Tenet - A Misunderstood Masterpiece

so 2020 was a bad time there were barely any movies out last year so we didn't get to experience many movie moments you know movie moments moments where you collectively experience something brand new in an excited theater moments you talk about in the bar with your friends images that stick in your head for weeks afterwards but there was one for me one movie moment [Music] okay the first time i watched tennis i was really annoyed the second time i was riveted now i know a lot of people didn't connect with this movie they stayed in that annoyed phase that i was and i completely understand that but i got so much out of it and repeat viewings and i'm only like 38 stupid so i got really obsessed and i started thinking about what is this movie and why it was so frustrating for so many people my sibling just made a video essay on objectivity and the idea of bad art that kind of explains this when people say something is bad what do they mean generally it means they wanted the art to fulfill some purpose or value and it just didn't a large portion of the audience was really disappointed that the film didn't have clearer emotional stakes others thought it was just indulgent pseudoscience technobabble that was deliberately confusing to seem smart others because they couldn't hear any of the goddamn dialogue over the cyberpunk great music and i can totally see that it doesn't hit as hard as inception emotionally but what if the movie was trying to just do something else tenant is not gunning for your emotions it doesn't expect you to understand what's going on in the first viewing like a lot of sci-fi movies tenet is designed to be watched multiple times and as you become familiar with the structure it starts to make a lot of sense some parts of the movie are easy to digest on the first watch but some are inscrutable asking you to figure them out the first time i watched the interrogation scene i was like what the [ __ ] is going on it's deliberately packaged as disassembled pieces of a puzzle that you have to figure out see the first time i watched it i was expecting you know a fairly normal movie and i was disappointed the second time i watched it i played along with the game and that's what this film is it's a brain teaser game that's the entertainment it's trying to provide i'm not saying it's intellectual high class art you don't get it because you're an uncultured swine it's just a different kind of fun one that happens specifically in your re-watch or while you're doing dishes and running through the mind-bending timeline like wait if he was over there at that time then he'd be over there huh wow i guess that move wow see it's a different kind of fun than inception which is a different kind of fun from a marvel movie which is a different kind of fun from a romantic comedy we're supposed to engage with things in different ways and tenet has been so so fun for me i love playing the game of tennit and now i'm gonna try and share that fun with you so christopher nolan this guy seems to have this new attitude of what can i get away with see he's one of the few directors alive today who can make original films that make money he's hyper fixated on time and he keeps hitting us with new perspectives on it making film student essays extremely easy to write now but i think we can all agree that this one is different tenet is trying something new the problem with experimentation in film is by definition you're going against the language of cinema it's going to betray some of the audience's common sense abilities so when nolan decides to try and make a movie with a different goal than traditional entertainment and not going for some kind of emotional catharsis it's naturally going to ask a little more of you as an audience is that to say tenet is not indulgent of course not it is it has this structure that seems like it's not for us but when you allow tenet to indulge itself and when you indulge with it on its terms there is a really great movie experience here for you a different one a more of a thought experiment a riddle a science fiction rube goldberg machine so what are its terms what are the rules to the game what is tenet really about okay tenet isn't about saving the world it's not about protagonists overcoming obstacles and completing any character arcs it's not even about inverted bullets no tenet is entirely about the temporal pincer maneuver okay if you haven't seen the film you're gonna be completely lost what would it look like if a faction of people had the ability to move forward and backwards through time simultaneously but the time travel rules are under a fixed timeline nothing changes if you decide to go back in time to accomplish some sort of goal necessarily you've already done it it's in the past but also in your lived experience it's coming up in your future so under these rules if a faction was using this ability to time travel why would they use it and how would it work this fundamentally seems to be what the movie is about see we're introduced to inversion as being you can invert objects to go back in time but really it's about inverting people because in the future a scientist invents a bomb that can destroy time or reverse it we don't actually know the future people really want to use it so they can reverse the damage that has been done to earth due to climate change and they hate the past for it and the past really doesn't want to do it because they think it's going to end all the time so they're fighting each other so we take this tool of inversion and we have two fighting parties using inversion to gain control of the algorithm this means sending people weapons money and messages backwards and forwards through time to accomplish their goals oh this is so [ __ ] i'm having a lot of fun just trying to explain it so what does this temporal war even look like how does this work when we're in a fixed timeline but human beings are working from both the future going backwards in the past going forwards to win a war what absolute sorcery with the battle strategizing consists of how would one exploit this game-changing power to the best of its ability the inevitable answer to this is the reason this movie exists it's the game that christopher nolan is playing the temporal pincer maneuver guys this entire movie is just christopher nolan going the temporal pincer maneuver wouldn't that be [ __ ] up that would be so [ __ ] up the temporal pincer maneuver is a paradoxical battle strategy it consists of two teams red team and blue team red team is moving from the past to the future like normal people blue team is inverted they are moving backwards from the future through time for the sake of people who have a hard time wrapping their head around it like me i'm gonna explain this first in