Merlin's Tenet Review

 This actually comes from a series of comments I made on my own post on FB that I was going to watch Tenet after just buying it on DVD (2020 has really sucked ... ever since Dark Knight, Nolan's films really should be viewed on the big screen at least the first time, but I am among the people simply not taking chances). I took a picture of the case and posted on FB that this was the night to see how it measures up, and then when done, I thought I would toss up a quick comment or two after I watched it, and over one long post last night and another six comments today, this is what it turned into ... so it is kind of strung together, but being as I have work stuff to be getting done, and so don't have time to thrash out something structured, and I would rather save something of my thoughts for posterity, I figure I will just go ahead and put at least this up (the stand-alone ellipses are the breaks between original comments in FB).

Review: 

*Spoilers*

I thought it was really good but not as unique as Inception or Interstellar. The mechanical trick had a bit of a unique twist in having inverted things traveling through non inverted space, but the basic mechanical thing has been done in a number of recent films within maybe the past decade, various parts of it in various of the films (but see further below a more detailed addressing of the issue of "influence" possibilities respective to timing, such as what came out when), and various qualities: I thought both Looper and Deja Vu were really good, In the Shadow of the Moon was all right, and I thought Predestination really tanked (I mention Twelve Monkeys below too, and I was such a Monkeys Junkey when I first saw that that I got burned out on it because it is basically, as far as class, a tragedy, and I watched it four times in as many weeks with different people, saying "oh, you haven't seen that? you have to see it, let's watch it," and after time 4 I was like, "I just can't take the heartache again" lol). But it should be noted that all of those officially involve some form of time travel (they all have their interesting non-*travel* mechanics that makes each interesting, but they all also involve actual time travel even if limited: Jeff Daniels time traveled in Looper and Washington time-traveled in Deja Vu), and Tenet is technically and statedly not time travel at all inn the normal sense of that trope/mechanics in sci fi .(in the sci-fi story that gave C. S. Lewis the idea for The Great Divorce, the grass couldn't bend because you can't change the past, but in Tenet, the reason you can't breathe the air is that it is is flowing in the opposite time direction from that of the lungs, a mechanical reason all in the present) ... but see my comment below on that, and there are lots of similarities with those films (there is even some Twelve Monkeys in there with the final phone message, and it feels like he might have frankesteined his own Interstellar a little bit, but that is the thing with anything involving time travel, and probably why good story tellers approach it with great caution, which is that it's really easy to sound like a bunch of other time travel films). 

 

