I get the hype around Christopher Nolan movies. They're visually very beautiful and interesting, he's a good director in that regard. I'm not a fan of the Dark Knight Trilogy however I enjoyed them well enough, I don't purposefully watch them, they're in my bucket of, "would watch again if someone else put it on". (I'm actually more fond of Batman Returns, I know that's not a masterpiece and personally I'm not Burton fan and hate the hype he gets whenever he does shit with Depp, but Batman Returns has a nostalgia thing for me). I appreciate Heath Ledger's Joker (we never say him as the Joker, it was always his), however I didn't appreciate all the cringe edge-lords quoting it trying to be cool, it made it all comical and stupid and ruined the performance for me. I don't think Interstellar and Inception were amazing, I can see why they do get the hype they do. Visually compelling, different narratives, there wasn't much out there that was similar at the time. I vaguely remember Memento. Outside of all those I haven't seen anything else of his. Until I watched Tenet. And it was pretty good.
There's other stuff outside this that drew me in, mainly once I saw Martin Donovan, star of many a Hal Hartley movie, has a small role in this, and getting to see him on the big screen was great, for the five minutes he was on there. I'm also throwing all my enthusiasm behind Robert Pattinson's trajectory because he supposedly committed career suicide very early on being attached to one franchise that shouldn't have been a measure of his ability at all. He's awesome, I hope he fired whichever agent that told him not to pass on his breakout role (some reason having a smaller role in another franchise that irritates me wasn't enough). So now when I see him in anything that gets a lot of critical acclaim and he gets the props, I feel happy. I feel like things I hated didn't have such a toxic effect on everything they touched.
But I figured out after watching Tenet, when my ears stopped ringing from the ludicrous onslaught of the heavy bass soundtrack and shit 'splodin' and bullets pingin', that there wasn't a fuck of a lot of character development going on. He's not lazy about this, but a couple of characters seemed to purposefully lack the required depth for you to care while delivering the core concepts through the Nolanesque exposition style we've all come to know and like? Maybe?
Spectacularly tall Elizabeth Debicki (Australian apparently) probably has more of a backstory to work with and much more ground for you to give a fuck about her, but the Protagonist (yeah, that's the guy's name, played by John David Washington, who kicked a lot of ass in BlaKkKlansman) really isn't designed for you to know his past. He's the blank slate CIA operative. And he plays alongside Pattison's Neil (Just Neil) who makes a rather pointed comment halfway through that if the Protagonist gives enough of a fuck and they make it through this ordeal, he'll spill his guts. He's studied the required subjects to understand the mechanics of the universe they're in, and this isn't Nolan's biggest headfuck of a movie. I figured out one twist early on, and you're compelled to find out how things got where they were. The flashbacks were reminiscent of Inception, the mundanity of the technology and some of the dowdy set pieces were great, so it wasn't so heavily reliant on special effects as it was the effective use of reversing certain sequences. The only drawback of this was there was one scene that reminded me too much of the backwards bar fight in that one Red Dwarf episode. Nolan at least did well to not make this look so comical - you're not watching people regurgitate food. But the movie then seemed like a vehicle for this technique i.e. wouldn't a reverse car chase and a reverse battle scene be super cool, how do we incorporate a movie around that? You can't argue that necessarily with Nolan's story, it's interesting and adheres to time travel fundamentals, it's structured properly even when things seem like there's a big mess of dafuq going on. I liked it more than I expected to.
Chuck in Michael Caine in a sitdown cameo and Kenneth Branagh as the bad guy, who isn't effecting a terrible Russian accent and portrays a decent antagonist, you've got a decent package deal. I wasn't so convinced of the bad guy's motivations, wanting Godlike powers by way of commanding when the world will end was a tad generic. Him being a wifebeater made him way more unlikable. His story sets up most of the moralistic points of past generations making shit worse for future ones and those far enough in the head deciding humanity is too much of a fuck up and they could possibly reverse climate change on the off-chance enough of us die and don't wipe them out via the Grandfather Clause. You're not finding new concepts in that department, Nolan's ability to present them in an interesting way proves to be his bigger draw card. Considering I would sit through this again, it's getting more points from me than his previous masterpieces. I would hope he doesn't reach the kind of levels James Cameron has now. Because can you imagine a world with 4 more Tenet movies without wanting to puke? No. It doesn't exist. It's less likely than future people using entropy to reverse the direction of bullets. (Side note in 2023, I am an asshole who is immensely happy the current strikes have put another delay on the upcoming Avatar movies. I'm so happy about this it's disgusting but every time Jim doesn't get things his way, I feel a little happier inside).
