Tenet - The Best Kind Of Failure

coming out of the cinema from tennis was the most bizarre movie-going experience that i've ever had because never before have i been so satisfied by watching a film that i didn't enjoy the reason why is tennis was an experiment nolan wanted to push the boundaries and go where no filmmakers gone before but he didn't do that through inversion yes the idea of having objects change the direction in which the experience time is a fresh idea like it's a fresh take on the time travel trope but that's not the question behind this film it's just the vehicle through which it was asked and what was the thesis nolan was asking with this film can you tell a story where the protagonist is the playable character from skyrim he's a blank slate has no arc and has nothing more than the most bare bones motivation but despite that flaw everything else is pulled off so perfectly the plot so fast and well paced the action fantastic the concept and its exploration both creative and unique no one was asking can you have everything but character and still have your story be as gripping as a story that does have character and the answer as it turns out is no now i had nothing but respect for nolan before i saw tenet and after seeing it even though i didn't enjoy it too much i somehow respected him even more because too many storytellers get complacent once they reach a certain peak of success they stop trying as hard as they used to try and they reuse the tropes and devices that gave them that initial success and as a result they stagnate an obvious example is m night shyamalan he did the sixth sense people loved the twist and it was a great twist but then he did the number one thing that is the death of an artist far more than actual death ever could be he got complacent he clung onto that idea for dear life that idea of having a uh a plot twist that reframes the whole movie in a new light and he did it again and again and again so much so it's become a running joke that shyamalan is the guy who does plot twists but one thing that's for sure is that nolan is to shyamalan what left is to write nolan has the best characteristic an artist can have he is the opposite of complacent and what is absolutely bizarre about tenet and what i'm about to say next sounds so ridiculous that it it feels like i'm making a parody of myself and other essayists you know where we uh we look too hard at something for too long and we'll see an intention that wasn't there but honestly i swear to god that i think this is true nolan intentionally made aspects of this movie bad the thing is a lot of people have come out and criticized this film because it lacks interesting characters and they are 100 correct but at the same time they're missing the point so phil mento a fellow essayist of mine who made a video on tenet and he did exactly this and if you're watching this philmento i love you mate yeah you're fantastic and you made a great video that was completely on the money and didn't skip a beat in correctly explaining the failings of this film but at the same time i disagree with you at least the lens through which you criticized it because it feels wrong to call nolan out for having weak characters and ten it without first addressing the caveat that nolan chose for things to be this way i disagree with the perspective a lot of critics are taking with this one even though almost all of them are perfectly correct because their perspectives neglect the difference between a creator who has a vision but fails to achieve that vision because of a fixable flaw versus a creator who in order to achieve their vision needed that flaw to happen so before you say that i'm seeing meanings that aren't there we need to address the fact that the writing for this is on the walls or in this case it's in the credits uh because nolan literally called his protagonist protagonist not dave or tim but but protagonist is the character's name like it's how john david washington was credited in this movie if that's not a written confession that nolan chose to make his character a blank slate i don't know what is like it is like handing in an exam paper and filling in the box where the answer is supposed to go with the words insert answer here like i mean god damn it nolan made interstellar like the man knows how to give a story a compelling main character with a powerful personal journey so why didn't he do it here uh so well in order to answer that the obvious comparison to make is by looking at inception a tenet and inception are both made by the same guy they're both in this weird spot in the sci-fi genre where it's kind of soft science so much so it's nearly magic pretending to be science and both have high concepts that require a lot of exposition in order to be understood yet one of his stories seems to have been far better received as a story than the other so why didn't nolan just do the same thing twice all he had to do was take the same tropes and devices that gave him his initial success of inception and just well do it all over again well if you've been paying attention you know the answer that question is in the question because if he did that it would have come far too close to re-treading trodden ground like nolan like any good artist is pathologically obsessed with self-improvement with never recreating something because that goes against the idea of them always pushing themselves further and further nolan did the equivalent of getting warner brothers to bet 200 million dollars on him saying hold my beer then shooting himself in the foot and then doing a 5k run just to see if it was possible to finish a race with only one working foot he may have passed out with the halfway point from blood loss but like god damn it you've got to respect the man's commitment