#the scene done in reverse would unfold in the exact same way maybe with just a little more resistance from dean

[enochianspells]

okay so i really want dean to wash cas’ hair and i think the first time it happens is when they’re in dean’s motel room at the end of 9x06. for some reason they seem to need each other’s company even more than usual so they end up brushing their teeth one next to the other in the bathroom and when cas is done he notices some dried blood in his hair and says he really should wash it but he’s too tired. which is a weird word on cas’ mouth, cas who is human for the first time and is now burdened with the obligation of washing his hair too, like the guy hasn’t been through enough. it makes dean want to cry a litte. instead, he offers cas to wash his hair for him. all he needs to do is sit at the edge of the tub and lean his head back. dean used to do it all the time when sam was little and the water was too cold for a full shower. cas, on the other hand, has never experienced care in such a pure, unaltered form and the moment dean starts massaging his scalp he full-on breaks down crying

[charliejrogers]

TENET (2020) - Review & Analysis

It’s hard to write about this movie without spoilers… so… fair warning… spoilers ahead. Though they don’t start til like halfway through the review.

One of my friends recently asked, “So how was TENET.” My answer: “When I read about the plot after I watched it, my mind was blown.” Therein lies the problem. This is a classic, “It’s better the second time” kind of movie, something Christopher Nolan isn’t a stranger to (I lovingly saw Inception twice in theaters and The Dark Knight a whopping three times in theaters… and both countless times since). The difference is, both of those movies were great the first time around too. They just got even better with subsequent viewings.

My personal problem too is that with rare exception (and especially as I’ve gotten older), I don’t like watching movies more than once. While there’s too much out there that I know I’ll never see, I still want to do my best and see as much as I can. Therefore, I don’t put too much credence into “It’s better the second time.” If it’s not good the first time around, I don’t care if might be better the second time.

TENET continues Christopher Nolan’s fascination with toying with time. It’s a theme and gimmick that’s been a staple since his ground-breaking major debut with 2001’s Memento, but featured heavily in both 2014’s black-hole-time-warping space opera Interstellar and 2017’s timeline jumping war epic Dunkirk. In some ways, this is Nolan’s most straightforward manipulation of time, it’s just time travel. Here, the central conceit of TENET is that scientists at some point in the distant future have figured out a way to get objects (and people) to travel backwards in time, and to do so in real time. In other words, whereas in Back to the Future, Marty and Doc flash back from 1985 to 1955 in a millisecond, in the world of TENET that time-travelling would occur only after Marty and Doc wandered about Earth for the equivalent of 30 years’ time. And, importantly, during those thirty years, Marty and Doc would exist in the same plane and realm as all other “forward-time” people. They can even interact with the world like anyone else… just the interaction would be… interesting to say the least. The backwards-time person would appear to be moving in reverse from the perspective of the forwards-time person, and vice versa.

This idea leads to the most interesting part of the movie: the visuals and effects. Characters in the movie hold guns that don’t shoot out bullets so much as just absorb bullets from environments which travel with the same momentum as if they had been shot out of a gun. Bombs that blow up a building in the world of the forwards-in-time people, are experienced as fallen buildings that spontaneously reassemble from the perspective of the backwards-in-time people. The result is a movie in which the director clearly relished the opportunity to create little clever puzzle boxes of scenes. I’m sure there are countless of YouTube videos that will happily show you why this movie is a masterpiece, and I agree from a design and plotting perspective, it was satisfying to watch many of the same sequences (a car chase, a vault heist) from two perspectives (one forward-in-time and one backward-in-time) and to notice all the little details about how actions in one timeline ultimately affected the other.

That said, my head legitimately hurt as I watched this movie. As Clémence Poésy puts it in perhaps the movie’s most famous line, “Don’t try to understand it; just feel it.” I wish I could. The temptation to try to wrap your mind around what is happening on screen is too large.

Perhaps what most threw me off (and both impressed and annoyed me) is how it deals with the central paradox of time travel. Namely, what happens when you change the past… and can you even do that? To put it briefly, it tackles this subject head-on without trying to cut corners or introduce alternate universes.  Other films, like Avengers: Endgame address this issue by just explaining that each time characters go back in time and mess with the past, they are creating an alternate and parallel universe. This makes sense to me… as much as time travel can make sense that is. But the parallel universe solution means that truly whatever happened happened. The Avengers can go back in time and stop Thanos, but there will always exist a timeline where he wins.

