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Watched Tenet again. It’s a much better example of dream logic than Inception. Bad sound included. Feels like Nolan jacked into his brain & recorded a dream he had about his possible next film. Lots of stuff I’ve never seen before. Especially that unexploding/exploding building.
Put it another way: I don’t think it’s fair to judge a movie like Tenet in terms of rationality/logic any more than you can judge a film like, say, Apocalypse Now, or the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Or Dark City.
I am also ready to challenge any assertion that John David Washington is deracinated in the movie. On the contrary, I think he and the film are nearly as aware of the whiteness of the rest of the film (and James Bond generally) as Cleavon Little & Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles.
His smart ass reactions to the exposition, especially the bad guy threatening him with, basically, lynching, feel like the reactions of a person who is aware that they are the protagonist in their own dream, trying to stay in character but also feeling outside of it all.
Of course I watched the movie streaming and at the very end, something weirdly appropriate happened: I tried to scrub backwards to watch that exploding /unexploding building again, and somehow I created a window within the larger window. 1/2
Which means I finished Tenet watching it simultaneously backwards and forwards. The movie was rewinding through the first half as I was watching the second half in a little window. How can you not laugh with delight. 2/2
Anyway, I was slightly underwhelmed on first viewing but I think maybe it was because I wasn’t open to the possibility that Nolan was actually trusting his unconscious and flying intuitively a lot of the time even as he was retroactively figuring out the “system“ and the “rules.“
I guess that’s another way of saying this is the first Nolan film I’ve watched where I feels like it is more the work of a poet than a mathematician. Of course poets are conscious of math (if they are good at meter!) but a lot of it is just about doing what feels correct.
Here’s another comparison I never thought I’d make: my feelings about Nolan are similar to my feelings about Paul Thomas Anderson, which is to say, it was immediately apparent they both were virtuosos but I feel like they didn’t learn to let go & *feel* their ways until later.