linear terms red team goes in to fight a battle like norm blue team from their perspectives sits the fight out then after the battle's over they invert themselves and they go into the fight with all the knowledge of red team's movements and work with them to stage as close to a perfect combat strategy as humanly possible they go into the battle knowing what's gonna happen so they can help their buddies but here's the thing red team also knows everything that's gonna happen they both know blue team having traveled backwards through time to before the fight takes place tells red team everything that's gonna happen in their fight so now it's just a complete paradox both teams know how it goes and how it goes is the correct terminology here not how it's gone not how it's gonna go because this knowledge is now without origin where would it have come from it's unknowable theoretically there's some alternate universe where red team went ahead and did the fight on their own to tell blue team how it goes but no one gets to see that because we're in a fixed timeline red team receives information that they created in the future before they know it this is the temporal pincer maneuver but it begs the question then does it even help yeah it probably gives them a massive strategic edge to know everything but we almost don't even know if that's true anymore because there is no speculation as to the outcome of this battle all the soldiers are simply performing their part in like a pre-written play this is what's so [ __ ] up to try and wrap your head around the final battle of this movie we're seeing all of this convoluted paradox stuff happening directly and it's completely mind-bending it takes a lot of effort to piece together what the hell we're even looking at i mean i just wha what the hell now that is crazy really cool to look at now you might look at this and hate it because you're like oh well that doesn't make any sense the building would have to have been assembled already broken or something but the entire film is a temporal paradox you have to buy into the idea that this would be a paradox and it could work doesn't feel like a much bigger leap than a man surviving falling into a black hole because it's actually a tesseract and he can travel through time there but if that's the whole concept of the movie what's your solution then he doesn't make the movie how about you just sit back and enjoy the concept isn't that what sci-fi is all about but looking at this scene as a whole what we're looking at here is just a singular battle what about a long-term strategy what if you had a temporal pincer maneuver that takes place over a week what about a temporal pincer maneuver that spans 50 [ __ ] years what you see the ending of tenet is a temporal pincer maneuver inside of a temporal pincer maneuver inside of a larger temporal pincer maneuver see in the larger course of the movie the protagonist is on the red team and neil is in the blue team neil comes from the future to assist the protagonist to do something that neil already knows he succeeds at doing he's playing a part every single person in the tenant organization is performing in like a feedback loop all to ensure that the algorithm is never activated at any point in history and the movie itself is structured as a temporal pincer maneuver it's completely shirking its responsibilities as an action movie meant to deliver on character arcs and emotional punch and super high stakes with a lot of tension tenet almost refuses to make sense or generate the tension that we might expect and we might need it's designed for us to observe the temporal pincer maneuver and watch all of its parts perform and feed back into each other this film is an intellectual exercise it's not a plot it's not a satisfying emotional payoff it's just a display of an insane paradox for an audience and at the end of this grand experiment travis scott said so don't go into this movie looking for a movie strap your brain in and enjoy the ride of thought that this movie is taking you on watch the film again to try and parse out the timeline in your head fill in all the gaps realize how they work trust me this [ __ ] is really fun to do now if i made that whole spiel about the end of the movie why is it that this moment is my favorite in the film well i gotta talk to you about jdw is fantastic and tenant i've read some [ __ ] about the protagonist not being a very good protagonist but as a fellow actor i'd like to vouch for what this man brought to this film a performance is not just dialogue reading it's how the actor moves how they sit in their bodies as the character how their performance is serving the specific vision of the director not everyone is supposed to be a tony stark quippy emotion machine look at ryan gosling in blade runner this performance is cold emotionless and most of the time kind of dull but would you argue it's a bad performance not at all every emotion is beneath the surface sometimes it's better not to spell out every emotion for the audience and john david washington did something really interesting here first of all he's a really exciting casting choice because of the lack of baggage general audiences have with him as an action star you know how when you watch a chris evans movie now you just can't shake the feeling that it's captain america doing what he's doing that's because we have baggage we have experience with him playing a specific type of character which can sometimes be a detriment to a performance which has nothing to do with the performance itself but the audience's relationship to that actor but for john david washington this is our first real experience with him as the lead of a film like this he's a fresh-faced protagonist both to us and to the organization and as a blank slate he portrays a character that we don't know much about but we understand through his decisions and distinct personality and remember this isn't a movie about him it's about the concept so he doesn't necessarily need to accomplish the same things as another action hero might when i saw him in his spy movie scenes he really impressed me with how suave he could be even with elizabeth debicki towering over him with her nine foot goddess energy he's an absolute anchor he stands strong and with authority and he makes a lot of decisions and he's also really [ __ ] funny i ordered my hot sauce an hour ago but the real money from this character is how he performs in his action scenes the next time you watch this film notice his ferocity watch how he runs it is beautiful it's like watching tom cruise run you know we watch it for the performance of action the performance of body i get so much adrenaline from watching him run as fast as he possibly can moments like the kitchen scene let him really shine he may be the