This movie doesn’t subscribe to the parallel universe theory. It outright rejects my linear understanding of time and seems to subscribe to the same circular notion of time that was (not introduced but) made popular by the 2016 film Arrival. In this view of time travel, someone can go back in time and influence the exact same reality the live in. AND furthermore, the fact that one has traveled back in time makes it so that it has always been like this. In other words, traveling back in time erases any previous universe where one hadn’t traveled back in time. I think of it this way. Imagine someone poisons my Mom’s box of Cheerios. She dies. I manage to go back in time and throw away her poisoned Cheerios before she could eat them. In the Avengers view of things, my mom would still be dead in the original timeline, but I created a new parallel universe where she’s now alive, having never been able to encounter the poisoned Cheerios. In the TENET view of the world, by travelling back in time to throw away the Cheerios, I effectively undo the fact that my Mom was ever in danger. Though I as a time-traveller may remember my harrowing Cheerios journey, she has no memory of the experience since I went back and prevented that reality from ever happening. What this does mean though is that as soon as I time-travel far back enough to get rid of the Cheerios, there are now two of me in the world. There is one who time-travelled and one who is unaware that his Mom was ever in danger. Time-traveller-me now cannot simply return to his home and normal life… as the other-me is living his life unaware that time travel was ever necessary (creating a Prestige-like scenario where maybe the time-traveller is better off just offing themselves, and honestly I wouldn’t have minded Nolan retreading themes from that superb movie).

It’s that last part about the time traveller being unable to return to his old life that marks the biggest difference from time travel in the vein of Back to the Future. In the Back to the Future model, after throwing away my Mom’s poisoned Cheerios, I can zap back to the moment in time I initially decided to time travel, and insert myself back in the correct time (technically there could still be two of me... but we’ll ignore that for now). However, in the TENET model, you cannot “zap” back to the future. The only to go back to the point when you first went backwards is just to live that amount of time. That’s why two of the same person will have to essentially co-exist. And since the movie stipulates that two of the same person cannot come into contact, the time-traveller is likely to live a life of exile.

It’s the sort of head-scratcher that makes sense on paper (and hopefully I clarified something for someone), but when watching this stuff play out on screen it made for a very unsatisfying movie. WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! We as the viewer are used to seeing things as they unfold in real time. What this movie doesn’t allow us to see are the countless times various characters fail to do something and going back to undo their mistakes. Instead, we are experiencing the new reality created by past timetravellers, unaware (til the end of the movie) that they were previously realities that were erased (or prevented from coming into existence). We learn at the end of the movie that our Protagonist (John David Washington who’s cleverly named just The Protagonist… ugh) is actually the founder of the elite, global para-military force called TENET which is designed to thwart efforts by the future to erase the past. Setting aside how illogical the future’s plan is (something which the movie acknowledges… which doesn’t necessarily help matters), the reveal that The Protagonist is the original founder of TENET means that there’s a whole lot more to the plot we don’t see in the movie. The original Protagonist clearly had a long life with life events that were very different from what we see in this movie. Namely and most importantly, he at one time lived in a world without TENET. Presumably, the initial Protagonist discovers the future’s scheme and fails to stop it. In order to undo his failure he goes back in time to form TENET. In doing so, he completely erases the TENET-less reality he had actually experienced. And interestingly, the Protagonist involves his younger self in his plan for the eventual of TENET. So as I said, the Protagonist we follow in this movie is NOT the original Protagonist, but instead one who lives a reality that was manufactured by an older version himself.

What I think is crucial, (and maybe I’m dead wrong here, who knows?) but at the end of the movie when it is revealed that the Protagonistis the founder of TENET, it is implied that our Protagonist (the one we follow in the movie) will go on to do the same acts as his prior self (namely, as an old man, he will travel back in time and found TENET again). But I don’t think this is true, and it’s here I think the movie approaches time travel in a unique way. A figure has already founded TENET, so there’s no need to do that again. What’s happened, happened. In essence, the Protagonist we see at the end of the movie is free to do whatever he wants. What’s happened has already happened and the TENET-founding Protagonist has already done his thing.

