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Tenet (2020 movie)
Orion watched this movie without me, and then having it on 48-hour rental from Amazon, immediately wanted to watch it again to figure out the plot, so this was sufficiently intriguing that I watched it with him - and yeah, okay, wow, that was definitely a movie that takes some unraveling afterwards.
It's kind of hard to even talk about without at least *some* spoilers, since the protagonist (whose name we never learn) doesn't know what's happening in the beginning either. It's an actiony, bombastic, very Bond-esque movie. I really liked it.
The nameless protagonist is a CIA operative who is recruited to a team dealing with the appearance of objects that appear to be traveling backwards in time - so guns "fix" things which clearly had a bullet hole in them a minute ago, objects leap to your hand rather than being dropped, etc. A series of heists ensue, as the main team tries to recover objects that are part of a time-traveling superweapon that is going to be used for an apocalyptic war at some point in the future (creating the backwards-traveling debris).
As you might guess for a movie involving time travel, parts of the movie happen out of order for the characters involved, all of which was really fun to unravel - it's a movie where there's quite a bit going on in the background that makes more sense on a rewatch (or if you just watched it with someone on their second watch who can explain things afterwards).
Also I have made the alarming discovery that Robert Pattinson has aged into hotness and looks unexpectedly fine as a slightly disheveled time commando.
Now with all the spoilers ...
I finished the movie and I'm pretty sure I just stared into space for a few minutes going "what." (The final battle in which everyone is wearing heavy gear and helmets and you can't tell who anyone is except by their armbands didn't help - I literally didn't know who the second guy with the protagonist in the basement fight was until they took their helmets off, and that, at least, is a situation where you're not supposed to be confused about whether that's a secret surprise appearance by a backward-traveling time clone; it's just a case of the movie being gratuitously confusing.)
The title and plot are both a palindrome; due to Plot Shenanigans, the flow of time for the protagonists reverses halfway through the movie, finally ending up in a climactic battle at the approximate point (timewise) where the movie started, and having to dodge encounters with their past selves throughout.
I will definitely say that this is not a movie that fails to commit to its premise. The backwards effects are really nicely done, including the main characters at various points being reversed with regards to the world, or to each other.
I also think the physics of having some objects/people/etc moving backwards was actually handled in a not-too-implausible way - the thing that was the hardest to get a mental handle on was objects being broken, shattered, etc *before* they're shot or struck, but it's explained in the movie that the dominant flow of time tends to reassert itself - so things which are shot or broken would heal slowly over a few days, and this is even used in the movie when one of the characters is fatally shot and then has their personal time reversed to heal them (slowly). The fight scenes and car chases between characters moving in different directions on the timeline must have been an absolute nightmare to choreograph, but came out looking really cool!
And the main partners are, in true time travel tradition, meeting out of order - it's their first meeting from the perspective of the character we're following, but the other already met him at a much earlier point in his personal timeline, and they've evidently spent their entire careers working together out of order. From their respective points of view, this is one character's first time working together, and the other's last. (Looking back on the whole movie as Neil basically knowing most of what's going to happen and hiding it was ... wild. Especially their first meeting, when Neil obviously - in retrospect - does know him and is trying to cover!)
I correctly guessed at least part of the time-travel twist in the vault fight early in the movie, when they're fighting masked commandos in battle gear: I had guessed the commandos were them, from the future, and I was half right, except it's just *one* of them from the future, in two different parts of the fight simultaneously due to having his personal timeline reversed again in the middle.
You do basically need a red-string-laced wall-of-crazy timeline to keep track of everything happening in this movie!
The internet seems to believe that the little boy, the son of the protagonist's love interest, is Neil as a kid, which I'm not sure if I think tracks - it certainly would put a hell of a spin on the whole movie if this is Neil's final mission to save his mom and kill his dad, as well as implying a lot of things about how much time he's spent living backwards, buuuuut I'm not sure if that's just a crazywall internet theory.
(Also, the actress looks like the human equivalent of a borzoi. She's lovely, but wow. I looked it up and she's 6'3"!! Plus she's wearing like 5-inch spike heels in some scenes. Watching the movie shoot across her *down* to the other actors is really something.)
It was definitely a lot of fun. I get the impression the movie sank without a trace due to having the absolutely terrible luck to come out when no one was watching movies, as well as being so terminally confusing that you need to watch it at least twice to figure out what happened, none of which would have done it any favors on its initial release. But I had a good time and I'm glad I was lured into watching. I'm tempted to vid this movie; the visuals are really cool, and I think it would be fun if I could find the right song.
