Spoilers obviously
Was this Nolan's most reactionary film yet? The message of the film appears to be that future generations are all entitled brats who want to destroy the world to save themselves. The past should be preserved quite literally in this case at the expense of the future, who are all going to die of global warming. I think the future generations are right in this case. Fuck the boomers, global warming was their fault, and they would not hesitate to kill everyone before to save themselves so why should they?
Seemed like some references to the whole 'confederate statue' thing as well. This is the same guy who defended torture and mass surveillance. Elizabeth Debicki was hot as always though. Worth watching the movie just for her. That whole subplot was weird though, she didn't want to leave her abusive husband because he'd report her for art forgery? The level of threat there was not believable enough.
The movie as a movie is entertaining enough to watch at least once. The gimmick is enough to hold it up. I think everyone complaining that the sound mixing was too shit to hear anything is too focused on trying to understand something that's mostly an excuse for neat visual set pieces. That said, the climax of the film in that final battle was also the weakest part of the movie. It was difficult to tell who was shooting who and it looked like a scene out of inception.
Speaking of which I have trouble ranking this above or below inception. Inception had a stronger emotional core, Cobb was more of a character than "The Protagonist" but on the flipside(hah), Inception was still suffering from some halfway bullshit in terms of pacing. Rewatching that movie, it can drag heavily when they do exposition for an entire scene. In Tenet, Nolan and his editors seem to have perfected a style where every scene doesn't drag even though it can be exposition heavy.
This can be to a fault – the already mentioned plot point that future generations are going to invert the entire flow of time in a last ditch attempt to escape the end of the world due to climate change – is something that in any other movie would be treated as a major revelation. You'd have a scene of the main characters reacting to the news and thinking through the implications. The pacing in this movie is so scene-to-scene though that it's only explored once at the very end by the antagonist. Nolan leaves a lot of meat on the bone.
Which again, i
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