BEFORE: This was the big film of last fall, the one that Hollywood thought might draw people back out to theaters again, especially if the COVID pandemic ended on schedule. Umm, it didn't, thanks to conservatives and anti-maskers, who are now probably anti-vaxxers. Thanks, assholes, because your efforts kept theaters closed in L.A. and NYC, and I live in NYC. So even if I could have ventured out in September to the movies, there was nothing to see. But I've heard good things, about it, and for me, just to hear "Christopher Nolan" and "time travel" in the same sentence, that provokes a reaction from me akin to "Shut up and take my money, already."
All that considered, without paying a premium for Movies on Demand or to watch as a first release on iTunes, this is really just about the earliest I could possibly watch this movie, now that it's on HBO and HBO Max - it's another little bit of serendipity that I could work it in just after it became available to me at no extra charge, beyond what I'm already paying for premium cable. This is why I put films that are top-priority for me on my lists early, by the time I find a way to link to them, this way they MIGHT be available to me for no or relatively small extra cost.
Robert Pattinson carries over again from "The Lighthouse".
THE PLOT: Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
AFTER: Damn, but this is a freaking cool movie. I've seen "Looper" and "Inception" and every time-travel movie I could get my hands on and link too, but this works on a whole different level, this is some major-league freaky physics stuff here. And it all works, mostly. There's no time travel that works in the usual cinematic way, it's based on some theoretical physics, though, like the theory that a positron is just an electron that's moving backwards in time. I have no idea if that's true, scientifically, but if a particle were traveling backwards, how would we even know? Our clocks only run in one direction, and we have no way of measuring the reverse travel. Time dilation caused by near-light-speed travel, sure, we can measure that, but if something were truly MOVING BACKWARDS, how could we be certain?
OK, SPOILER ALERT, second one issued this week, because it seems only a few people in my radius have seen "Tenet", if you haven't seen it then please TURN AROUND and go back the way you came (which is something funny to say if you HAVE seen "Tenet".)
It's easy to send messages into the future, all you have to do is write something down, or send an e-mail or pay for something with a credit card, and the people in the future who know what to look for will get your message - this itself is somewhat reminiscent of the phone calls made by James Cole in "12 Monkeys". What's much harder is getting a message from the future back to the past (without using a DeLorean and delivering a sports almanac yourself) but in this film, it's accomplished by something called inversion. Some form of radiation is used to make objects travel back in time. Most spectacularly this is seen in the form of bullets, irradiated inverted bullets are able to travel back from their target into a gun, in a sense the gun "catches" the bullet, rather than shoots it. This is supposed to be an reversal of cause and effect, the bullet hole is the effect that somehow happened before the cause, the firing of the gun. And someone can still be shot by the reverse bullet, if they're standing between the bullet hole and the gun. Umm, OK, but this doesn't really explain how the bullet got into the hole in the wall in the first place, if it's running in reverse and the gun didn't put it there. It's still very cool, but it's JUST shy of making any kind of sense.
There is traveling back in time, but only after inversion - and there's no shortcut back to a specific point in time like in most time-travel movies, you have to live backwards for one week to travel one week back in time. This makes things more difficult, but in some ways it also makes things easy - like if you want to go to London, you just board a plane or a ship that just came from there, and you'll get there in reverse, and you know in advance the method of travel is safe, because the plane left safely from London, so to inverted you, it's going to arrive safely for sure.
To get inverted, you have to travel through this device called a turnstile - and the fact that the turnstiles even exist in the now hearkens back to that paradox about how if someone in the future invents a time machine, then travels back and gives the plans to someone in the past to build it, and then time travel is a thing, then who invented time travel? It's simple, really, the person in the future invented it, and then GAVE it to somebody in the past so that it could be used in the past, and then the past becomes a convenient place for somebody in the future to hide somebody or something, and then use the time machine to get back. Or, you know, just wait. It doesn't matter who invented it, once it exists, it does so across all time periods. Right?
What's great here is that if you go inside the turnstile, and switch directions to reverse, you'll see confirmation that the process worked, because you'll be able to see yourself coming out of it, which happens before you go in. Does your head hurt yet? This film's just getting started...the whole film moves forward until a certain point when the main characters get inverted, and then it moves in reverse for a while, and we'll see some of the same scenes AGAIN, but backwards and from a different perspective. That's kind of genius, if it's done properly (see my NITPICK POINTS below, though...)
The best metaphor here seems to be that "Life is a highway", where time travel is concerned. We're all traveling in a straight line, more or less, down the timestream, like cars on a highway. We may even be going at different speeds, in different lanes, but all in the same direction. If something were to be traveling down that highway in the OPPOSITE direction, that could be very bad, especially if the cars were to crash. (By the same token, it's VERY BAD to encounter yourself while you're traveling backwards in time, especially if you don't remember that encounter taking place before. Point of order.)