to the art and determination to push the boundaries i used to love nolan's work simply because he told great stories but now i'm a little older a little more experienced and he's put out more work so the trends are clearer to see i now realize that the reason why he has always been my favorite storyteller and probably always will be is because he's a trailblazer because nolan is very consciously laying a foundation for the next generation of filmmakers and storytellers to learn from his mistakes and victories a handful of people thankfully not many but a handful of people are saying that tenet has knocked nolan down a peg because before he was in a hot streak of near universally loved masterpiece after masterpiece and the mixed bag of tenet has brought him down from being a master to melee being quite good i would like to tell those people that they could not be more wrong because the artist that's obsessed with creating perfection is the artist that's the furthest away from attaining it it's those who strive not to achieve the outstanding but to make themselves into someone capable of creating something more outstanding than their prior work those are the kinds of artists who create the best work are the ones who will be remembered in 300 years time for what they have given the world and nolan surely will be ever since he's received the baton in the early 2000s he's been running at full pelt never slowing down never relaxing because he knows the date will come where his time in the spotlight will be up and it'll be his turn to hand the baton over to the next generation of directors and writers and it's his mission to cover as much ground as a humanly can before that moment and unearth as much as he can about what makes a good story good so the next generation will be all the more informed for his effort he is not making the mistake of striving to create a string of masterpieces he is instead striving to be a better storyteller but it's not just that his main goal is so much more noble he is striving to help you create your string of masterpieces by putting out a varied array of creative experiments for you to digest learn from and to push the bar of what's possible in cinema to new heights and he's doing it knowing that he may not be around in several decades time to see the fruits of his labor in the form of the thousands of great works in which he will be a direct influence god damn it that is why he's my favorite director in case in case the past like 10 minutes the video didn't convince you of that okay now now that i've got my gushing out of the way let's assist him uh as any scientist would tell you even if an experiment fails that does not make the experiment a failure uh sure this film has a lot about it that's great but enough flaws have surfaced to present a trove of interesting learning opportunities for us to study so let's take a closer look and yes that pun was fully intended at what tenet taught us while there were a few dozen tidbits here and there i've boiled them down into three key lessons and while all of them are pretty important the number one lesson that's probably going to be the most valuable to you i'll be saving that for the very end of the video because i want your watch time so i'm going to be holding it hostage also before we crack on being a youtuber while it is a dream job it also means that you live in a constant state of fear not only can i have my videos blocked copyright striked or demonetized at any time but the algorithm is often loving a creator one second and then they drop them on a whim the next um imagine if your boss was hal from 2001. he's a cold robot that rewards you if you're doing well but like the second that your numbers are down he cuts you off and ejects you out the airlock and emotionlessly ruins your livelihood like when i say it like that it sounds a bit light-hearted but i've seen it happen and i've seen creators livelihoods ruined because the algorithm deemed them unworthy but it's not all doom and gloom because myself and over a hundred other youtubers like h bomberguy hello future me just right nando v movies legal eagle lindsey ellis and like so many other names that you've certainly heard of we've all come together and we've come up with a solution and it's called nebula youtube has a monopoly on the video sharing space nebula is here to change that basically the the premise behind nebula is you the viewer sign up for a really low fee and then you use it to watch your favorite creators in an advertisement-free experience no annoying unskippable ads no annoying brand deals getting in the middle of your videos and a major chunk of your subscription fee gets given to the creators you watch based on how long you watch them and what really sweetens the deal here is nebula's joined up with curiosity stream which is a great streaming service with thousands of high quality documentaries like some of which involving david attenborough which i really enjoyed and they're doing a joint subscription it means that for what's usually 19.99 a year or if you're really quick about it there's a 41 discount that ends 10 days after this video comes out which is the 20th of january so if you're really fast about it you can instead get it for 11.97 a year if you're really quick you can get access to curiositystream's vast library of fantastic documentaries and on top of that for no extra charge whatsoever you get full access to nebula and in doing so directly support your favorite creators last night i watched deep ocean which is a documentary narrated by david attenborough where they're hunting for deep sea fish and i found it really interesting you can only watch it on curiosity stream and i'd highly recommend it as the first thing you check out so if that deal sounds good to you all you