As a side note, I didn't mind Interstellar on rewatch, it had decent moments. It's commentary on love being quantifiable however makes a lot of the dialogue sound like an essay delivered by overemotional actors. I'm not saying there weren't moments of genuine emotion either, but McConaughey's delivery at points is really stupid, he's sort of drunk in his mannerisms, and he has to play dumb as the audience surrogate, I understand he's forced into the mission with little time to spare but he was briefed on the mission before agreeing so how did they end up so much further into the mission with him still trying to get his head around relativity? Or wormholes. I like Anne Hathaway and she doesn't overdo it in this. The punchline being that both plans were viable all along just because one was set up as a kind of diversion due to not having any hope of fruition, that seems like too much of a happy ending. We get space stations and a chance at life on another planet? Once they were explaining the repopulation on the human race from frozen embryos, I checked out on the premise humanity had a right to survive that fucking long. We don't. I can only think of a handful of people genuinely worthy of life and I'm not one of them. The dialogue gets too hammy, and Nolan's ability to stretch out a penultimate scene is parallel only with Tarantino at this point. By which I mean they completely overstay their welcome. You're shouting "DUH" at McConauhghey once he pieces shit together rather than biting your nails, which is the intention. I enjoyed Hateful Eight much more than Inglorious Basterds. You have to put those guys in the same bucket when it comes to the level of hype surrounding one of their releases. They're meticulous directors who aren't guilty of being prolific, we aren't saturated by their art, we're treated to it for the amount of time dedicated to their films. They're both brilliant in their own ways but Tarantino's the better writer at least in terms of dialogue. Sorry, I don't find Nolan's dialogue to be particularly human sometimes when he's making political or philosophical statements. And we have to believe in the future the argument for there being a falsified moon landing has now been confirmed and is in the text books, in a parody of anti-religious education. The story is also easier to follow than Inception and Tenet, but ultimately the twist is identical to Tenet's. I'm waiting for Nolan to make a female protagonist who isn't responsible for their own destiny whose entire arc depends on them setting their own future in motion by some time travel mechanic.
I'm now hearing about the relentless soundtrack in Oppenheimer (which I did want to see initially but now I'm like, meh. And neither Barbie nor this inspired me to visit a movie theatre, but I want to know five years from now if its cultural impact will be remembered and pondered over). Anyway, when the Red Letter Media guys mentioned the presence of a constant score in Oppenheimer, it just set off so many issues I had with Tenet. Then I realised, oh his scores get a lot of hype from people, I know someone who listened to them at work, so he must think he can just have them there constantly in the movie so we never get to catch a breath in terms of tension. You really did have entire two person dialogue scenes with this constant, annoying score just loud enough to be distracting. It's the opposite of trying to build tension with everything else, a score shouldn't be ever-present. Supposedly Barbie used a similar technique with one song and that might be different, it's not the same to use theme and variation, but you can oversaturate it with a certain melodic sting like in Indiana Jones or Star Wars. It's obnoxious even then. Do it constantly with no pauses and it's too much. I am seeing this horrible trend of overhyped male directors who just get too much praise for their work they think they can give masterpiece after masterpiece when it's really not the case. Even with Greta Gerwig, I see her using characters as mouthpieces and I'm not interested in Barbie now because of this, the same thing bothered me with Marriage Story, and Lady Bird just didn't mean much to me. So seeing clips of Barbie I'm thinking, no I don't have time or patience for this personally, far be it from me to stop anyone else, but Barbie's her first mainstream hit really, if you've not seen her work, you'd not know any better. I like the idea of the Barbie movie, but Trixie Mattel can't even decide if she liked the movie. Trixie, Mattel's biggest product they did nothing to actually create, can't decide if the Barbie Movie is good. I get it. I had Barbie's existential angst as a child, I preferred my ponies, but I also knew about societal ladders and gender disparity (maybe not the wage gap but that there was a firm distinction), I just don't have time for people stumbling into third wave feminism this late in the game. I like Nolan was pissed off about it being paired, meanwhile Gerwig clearly didn't give a shit, and now her movie's doing better financially too, I'm very pleased about that. About as pleased as I was when Jim lost to his ex-wife at the Oscars. Any time that man's denied awards, I feel good inside. And Avatar 2 choked at the last Oscars. Here's to Avatar 3: Revenge of the Fire Nation getting trounced financially and critically. (I know it'll still do well financially, but I'm sure it will make less and receive less praise and less accolades. I'm sure of it, so it pisses me off he insists on continuing when this whole thing's been going on for over a decade longer than it should).
