nolan makes sure that this puppet is as repellant as possible so as to stabilise the moral aspects of the film and facilitate our identification with its protagonists - i.e. the people who, according to what we know about the future of the film's world, are working to preserve the present order and thus to ensure that the catastrophe that the current order produces happens to someone else rather than to them. This is why I ultimately think that the film is an expression of capitalist realism in its most brutal sense (even if its most visible antagonist is still also a capitalist). Its explicit argument is that the present order must be preserved against all possible threats of change, even if we know that it will bring about a catastrophe so terrible that future generations would risk annihilating everything in the present in order to save themselves. Ultimately, I guess I see this as reflective of similar anxieties as the Dark Knight Rises (in which a relatively localised and disorganised threat in the form of an Occupy analogue were the villains), but for an era in which the organised left is beginning to reappear as a wider threat to the capitalist 'end of history'. The way that I read it, the film's primary message is, 'things could, but definitely should not be changed. You are justified in harming future generations because their demand that the present be different is as much them destroying your world as you literally making theirs unliveable. And this is true, even if their demands are based upon a reactive desire to stop the damage you are doing to their world'.
It's also really boring. Like watching someone set up a course of dominoes for 2 hours, before finally getting to watch them fall down
Also none of it makes any fucking sense even within its own time travel rules, but it doesn't even matter because the smug shithead director deliberately mixed the audio so you can't make out a word anyone is saying even in the walls of exposition, so it's just some big dumb explosions (some in reverse!) and other assorted spectacle but with a veneer of "acktually my movie is just too smart for you dumb peasants to understand"
I have never hated a movie as much as I hated Tenet
Totally agree. It's surprising how unexciting a lot of the spectacle is. It feels cold and mechanical. Yeah, I ended up watching it with subtitles so I could understand what people were saying.
there are like a dozen dramatic or action sequences before the finale, so you're completely wrong. Dominoes are also awesome to watch fall, and it was awesome at the end where you watch the super long synchronized thing happen twice in different directions. just the concept of having a military maneuver where the forces are simultaneously inserting and withdrawing is worth the set piece. btw, that's basically the structure of a movie: Introduction, development, Climax, re-encapsulation, coda. you could say the same thing about Jin Roh or Parasite or Come and See, honestly "Wow, the movie doesn't have stuff happen until it does"
I was being hyperbolic about the film's structure, but I broadly think that my description is accurate. Obviously, things happen during the earlier parts of the film, but overall I found it to be cold and mechanical. My feeling watching it was that the film is more interested in its structural complexity than in its dramatic content, with the result that its characters feel like the component parts of a machine rather than genuine characters. I do find that interesting on one level, but I also think that it's kind of dull. Particularly as it isn't clear that Nolan has anything to say about the ideas around the relation between future and present that he's engaging with - hence the ending focusing upon the undeveloped relationship between the protagonist and Kat. Honestly, you can read the protagonist as a kind of author insert (after all, he's the person who put the events of the film into action and devised the overall plot just as a director does) and the film as ultimately just about how smart Nolan is for coming up with its structure.
If you like Inception enough you think you'd enjoy it even if it had a worse plot, less compelling characters and a sci-fi concept that doesn't work as well, Tenet is a movie for you.
Idk, I found it interesting as a cultural artefact that expresses an anxiety that has been central to recent political life in the anglo countries, but it is also pretty boring. It's more like a machine than a film. None of the characters are interesting, they're just components. But that can also be interesting from a certain perspective
Isn't the idea that the 🤢 CIA 🤢 thinks they can change the future from the incoming apocalypse they've been warned about as opposed to the time-terrorists who think there's a chance they wipe out the past while keeping the future intact.
Although I can't really remember tbh. It doesn't help Nolan is desperate for you not to hear the dialogue
Yeah, it's possible that I misunderstood what the stakes were. I wrote the post after seeing it for the first time.
Right?! I had to put subtitles on just to know what anyone was saying!
I think the eco-fascists are more the Kenneth Branagh boys who are willing to take a chance of living in a permanently reversed time world, which would definitely wipe out people who live in the past/present- rather than fix their current world.
Then it raises the question if the Kenneth Branagh boys definitely live in a shitty overwhelmed world can the CIA/anyone change the world's trajectory. I think the Protagonist (lol) believes he might be able to change it.
Then again I'm just as uncertain as you, the film is simultaneously the simplest Nolan film in a broad plot & character arcs sense, while being the most inaccessible to actually, y'know, understand.
I think part of the problem is that our information about the future of the film and what would happen to the present is mediated by the characters own imperfect knowledge and their own description of their motivations. We only know what they tell us about the future and that might even be somewhat contradictory. Similarly, they can only really speculate on what will happen if the antagonist's plan succeeds. As I remember it, the film kind of ends up glossing this to increase the dramatic tension of the closing scenes - so we go from uncertainty about what will happen to the present world will 100% be destroyed.
I think I probably had a relatively idiosyncratic reading of the film because I like Benjamin so much and am particularly interested in his writing on history. Watching it, I couldn't help but think of this line: 'every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably'. I think that led me to think about the film less in concrete terms of the exact events on screen and more in terms of it expressing anxieties about the ways in which any future will come to rewrite the present in its own image.
Lol, now I kind of want to watch it again to work out exactly what is going on!