Sunday 13 September 2020

Tenet

Before I saw this film I knew that it was by Christopher Nolan, involved messing around with time, and had some muffled dialogue. All of these things turned out to be true. The dialogue wasn't actually too much of an issue. It was the action scenes that were hard to follow. Car chases and fast fights are hard enough to know what's going on anyway; I had no chance with time-reversal too.

The central idea of the film is that some things (and later people) can travel backwards through time. Not time-travelling, but moving backwards at a steady rate through time. This doesn't appear to make any sense, and on closer inspection, still doesn't. This is more or less admitted by the film, then buried out of embarrassment. It seems like they got three quarters of the way through filming, realised it didn't work, but carried on anyway.

If a bullet is inverted then wouldn't it just retrace it's forward steps, i.e. sit in a box for a while then head back to the factory when it gets made? It wouldn't start jumping into people's hands (or into guns), unless it did that the first time. Or is the inverted bullet a new object, that is unrelated to the original bullet, that has magic properties?

When inverted bullets get sucked out of glass, the glass remains whole. But when they get sucked out of people, the people are injured. Why is that? When the Protagonist gets inverted why can he drive a car, unless that's been inverted too? Why does he have to take back his own oxygen (as the reactions happen in the opposite direction) but not his own light (that would also move away from his eyes towards the sun in an inverted world)?

Admittedly I've got some of those from the internet. My problems are more basic. In a temporal pincer movement wouldn't the second group, moving backwards in time, simply arrive to see the whole area devastated (since the first group set off a big bomb at the end)?

It almost makes sense if you forget about the time aspect, and just call it magic-mode. When something enters magic-mode things are a bit weird. Any closer examination of the time-inversion idea means it works less and less well. This is the opposite of what a Sci-Fi film should be; the main idea should be explored not buried beneath fast action and very loud music.

Ignoring the time-inversion it's quite an entertaining spy film. Robert Pattison is good, and so is Kenneth Branagh.

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