[Added in Blogger: Add to the list of at least resonances whichever season of Lost the island becomes unstuck in time, or they do, and when Jeremy Davies's character Daniel Faraday says that it could be either the island that is moving through time of they as persons ... and then of course you have Tony Stark saying that Bruce Banner et al. ran time through Scott Lang rather than running Scott Lang through time ... but, as much as I like the Avengers arc and think Marvel really carved a place for itself in cinematic history by successfully orchestrating like twenty-two films or whatever it was and then making us like hanging on a cliff for two years between Infinity War and End Game (and Ant Man and Wasp was a brilliant filler for that, not falling into the bad idea of doing reveals for Endgame that in the end would really just leave viewers unsatisfied and disgruntled because frustrated in not getting as much as they wanted, but instead going for a good character film [and the easter egg there was not bad, as you pretty much knew the only thing further to which anything Marvel could go at that point, so when they used it to say "yeah, of course, don't worry, it will tie together with that, but that's all we'll say, it actually, I think, worked to sort of seal in the flavor of this film for itself]), I'm not going to go down the path of "everybody is trying to copy Marvel because they are so great" ... Lost wrapped in 2010, so it may have been fodder; Endgame was 2019, so it definitely was not. ... and having seen the previews of the Flash movie and the various instantiations of Batman and bringing in Keaton's Batman alongside Affleck's as different Batmans, I have to say that I am out for the most part on the whole multiverse thing unless I really like the characters, like I think Olson's Scarlet Witch and Cumberbatch's Strange could be an interesting combination, but seeing Maguire and Garfield in the cast and knowing it means their Spider Mans as "alternate universe" versions, and then seeing Reynolds and knowing that probably means Deadpool, I will probably see each film once to say I saw it and then I'm out, whatever ... stories need to have a certain scope they call their own to work, and while I think Endgame succeeded in playing with that as much as possible and having fun pushing into that alternate universe territory while still staying in bounds (but probably the most interesting with it was Into the Spiderverse), that's about as far as I can buy it without narrative becoming too nebulous to work as narrative (sadly beginning to look like the fucked-up blurring between news and fiction that is the reality TV that gave us in America four years from hell and a pandemic much worse than it had to be) ... and if this becomes some way to smooth over different versions being done, I'm really out; different people made different versions and their relative quality can be argued, leave it at that ... let's say somebody comes a long and makes a Harry Potter series of films in which number 4 doesn't suck like Mike Newell's 4 and the films of books 5 to 7 don't suck the way Yates's did, BUT they try to multiverse those with the Columbus/Newell/Yates series, I would hate that worse than I hate Yates's and Newell's abominations ... you can really see the logic of just letting various instantiations stand on their own ground if you thought about, say, trying to multi-verse together the Alec Guinness BBC miniseries of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and the Gary Oldman feature-length film... the difference is not between genres, as in between sci-fi superheroes versus real-world spies, but rather between concepts of (1)  unique interpretations of stories with distinct beginning, middle, and end, and/or (2) on the other hand, stories loosing distinction in being stitched together with an infinite number of possible version into some "whole" that is too nebulous to be a defined thing at any one time (this was always a problem I had with the MCU easter egg after a certain point, I enjoyed some of the content very much, but they lessened the feel of closure and the end of the film because you stuck around to see what this one was going to connect with (but note what I said above about the credits scene in Ant Man and the Wasp, where it doesn't do that) ... I think one of the marks of Nolan's genius and the distinctiveness of his interpretation of Batman will be that they can't work his Bale Batman into that multi-verse deal ... and I had no problem with going from Nolan and Bale to Affleck and still being in awe of Nolan's work while liking Affleck in the role a lot [despite the grave and obvious shortcomings of Batman versus Superman as a film).]

 

What Nolan brings to that [sometimes well-worn] grouping of time tropes hardcore in Tenet, making it worthy of accolades, is applying his choreography to it ... he can do that mechanics on a scope that really nobody can touch, not just the bigness of the action on screen (but that is impressive here, for which I do wish I had seen it on the big screen, some of the stuff I would love to have seen on imax ... although again some of the action scenes feel like he frankensteined a little of his own work, meaning mainly invading the top floor of the building early on feeling a bit like the nighttime incursion in Hong Kong in Dark Knight and the hallway fighting from Inception), but primarily the intricacy of movement involving such a large number of pieces, like watching several simultaneous chess games side by side in time-lapse when you know there is something also going on across the games (for instance, you have pairing big choreography scenes--the opera at the beginning and the assault on the Soviet dead hidden city at the end-- and paired experiences of the same incident with the plane at the airport, and within the latter the crossover, pretty much center of the film, or at least one side of the center [see below], in that key moment of crossing over Debicki's character to heal her from being shot by the inverted bullet).

 

I like the name: in the end Pattinson's character Neil says that the "what happened has happened" is a statement of faith, and it's common to speak of faith as having tenets, tenets of the faith, and it's also a palindrome, so the two directions of reading the name meet in the middle and then continue on to their respective termini. That line also has an interesting mix of the simple past tense (happened) and the perfect (has happened). 

 

I'm not sure the time relations work out with the mechanics of officially not doing time travel, only inversion of direction (which direction is he going when he "ties up loose ends" at the end in relation to when he received the phone call in relation to what direction he was traveling at the end of the big fight); it seems like they do some appearing at different points in time that would require actual time travel and not just inverted directions (but see my fun comment below on Frogger-style if there is a way to make it work without actual time travel). But I'm not sure on that and I may read something by somebody that explains all that to my satisfaction. 

 

I also like the characters and the performances (seeing Pattinson in this gives me hope that the new batman could be good ... although again, maybe not character-wise, but player-wise, finding Pattinson's Neil character in the hotel felt a little frankensteined from meeting Eames in Inception). So, while I say that it's core material thing is not as distinctive and *thematically* earth-shattering as Inception and Interstellar, it's still an amazing film. The Nolan brothers are incredible (Jonathan didn't write on this one, but I 'm just saying that the corpus between them, the stuff they did together, Christopher in this, Jonathan with Person of Interest). So, in the end, I highly recommend it and wish Covid had not robbed me of being able to see it on the big screen safely.