What I like about that is that it avoids the weird, paradox circular shit that infects time travel fiction. Take the third Harry Potter, for example. Harry is about to get destroyed by Dementors until a Patronus spell is fired. As we discover later in the movie, it was actually Harry who cast that spell. But how is that possible? If a future Harry is the only way to save Harry… then how does he get saved the first time? Maybe there’s an alternate reality we don’t see where Ron saves Harry last second and Ron dies so Harry goes back in time to prevent that reality from happening and we just never see that. Regardless, it’s a large plot hole that is unexplainable. What I give credit to Nolan and co. for is crafting an incredibly complex time travel tale that avoids any obvious plot holes and time paradoxes. We are left with a fairly intelligent piece of science fiction. Also it doesn’t chalk it all up to, “aliens think and speak in circles so time is circular”… you know that bullshit that Arrival pulled.

That’s more than I intended to write about the plot. The point is, as I said at the beginning, reading about and discussing the plot is superbly interesting and hats off to Nolan and crew for putting it together.

Watching the plot is a different story. Nolan is needlessly confusing in this picture. The fact that reading about the story offers a great deal of clarity should be a red flag. Not that every movie needs to or should be clearly understandable immediately… but it shouldn’t be so confusing that your head hurts.

I think the most disappointing thing is that I would be willing to set aside the confusing story for the pleasure of some well-choreographed, mind-bending action sequences. While the previously mentioned car chase is one such sequence, the grand finale invasion/battle was (for me) incredibly hard to follow. Shot to show two simultaneous operations, one team moving forward, one moving backward, I had no fucking clue what was happening.

And then once we start to actually think about the characters and humans who make up this story… it’s clear more work went into designing the action/set pieces than in developing the characters. I hated… HATED John David Washington’s performance as the Protagonist. He was written to sound like a quick-quipped, witty, charming Bond-like hero, and this just isn’t the movie for that. Though a former CIA agent, he’s not in a spy-thriller. And when the dialogue isn’t a showcase to show off how witty our hero is, it is just an excuse to explain boatloads and boatloads of exposition. I’ve become a real stickler as of late for how films do this. Classically, films use a newbie character as a stand-in for the audience as an excuse for other characters to explain the particulars of the world to them. It’s a little trite, but it’s perfectly functional. What isn’t functional is what this movie does. Half of the dialogue is the The Protagonist meeting someone and them asking him a question like, “What do you know about this Russian base?” and the Protagonist responding, “That Russian base? Well it’s… blah blah blah” and proceeds to talk for a minute answering the person’s question exactly. They reply, “Correct.” And the movie proceeds. It just doesn’t do much to make me care about any characters.

And then, yes, we have to talk about it, the way Nolan’s film deals with its lone female character, Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). She’s the wife of the film’s villain, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Brannagh, doing his best impression of a Eastern European maniac since the last time he did this for 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit… which admittedly he does a good job of). The men in this film just don’t give a shit about this woman. But that would be OK if the movie was honest about this, or in particular made the Protagonist feel guilty about how he uses Kat, discards her, and gets her unnecessarily involved in her husband’s affairs. If you can’t tell, I hated the Protagonist, which is never a good sign when watching a movie. I didn’t much like Washington in BlacKkKlansmen either, so maybe he’s just not my guy. In both movies, he seems to have a confident swagger about him that doesn’t match the characters he plays.

Robert Pattinson is in this movie too. He’s good. I don’t know. Nothing special here from him. He doesn’t detract from anything, but he’s not a great addition. Same goes for the performance from Debicki. Branagh as the villain is good. He’s a good actor even if his beard/facial hair just looked off the whole time. Maybe a larger make-up budget would have helped? At least he was an interesting character, even if deeply flawed and the movie goes a bit too far to make him sympathetic.

So it’s not the complete mess that some people say it is online, and while I understand and appreciate and really like the complexity of the plot and time travel mechanics on paper… they are certainly not a joy to watch. If you do watching, then be prepared to do boatloads of mental gymnastics or just resign one’s self to not understanding what’s happening. While I’m happy to hand-waive some shady plot points or time paradoxes from a movie, when the whole movie is a time paradox, that becomes hard to do. Alas, this is still the best Nolan film for me since Inception, but still a far cry from the highs of his 2000s run of The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception. If some of the character moments were better developed, this would have been a better film. Instead, really, don’t try to understand and just be awash in this time-loopy, messy, but clever film.

**/ (Two and a half out of four stars)