It's kind of hard to even talk about without at least *some* spoilers, since the protagonist (whose name we never learn) doesn't know what's happening in the beginning either. It's an actiony, bombastic, very Bond-esque movie. I really liked it.
The nameless protagonist is a CIA operative who is recruited to a team dealing with the appearance of objects that appear to be traveling backwards in time - so guns "fix" things which clearly had a bullet hole in them a minute ago, objects leap to your hand rather than being dropped, etc. A series of heists ensue, as the main team tries to recover objects that are part of a time-traveling superweapon that is going to be used for an apocalyptic war at some point in the future (creating the backwards-traveling debris).
As you might guess for a movie involving time travel, parts of the movie happen out of order for the characters involved, all of which was really fun to unravel - it's a movie where there's quite a bit going on in the background that makes more sense on a rewatch (or if you just watched it with someone on their second watch who can explain things afterwards).
Also I have made the alarming discovery that Robert Pattinson has aged into hotness and looks unexpectedly fine as a slightly disheveled time commando.
Now with all the spoilers ...
I finished the movie and I'm pretty sure I just stared into space for a few minutes going "what." (The final battle in which everyone is wearing heavy gear and helmets and you can't tell who anyone is except by their armbands didn't help - I literally didn't know who the second guy with the protagonist in the basement fight was until they took their helmets off, and that, at least, is a situation where you're not supposed to be confused about whether that's a secret surprise appearance by a backward-traveling time clone; it's just a case of the movie being gratuitously confusing.)
The title and plot are both a palindrome; due to Plot Shenanigans, the flow of time for the protagonists reverses halfway through the movie, finally ending up in a climactic battle at the approximate point (timewise) where the movie started, and having to dodge encounters with their past selves throughout.
I will definitely say that this is not a movie that fails to commit to its premise. The backwards effects are really nicely done, including the main characters at various points being reversed with regards to the world, or to each other.
I also think the physics of having some objects/people/etc moving backwards was actually handled in a not-too-implausible way - the thing that was the hardest to get a mental handle on was objects being broken, shattered, etc *before* they're shot or struck, but it's explained in the movie that the dominant flow of time tends to reassert itself - so things which are shot or broken would heal slowly over a few days, and this is even used in the movie when one of the characters is fatally shot and then has their personal time reversed to heal them (slowly). The fight scenes and car chases between characters moving in different directions on the timeline must have been an absolute nightmare to choreograph, but came out looking really cool!
And the main partners are, in true time travel tradition, meeting out of order - it's their first meeting from the perspective of the character we're following, but the other already met him at a much earlier point in his personal timeline, and they've evidently spent their entire careers working together out of order. From their respective points of view, this is one character's first time working together, and the other's last. (Looking back on the whole movie as Neil basically knowing most of what's going to happen and hiding it was ... wild. Especially their first meeting, when Neil obviously - in retrospect - does know him and is trying to cover!)
I correctly guessed at least part of the time-travel twist in the vault fight early in the movie, when they're fighting masked commandos in battle gear: I had guessed the commandos were them, from the future, and I was half right, except it's just *one* of them from the future, in two different parts of the fight simultaneously due to having his personal timeline reversed again in the middle.
You do basically need a red-string-laced wall-of-crazy timeline to keep track of everything happening in this movie!
The internet seems to believe that the little boy, the son of the protagonist's love interest, is Neil as a kid, which I'm not sure if I think tracks - it certainly would put a hell of a spin on the whole movie if this is Neil's final mission to save his mom and kill his dad, as well as implying a lot of things about how much time he's spent living backwards, buuuuut I'm not sure if that's just a crazywall internet theory.
(Also, the actress looks like the human equivalent of a borzoi. She's lovely, but wow. I looked it up and she's 6'3"!! Plus she's wearing like 5-inch spike heels in some scenes. Watching the movie shoot across her *down* to the other actors is really something.)
It was definitely a lot of fun. I get the impression the movie sank without a trace due to having the absolutely terrible luck to come out when no one was watching movies, as well as being so terminally confusing that you need to watch it at least twice to figure out what happened, none of which would have done it any favors on its initial release. But I had a good time and I'm glad I was lured into watching. I'm tempted to vid this movie; the visuals are really cool, and I think it would be fun if I could find the right song.