 

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Add The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the idea of one person or thing moving temporally backward in the midst of others moving forward (although there it was biological aging in reverse and not technically time play, but the concept of moving contradirectionally is there, and with at least a time element, in that aging requires time as part of it's core definition, and the concept of the scope of inversion for a lifetime arc if Neil was recruited by the Protagonist way, way in the future, and this resonates with In the Shadow of the Moon too [but see next section on the 2019 dating meaning probably no influence). 

 

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Add also Harry Potter seeing himself cast his patronus at the end of Prisoner of Azkaban for Kat seeing herself dive off the boat, envying her own later freedom. I have to add too that timing impacts things, which is fitting, especially because these would be issues of cause and effect (a relationship directly mentioned in the film). I should say that the upshot might not be whether one could accuse Nolan of borrowing too much (although really, everything is a little borrowing; there were only ever three original ideas in the history of the world: creation, fall, and redemption), but rather whether the film has the impact of uniqueness and innovation at the time when it is hitting ... but there is also *some* question of interplay. Wiki has it that Nolan had been working on the idea for ten years before production (actually writing the screenplay in the the last five before filming and production), so that puts it at 2009 or 2010. Harry Potter book 3 definitely predates that by another ten years, making it a possible idea-sparker. Twelve Monkeys was even earlier than that in 1995, and then Deja Vu was 2006 and Benjamin Button was 2008. So those could be fodder in Nolan's idea. Looper was 2012, between when Nolan reportedly started thinking the idea and when he started writing the script, as is also the case with Predestination in 2014. Only 2019's In the Shadow of the Moon is distinctly too late to be any influence (unless Nolan were as whimsical as George Lucas, who reportedly halted filming on Attack of the Clones to work up a chase scene like the chase scene in the car factory in Minority Report of some other Tom Cruise film when he saw it while shooting Clones ... and I don't think Nolan is that loopy). But even with all that, I still think his core mechanical idea of material traveling in reverse time flow is unique, and he keeps that in the fore with things like "you're catching the bullet" and inverted lungs not being able to breathe non-inverted oxygen (presumably because it is moving in the wrong direction for normal actual intake and handling by the inverted lungs to occur, they can't catch it because they didn't throw it, or however that relation works in the scene where it is explained in the lab ... although that still may cause problems depending on who is traveling in which direction when ... it's very complex, and using such minute parts to support the unique mechanics opens the door to other minutia as sources of problems: in order for somebody inverted to interact with somebody non-inverted, wouldn't they have to be able somehow hop out of inversion to do that, which would mean the inverted folks from way in the future like Neil have technology beyond the big inversion chambers of the present, more like portable very small devices that can toggle direction ... which SEEMS like what he is saying when talking to the Protagonist and the Protagonist asks "I thought you were going the other direction" and he says he switched midstream ... and, with regard to freshness of the mechanical concept relative to all these different time-related works, a hopping around in time by reversing directions at various places, kind of like hopping logs and beetles in the river section of a level in Frogger to hit the open pocket on the other side, is a pretty fresh idea ... at least with time involved, as it is a little bit like the big finale sequence in Adjustment Bureau).

 