shortest guy in the room but he is strong and a force of nature you don't [ __ ] with this guy i guess you can say he inverts your expectations it's this unspoken aspect of the character that made me completely fall in love with him also real quick he's black and he's not black because he's from detroit or wakanda he doesn't need to be black but he is not every movie with a minority needs to be a comedy drama about diaspora this is the kind of role that people of color like myself really want and what we need to see more of just to be allowed to star in a really interesting movie in the midst of all the organization's secrecy and high concept complexity the protagonist is our grounding force he's intelligent but he's a little too much of a layman for the incredibly powerful people he interacts with he paid nine million dollars well they cover the cost of the holiday he just forced us on where'd you go mars i think you're a little out of your depth he has a lot of strengths and weaknesses coming up with crazy ideas like the five-truck heist and eventually learns how to be a successful member of tennant sometimes figuring out things before other characters do he doesn't have a backstory but that's the life of a cia operative turned global super spy kinda like james bond if we're giving double07 a pass we need to look at the value the protagonist is providing this is a high concept intellectual exercise of a film not a character study john david washington did exactly what he needed to do okay so with all this in mind do you remember when i was talking about a single scene that made this movie let's revisit that scene which made such an impact on me you know the one that sounds like this is the last action scene before it's revealed to the protagonist what a temporal pincer is before the real meat of the thought experiment of this film begins and in this scene the music telegraphs this shift that's about to take place this movie is about to go off the rails insane and ludwig goranson laid the groundwork for us to be prepared for when it does while han zimmer may be modern film composition as we know it today ludwig is constantly proving himself to be the next step nolan has always used music as one of the most important drivers in his scenes film is a visual and audio medium and that doesn't just mean sound design it means music too literally the entire reason i was inspired to make this video was from this score and this image it resonated so much with me that i felt compelled to understand why nothing intended has sounded this bombastic and it kinda feels like it doesn't belong here this blaring army of synthesizers is being consistently pushed back by the kick drum like chaos firmly under control which is a nice metaphor for the move one of them sounds like a literal siren warning the characters and us this is the last moment of fairly standard action we're gonna get in the film and ludwig's soundscape is like a red alert warning us that we are about to go off the [ __ ] rails so that's the music but what's happening plot-wise in my 2020 movie moment at this point all the protagonist knows is that the fate of the world is at stake if they don't get this mcguffin bad things apocalyptically bad but we don't know exactly why yet protagonist plans this crazy four truck highway pin down it's this whole chris nolan ass tice thing they have to avoid leaving a digital footprint so that the villain won't be able to have people in the future find evidence of it and send the info back in time and jesus christ god god this is complicated look all that matters is that they have to do it this way but just before this heist takes place we see cat walking into the freeport and we catch this image of a guy wearing a mask in a car ready to do something this was a very striking and unsettling image for me it's an omen of something inhuman about to occur and then sedor says watch everything and tell me every detail watch everything give me all the details which is sus what are you talking about so with these two pieces of information we know that somehow some way this is gonna go horribly wrong this is the second layer of tension the first being this is a really dangerous highway stunt we don't know if you can actually pull it off but on top of that we know that the bad guys have a plan so the plan goes ahead and protagonist hops on the fire truck these shots convey this momentum so effectively i do not understand how the cinematography makes me feel this way oh wait i do hoyt van hoytema is one of my favorite camera artists look at what he did in her this movie rocks this is so goddamn pretty and beautiful but maybe the more important and obvious reason i was so fixated by this scene was it's [ __ ] cool this is so goddamn cool he's [ __ ] sick bro denzel washington's son is jumping off a [ __ ] fire truck on a highway chase directed by christopher nolan with ludwig gorinson's experimental electronic music and robert pattinson's on backup like god damn fire trucks are so cool i'm a boy i was nine once fire trucks are cool they're big and they're red they make a big noise they got a ladder on top and hoses that plug into the fire hydrants and they use hydro beams to defeat fire they're the coolest truck and i like that the protagonist gets to climb on the coolest truck to steal the mega secret that heist energy is cranked well over 9000 and we still don't even know what the movie's about in this moment all these exciting artists came together to have a singular story beat happen with a ton of style simply for the sake of making us more immersed in this alternate reality i just found it to be this true movie moment it makes me feel like i'm about to rob god and again john david washington seeing him clutch onto this fire truck his body fully ready to give it his all it's really exciting to watch and it's not like there's no emotion in this movie by the end of the film john david washington has to reckon with this guy that he just met that he's really getting along with and he dies along the way but also finding out that he's gonna hang out with him in the future and have a whole bunch of fun adventures the real tenant was literally the friend he made along the way so yeah that's it that's tennant it's a film that is paradoxical by nature and it's a real mess to try and follow but when you take the time to let the pieces fall into place when you figure out how they fit themselves it's so thrilling this was my movie moment of 2020 and probably my film of 2020. thank you to cjdx for helping me write this video subscribe hit the bell and then also give me money on patreon bye love you

Channel: Ben From Canada

Views: 2,243,445

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Id: 0OoLokmqo0A

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021