need to do to sign up is click my link in the description and get two for one on these two great streaming services today uh anyway the first takeaway is a lesson that nolan clearly knew himself when he made this film because he did everything he could to compensate for it this film has a pretty bland main character and that's why the plot moves so quickly i know those two things seem to have no connection but let me explain why they're directly connected characters are to a story what gluten is to bread or what cement is to a brick wall the characters not only bind the whole story together as the progression of their arcs provide a sense of cohesion to the whole structure they also help to fill the gaps and that stops the audience from getting bored whenever the plot stops moving forward if we say look at interstellar yes the plot has plenty of twists and turns but there were quite a few scenes where the plot didn't progress even slightly from the scene in the baseball stadium to cooper's chat with his father-in-law on the porch to him saying goodbye to his daughter to the scene where he sees his kids messages decades later like when cooper starts crying at murf saying that she's now as old as he was when he left even though this scene does nothing to progress the plot itself nobody is yawning and looking at their watch while this plays out like nobody feels like the pace of the movie has come to a standstill even though it technically has because the compelling character drama is picking up the slack the thing is with tenet because nolan chose a protagonist who has about as much intrigue to him as just your average rock he knew he had to compensate for that by having the plot move at a break next speed never pausing never giving you a chance to catch your breath the protagonists in the concert hall extracting a guy then he's being recruited then he's infiltrating a skyscraper in india and so on like this throughout the film there is no scene where the protagonist just sits down and confesses his doubts or has like a great revelation and learns a lesson as a person this was all a very conscious choice by nolan the lesson to take away from this is if you have a portion of your story or even a whole story where the character isn't undergoing a gripping personal journey such as tenet for whatever reason you might want to do that your plotting needs to be nothing short of outstanding because there are two things that keep your audience engaged plot and character and if you have no character focus then your plot needs to be consistently brilliant throughout your story because if it's not even if it's just for a minute there will be nothing maintaining your audience's engagement so they will be immediately struck by a sense that things have come to a grinding halt a film that comes to mind when i think about this is men in black international a film so thoroughly mediocre and forgettable that the only time i'd recommend it to someone is if they're struggling with insomnia because it's a damn good cure but if you look at that film asides from the first five minutes of the movie none of the main characters display any form of want or motivation more complex than i need to stop the bad guy as a result they're pretty boring protagonists and because the plot wasn't exactly awful it was just very average with quite a few moments where it doesn't progress the movie feels incredibly slow during those moments because the characters weren't compelling enough to pick up the slang so that's lesson one character and plot are the main two things that keep your audience engaged and if you ever have a scene where one of them is absent you need to be sure that the other one is doing a fantastic job at picking up the slack okay now lesson two and this one comes from the very beginning of the film if you asked me and i imagine a few people can disagree with me on this but if you ask me the prologue for tenna is the weakest opening of any nolan movie although let's be fair that is an extremely high bar and like tennis opening is still quite good when compared to like the average movie opening but still it's nolan's worst opening in my opinion and the reason why this isn't anywhere near as compelling as it otherwise could have been is because it's so alienating to watch let me explain so this film begins in medias race which means in the middle of things and if you say in media res [ __ ] off it's in mideast race that's how it said in latin why did i swear the audience okay so um this one begins in medias race which means in the middle of things but that's not the reason why it's alienating rather it's because the audience is confused while the characters are not and that's breaking one of those universal laws in storytelling like show don't tell like it's one of the ten deadly sins that when you're telling a story you should always shy away from no matter what but okay to be more specific a viewer who's watching this film for the first time in just the first five minutes is asking why are these guys wearing badges and pretending to be police officers to which the answer is we don't know why are they trying to rescue this guy we don't know that either and why is this guy meeting with what looks to be a general we don't know the protagonist grabs an odd metal mcguffin from the backpack what is this what does it do and why does the protagonist want it we don't have the slightest clue to any of those questions and because the audience is asking so many questions to which the protagonist knows the answer but we don't it creates a divide that stops the audience from being truly immersed and absorbed with the story okay let's explain how this could have been done better by comparing it to a film that confuses its audience but does it right and it's jay's introduction