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So, themewise: It's all about the girl and her child, which is not necessarily the freshest ... but the plight of that primal relation against machinations of power players deserves to keep being done over and over and over and over ... if you don't keep it in the fore of people's minds, you get Don Jr. and Eric and Ivanka and whatever poor Baron will become having gotten hit with the worst of Trump's approach to family in the service of personal image and conquest by getting hit with the version that has had the weight of the office of the president of one of two world superpowers (not just the way the power can rev up an ego trip, but also the factor of your young life being put on a world stage) behind it (I thought that the idea I think is in Inception was really fresh, which is the impact had on a mother by incepting not just an idea, with the spinning top in the safe, but an experience of fifty years of growing old *without* that involving the milestones of the kids growing up). Yes, on the surface, it's about saving the world, but all of he plot mechanics are driven by concerns around the woman, especially that central portion of the inverted run through the Oslo chamber scene being done to save her, and she has a central role in the finale that goes back and happens precisely at the moment of crisis in that relationship, when Sator most threatened her, not by threatening to kill her or even threatening to take her son physically from her, but to take him emotionally from her by getting her to consider it even for a split second. The saving the world thing is still there, but there is a relationship between that level and the mother's level that is at least consistent with (regardless of how conscious on Nolan's part, but I think he is probably at least aware) an older model, a classical model and really even deeper than that, of the same thing being in the microcosm (saving the mother and her relationship with her child) and in the macrocosm (saving the world from Sator taking it with him when he dies) ... that's what Priya doesn't get and why saving Kat from Priya at the end is not just throw-away icing on the cake (just like, despite what a lot of disgruntled people think because they secretly know they can't process such things and keep mistaking them for ciphers, I think the spinning-top ending to Inception is central to its theme); it's central to theme (it was more latent in Inception, but there was a similar relationship in the microcosm of finding resolution to what Cobb did to Mal and saving the world-economy situation by bringing resolution to the father-son relation [which is one of the reasons I think that motherhood has to be central to the main theme in Inception; it can't just be that she had a psychic break that anybody else could have had whether or not they are a mother ... and the thing about the top is that, because he took away the psychic stability of secure knowledge that the world you're seeing is real, the stability his wife needed to function as a mother for her kids, Cobb must now be there for them himself without having the comfort of the security of that knowledge, and his acceptance of that is symbolized in going to the kids without waiting to verify via the top, not demanding the security before acting, the security he took from his wife, however unintentional the theft was, and of course, for the audience to get that, they too much forego knowing for sure]).

 

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For a possible quasi-chiastic reading (but not conclusive ... beware the bed of Procrustes): the second run-through of the sequence at the Oslo chamber isn't paired only with the first run-though of that sequence, but also with the scene at the other chamber where Sator shoots her, and those two scenes do have a close conjunction at the center that is tight enough to read as a pair center (chiasm can have either a single element as center, which is more common, or a sort of Janus-faces pairing where the center of the chiasm is the relation between them ... in this case [1] an immediate attack by Sator and [2] saving her from it, which is itself a microcosm of the plot of saving her that is itself a microcosm within the macrocosmic plot of saving the world ... this "X'' witnin X' within X kind of thing is not the same type of plot structuring as when done in chiasm, since it is more theme than material, but on that theme level it is a bit akin to the plot chiastic nesting Mary Douglas, in her book Thinking in Circles, describes in the Iliad, in which the central element of the over-arching chiasm is itself a chiasm). The question would be what to make of the second run-through having two pairing relationships, one with the first actual run-though of the Oslo sequence and the second in pairing with the chamber scene in which she is shot. And ... if the mechanics of that second run-through of the Oslo scene does work, with each of them taking on one version of the same person but moving in opposite temporal directions ... that is some seriously kick-ass choreographing of that mechanics.

 

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Oh ... and on comparisons with James Bond ... I've never been a Bond fan. I don't necessarily hate it, but it has always seemed kind of poser to me, like "appreciating" it is always passed off as some sort of sophistication. I think the Protagonist being like Bond and Debicki's Kat character being styled like a Bond girl, especially looks (tall, lean, European model looking), whether Nolan intended it or not, works as a kind of "see, here is how you do that sort of thing so that it actually *means* something" (and means something with a happy ending ... John Lecarre, of late fond memory, did espionage and spy lit that was exponentially more legit than Bond, but it was definitely not an unequivocal happy ending: Smiley wins through Karla's desperation and can still do so only through the blackmail method that is the only thing Karla can understand, and that involves materially threatening Karla's innocent daughter).

 

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And on the fun kick-ass trivia front: the female leader of the blue team in the final temporal pincer assault in Siberia is the daughter of none other than Grima Wormtongue, AKA Billy Bibbit the tragic suicide in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, AKA the mentat Piter De Vries in Lynch's 1984 version of Dune (and the incarcerated killer with whom Tuvok mind melds in one of the only episodes of Star Trek Voyager that was ever any good, as well as the monk who had been mind-wiped in one of the best single episodes of Babylon 5) ... Brad Dourif.

 

(Oh, and the scientist who explains inversion to him, Barabara, was Fleur Delacour.)