But here's the question - would a car traveling back in time LOOK like a car coming at you, head-on, down that highway? Or would it look like a car driving backwards, because that's what it's doing? To the person inside that inverted car, he'd be moving forwards, from his frame of reference, but to the majority of the people traveling forward, that inverted car might look like a car moving in reverse. Umm, I think? This is where my head starts to get all foggy. I couldn't get to sleep last night because I was trying to figure out the car moving in reverse. I don't THINK that car was chasing anything going backwards (a natural conclusion the first time you see it) but I think really the driver of the car was moving forwards through backwards time, or backwards through forward time, and the second time we see who's in the car, and things make more sense - or do they?
My brain gets in trouble whenever I think about a plane flying west, because the plane is constantly moving forward in time, but it's traveling into other time zones, so relative to the Earth, it feels like the plane is moving back in time, but I know that it's not. And if you could build a plane that could get from NYC to L.A. in under three hours, then it would leave NYC at noon EST, then it would arrive in L.A. at, say, 2:50 pm EST, which is 11:50 am PST, and therefore it arrives before it left. Doesn't it? That can't be right. Sure, you can tell me that noon EST is really 9 am PST, so it left NYC at 9 am PST and arrived at 11:50 am PST, but it's always going to feel to me like that plane is traveling back in time.
This film also reminds me of "Memento", from the same director - how the character is moving forward in each scene, but the audience keeps moving backwards in time, because the scenes are in reverse order.
This film also reminds me of "Back to the Future 2", from a different director - how if you go back to the past, you can't run into yourself, and then even if you do, the earlier you can't know about it, because the later you doesn't remember that happening.
And then it all culminates in a big battle where two teams attack the same secret base, where the villain is trying to destroy the world, the whole team goes through a turnstile and travels back to where they know the battle took place (only it hasn't happened for them yet) and half of them go back a little further so they can attack from the past in a forward direction, and the other half of the team doesn't go back as far, so they can attack from the future in a backwards direction. I swear, this all makes more sense if you just watch the movie. And it all looks very freaking cool because half of the gunfire and explosions are happening in reverse, no matter which team you follow. And somehow the team that attacks from the future learns enough about the battle to tell the team attacking from the past what to do, which I think somehow is very important.
Now, this isn't a perfect film for a couple of reasons, for one, the protagonist of the film is named Protagonist. That's very cheezy, why isn't the villain named "Mr. Villain" them? Or named "Dr. Evil", like in the "Austin Powers" films? That would be the equivalent, if you ask me. Also:
NITPICK POINT: The car explosion, it's set off by a character moving backwards in time, only we see it happening in forward, not reverse, and it affects another character who's traveling backwards, and he ALSO experiences it as a forward thing. But shouldn't the explosion be backwards, at least from his point of view? It should be an implosion, not an explosion, so why does this event break the rules, or is this just a movie mistake?
NITPICK POINT 2: How do you drive a car when time is inverted, anyway? I mean, it's a machine that operates only a certain way, you can't even start the car because that's an action that has a cause and an effect, you turn the key and the engine starts. Do you need to find a car that's already running? But even then, every single action in the working of that machine is cause and effect, you step on the gas, the car moves forward, you step on the brake and it stops. None of this would work properly during the inversion, unless the car itself were also somehow inverted - is that the case here? It's never stated.
NITPICK POINT 3: It's postulated that at some point in the future, the Earth runs out of resources, so the people of the future create this time inversion, perhaps so they can travel back to the past, back to a time when the Earth was in better shape, and thus they can escape doom. A couple things, though, how is that going to work for them, if they can only breathe inverted air, can they also only eat inverted food? Someone from the future's going to have to keep sending back air and food and water for them, unless they can also eat and drink the resources of the past. And if they can, then don't the inverted humans become part of the problem, using up all the resources when they exist, but before they were scheduled to run out? And my brain hurts again.
I feel like maybe I need to see this about a dozen more times before I fully understand it, if that's even possible. Maybe one more time will be enough, but very ironically, I don't have time for that right now, I'm on a tight enough schedule as it is. Maybe if I have some down-time in November again, I can schedule a re-watch, knowing then what I know now, I think I'll notice a lot more things. This is perhaps very similar to what happens in the film, people fight in a battle and learn how the fight goes down, then they invert and go back to the battle and they know what they have to do to win, only in backwards fashion. Umm, I think.
Now I'm telling all my friends to just go and see this movie, because it's the kind of movie my wife will NEVER watch and I need to start exploring some fan theories that explain everything. Oh, well, I guess there's always the web...
Also starring John David Washington (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine (last heard in "Dunkirk"), Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "All Is True"), Martin Donovan (also last seen in "Malcolm X"), Fiona Dourif, Yuri Kolokolnikov (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Himesh Patel (last seen in "The Aeronauts"), Clémence Poésy (last seen in "127 Hours"), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Denzil Smith (last seen in "The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Laurie Shepherd, Marcel Sabat, Jack Cutmore-Scott (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Julia-Maria Arnolds, Anthony Molinari (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Adam Cropper, Rich Ceraulo Ko, Jonathan Camp, Wes Chatham (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Andrew Howard (last seen in "CHIPS"), Mark Krenik (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name").
RATING: 9 out of 10 gold bars
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