in men in black in his first scene we see jay running after a guy with the police behind his back as jay screams well we instantly have a foothold and understand like it is a cop chasing a crook a very simple premise that grounds us but that's when bizarre things start to happen the criminal jumps off a bridge tall enough to break a man's shins but he lands and is perfectly fine then he pulls out a weird gun that dissolves into gas when it breaks then the criminal leaps an impossible height and scrambles up the side of a building and then later he blinks sideways all of this is confusing equally as confusing as the beginning of tener is but the reason why men in black's opening is in my opinion a far more engaging sequence than tenets it's because the protagonist is just as confused as we are the criminal does these insane feats and jay just looks on in befuddlement and like not only does that make him instantly relatable it makes our confusion feel justified and that does a stellar job at immersing us in the story if you look at nolan's movies so far none of them as sides from tenet have fallen for this issue the beginning of the dark knight kicks off in madea's race but we can easily understand what's happening these people are robbing a bank we grasp that really quite quickly and when they're in the car talking about their plan how many people are involved and how they're going to split the money it all fills in the gaps and catches us up to speed or if you look at a film like inception which deals with a far harder to grasp concept a film where the beginning could have very easily been cobb running around doing things that we don't understand does the film start off doing that no it starts off with cobb explaining how dreams work in this story that it's possible for people to enter someone's dreams to steal information and that cobb is the most skilled person at this in the world and then a minute later when we get a shot of them all sleeping connected by a machine the audience is immediately on the same page as the protagonist they quickly understand that this is a heist and that cobb is trying to extract information from saito's mind as he sleeps like honestly for a film that deals with such a unique concept the beginning of inception does a masterful job at catching the viewer up to speed so quickly in such a short time frame like when you compare men in black or inception to tenets nolan didn't take either of these approaches he didn't give us a character who he can be confused with and he didn't take the time to catch the viewer up to speed with the protagonist watching the opening of tenet for the first time feels like when everyone in the room is laughing except for you because you don't get the joke and while it is not a you know a terrible viewing experience it's not a very immersive one and immersing your audience in your story is always what you want to try and achieve okay so let me be all closer looky and stuff let's rewrite this beginning just a little bit to try and fix this issue okay so in this rewritten beginning let's say that the protagonist starts off as a regular swat officer here to save these hostages and that's it we show these armed criminals taking control of the opera house then we have a shot of the protagonist arriving in a big van labeled swat followed by shots of his squad leader with a marker pen and a whiteboard very briefly explaining their plan to save the hostages there we go the audience is now on the same page as the protagonist but that's when confusing stuff starts to happen as it all kicks off we see other squad officers going against the plan they've laid out like their squad leader shouts hey come back where the hell are you for going as these four mysterious figures run off on their own and as the protagonist watches he sees the last man's shoulder clip a doorway and his emblem falls off his shoulder so the protagonist is like screw this my curiosity is just too strong to resist so he breaks off from his unit picks up the shoulder patch and holds it against the one he has and he sees that while his is stitched on and has like a bright yellow text the one that fell off was being held by glue and all of the stitch work is ever so slightly wrong at a distance it's good enough to look real but up close it's an obvious fake so he gets even more curious and stalks these mysterious figures as they do exactly what the protagonist did in the original film like they run into that vip booth and have these confusing conversations with all of these code words all the while the protagonist is eavesdropping through the door and being confused with us but then he bursts in and holds them up accusing them of impersonating policemen then there's a firefight the protagonist ends up stealing their bag then he opens it and sees this confusing metal object inside like what the hell is this he mutters and so on like that as the inversion happens and things get progressively weirder and you know from here on he then gets recruited by this mysterious agency and the film plays out pretty much in the exact same way i realize that rewrite goes against nolan's vision because it actually gives us a protagonist who has you know some personality i know it's terrible how dare i but i believe that opening would have been far stronger because it immerses us rather than alienates us by making the audience's confusion feel justified it takes what was confusion and makes it feel more like a mystery slowly being unraveled if there's a lesson to take away from nolan's recent experiment is that you should only ever confuse your audience if they have a character to be confused with preferably the main character and now with a big one this third and final lesson is the main takeaway you should have from tenet so i know