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"Tenet" - 2020.. Nolan's new mindbender

Well, that's tossing in the towel. I had expected them to withhold a home media release for a while now in the hopes they could score some money off this when Corona's done and people start going to the theatres again.

Then again, why postpone the chance to make some guaranteed money? People will buy this movie on DVD and Blu-ray regardless of when its released. But there's no guarantees on when the world will correct itself from this shit, so why wait that out?
 
Well, that's tossing in the towel. I had expected them to withhold a home media release for a while now in the hopes they could score some money off this when Corona's done and people start going to the theatres again.

Would there even be space for it in the 2021/22 cinema schedule? We’ll probably have less theaters and a lot of big films coming in that window.
 
The 6 minute prologue is up on youtube to promote the blu-ray release

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The dialogue sounds so cold. I have to rewind it a couple of times to fully grasp what they're saying and I'm a native English speaker too.

It's like the dialogue is trying be a snob to those that can't keep up.


-You’ve been made. This siege is a blind so they can vanish you.

-But I established contact.

Later

Swap clothes! Ukrainians are expecting a passenger. I’ve never seen a encapsulation like this.




Maybe there should have been a more familiar verb to use? I understand though these are high level secret agents. It's not uncommon for people in specialized professions to talk a bit jargon-y and use shorthand in movies. It adds a level of authenticity, or at least a feeling of authenticity.

But here it comes out so jagged that it almost sounds like jibberish.


I'm also reading that alot of people complained about the sound mixing

https://twitter.com/GeekVibesNation/status/1337471574878859265
 
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I think that was kind of the point though, I don't think it was really supposed to make sense until you get more context later in the movie.
 
You are meant to feel destabilized and confused, to varying degrees, throughout the film. It is not unlike Polanski's Frantic with Harrison Ford in 1988. The way the story unfolds in Frantic creates a sensation not unlike that which Ford's character is experiencing--that's intentional. In each case (and there are others--neither Polanski nor Nolan have invented anything on this front), the idea is to use the tools of filmmaking to elicit from the audience the feelings of the main character by presenting incomplete information and having it be unsettling. I'm the only person I know IRL who has seen Tenet, so I've not discussed it with anyone, but I saw Frantic with a bunch of friends at university (including a couple of film studies majors) and we had a long chat at a local pub after the film. Opinion was split. About 30 percent of us (including me) liked the way the film created its tension and the unsettling feeling of not knowing what was going on (until the end)--the others were not enamoured with the experience. They preferred watching films where characters might not know what was going on, but they did not want to be equally out of the loop, so to speak. I suspect reactions to Tenet are similar.
 
As I noted back when I saw the movie in the summer, it feels very much like getting dumped in the middle of a sequel to a movie you never saw. Which was likely intentional, to mirror the feeling the lead character must be experiencing getting tossed right into the middle of this time travel adventure having previously not been aware time travel was a thing. But I found it made for a rather off-putting viewing experience. YMMV, I guess.
 
I never got the chance to see it in theaters, but I got the disc and I'm watching at home. I feel like there was a lot of overreaction to the audio mix (or maybe it was different in theaters). I'm a little over halfway through the movie, and so far the only time I found the dialog incomprehensible was in one scene in which the dialog is not supposed to matter to the viewer anyway (when the freeport rep is doing the long sales pitch with Robert Pattinson, but Pattinson is observing everything else instead).

Kor
 
I saw it at an IMAX 15/70 (aka a real, proper IMAX). Whenever dialogue was hard to decipher, it was intentional. The viewer is meant to experience the same degree of difficulty and incomplete comprehension as the main character. Nolan didn’t invent this technique but does use it to good effect. There is no inherent obligation for all dialogue onscreen to be intelligible in any movie or show. If the filmmakers don’t want the viewers to be fully informed at all times in the unfolding story, that’s entirely legit.
 
I did see it in theatres, and the dialogue was very hard to follow there.
I'm not normally one for complaining about audio, but even I had to put the subtitles on for a good chunk of the movie. Even scenes with two people just talking were sometimes hard to decipher.
 
I guess our theater must have had a really don't remember having any trouble understanding the dialogue.
 
I had to put subtitles on. It's Nolan's style though. He says mood is more important than dialogue details.
 
I watched this in 4K last night, and enjoyed it. It'll definitely require a rewatch with subtitles so I can understand what the hell some of the people were saying. It literally sounded like they cranked the music and bass way up and everybody was mumbling :lol:
 
Now that Tenet is available on streaming, I watched it this weekend and then watched the first hour and a half just to see if it made sense knowing the ending. As expected with a Nolan film, it was a real spectacle. The ending reveal, though reminiscent of a Doctor Who story arc, seemed to set up the possibility of a sequel. I wonder if Nolan had originally planned this to be the first of a series of films?
 
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