this may sound like a total segue but bear with me this will be directly relevant in a second i was watching the judge the other day which is a fantastic film with robert downey jr and robert duvall and i highly recommend it the premise of the film is that the local judge of a town is on trial for murdering an ex-convict and his estranged son is the lawyer defending him now throughout the movie there are a ton of turning points and developments that keep things interesting but here's the thing the whole trial while being fun to watch while being the reason why the viewer is watching is not the reason they're caring what the audience cares about is not the trial but the relationship between this man and his son as they start off bitterly hating each other but grow to love each other as the film plays out the plot of the movie is nothing more than a device it's a vehicle and its main purpose is to enable the exploration of the real core of the story that being this paternal relationship if we take that basic premise where the lawyer defending the judge is not his estranged son and is instead just some random lawyer the film entirely falls apart it becomes a shadow of its former self and is significantly harder to care about even though the events and the plot is identical that is tenet with the judge it was the plot that kept my attention but it was the father-son relationship being scrutinized and explored that kept me caring with tenet it had my attention from the opening shot to the very end credits like at no point did i yawn or look at my watch but also at no point did i care about the hero stopping the villain because the villain is a generic two-dimensional psychopath and the hero is a generic two-dimensional protagonist at no point do i want the protagonist to win in the end because what reason did i have to if evil gilderoy lockhart succeeded in blowing up the world and everyone died i would have reacted with nothing more than a shrug and a huff because the film skimped out on the number one reason why people become invested in any narrative characters now this is not the case for every last person in the world like some people love a good sci-fi that barely has a plot and has no character whatsoever and it's nothing more than the exploration of a concept and there's nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of story but what this is to say is that the main reason why most of us love stories is because we love seeing our own humanity seen through a new perspective if you want to see nothing more than events transpire you just read a history textbook written by an unbiased third party decades after the event but if you want to see the human element you want to feel emotion and cry at the sad bits and laugh at the funny ones you read a memoir written by the person who was there when it happened at a fundamental level what most of us crave when we go to the cinema or play a story driven game or read a good book is not a plot that is merely eye candy to keep us from looking away rather a plot that while sure it does act as eye candy that keeps us from looking away it also more crucially allows the story to explore both its characters and its emotional core whether that cause not a father loving his daughter or what it's like to lose a loved one or to be a pregnant teenager or to have honor in a world where having honor is punished more often than it's rewarded the danger with what tenet did with having a blank slate of a protagonist is it comes dangerously close to being not a memoir filled with captivating humanity but rather an unbiased textbook written by an uncaring dispassionate historian and why would you tell a story that just recounts the events when you can instead tell a story that still recounts the events but also at the same time has captivating characters that is not to say that tennie is without merit it is not to say that somehow you are not allowed to enjoy a story because it skimps out in the character department but what it is to say is that if you deny your audience engrossing characters who undergo fascinating personal journeys you are depriving your story of not all of the reason but the biggest reason why most people love stories in the first place anyway uh that's all i've got to say today but if you haven't done it yet please do click that like button and also hit the subscribe thing and also please consider supporting me on patreon if you found this video interesting and want to help me create more videos like this there is a link in the description down below anyway thanks for watching and i'll see you guys next time on the closer look

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 384,391

Rating: 4.8627234 out of 5

Keywords: tenet, nolan, christopher nolan, movie, review, explained, the closer look, closer look, the closer, ending, creative writing, writing, video essay, video, essay, john david washington, inversion, writing advice, how to, interstellar, inception, dunkirk

Id: Mvo60B3myBw

Length: 26min 24sec (1584 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/houseurmusic]

FYI the movie drive did the same thing.

[u/relvant_usernam]

I think there's some really good points from this video, especially the weakness of the opening. Completely agree that everything is way too confusing and maybe making TP as confused as the audience would've fixed that. And that critique, in my opinion, extends into the plot points revolved around Kat and the painting too. However, I would not call the movie a "Failure", or as the video puts it, "the best kind of failure". Just think that is far too harsh in the sense that, this movie is meant to be re-watched and discussed and dissected and re-watched and re-watched again, and not just once and then judged based on it being "too complex".