The Re-Invention of TENET (feat. FilmSpeak)

I was on my Pelon doing a i interval of some [ __ ] G I'm dying and the instructor said this song is from the soundtrack of a movie called tenant did anybody see this besides me started talking about one of my films and said what the f was going on in that movie cuz that's a couple hours of my life I'll never get back again and that's 2 and a half hours of my life that I want back I'm seriously you need to be a neurosci scientist to understand when Rex re takes a [ __ ] on your film he doesn't a

sk you to work out by pretty much any metric tenet is Christopher Nolan's least successful movie across his filmography it's the lowest ranked on Rotten Tomatoes by both the critical consensus and the audience score it's also the lowest ranked of his movies on letter box it's his only movie that has made less than double its budget back at the box office and besides the Dark Knight Rises it has the lowest number of Oscar nominations of any of his movies since the prestige and if you ask most cas

ual movie goers then if they have seen it at all then their main takeaway from that experience was probably that the music was too loud and that they didn't understand the plot what the was going on in that movie but like a lot of movies that were misunderstood and underappreciated when they first came out tenet has been undergoing something of a Renaissance slowly but surely people are starting to appreciate that tenet is a movie unlike any other why well take your pick there's the insane actio

n sequences all all of which we get to experience twice because of the movie's palindrome likee structure there's that insane score that will be resonating in your brain for weeks after you see the movie there's hoit van Hut's stunning cinematography that fully captures the beautiful locations of this globe trotting Adventure on 70mm IMAX film there Kenneth braner scene chewing villain sator John David Washington's underappreciated protagonist Elizabeth dei's Steely determination and Robert Patt

erson showing off 60s era Bond levels of charm and Charisma and of course there's Christopher Nolan's precise Direction orchestrating it all into a cinematic experience that only gets better and better every time you watch it and some people look at all of that and go yeah but the music was too loud and the main character was kind of boring Jesus Christ so in this video I want to look at why tenant is having a Renaissance and why more and more people are learning not to understand it but to feel

it and to help me do that I've roped in some help from one of the biggest tenet heads on the internet friend of the channel Griffin Schiller from filmspeak and if you don't know what a tenet head is this is a Tade getting to see that in a theater again on film with a packed House of people who like were enthusiastic for that movie was incredible and so I'm watching this thing and like everyone's stoked everyone's amped up at the very at like the prologue with protagonist running around and tryi

ng to figure out all that stuff but then like every time priia mentions Oppenheimer people were cheering uh when IES as like uh temporal pincer movement everyone was like woo and it was like it there were just like these it felt like I was watching a screening of the room but first let's hear from the man himself Christopher Nolan do you understand everything in tenant you're not meant to understand everything in tenant it's not all comprehensible I think that where people encounter frustrations

with with my narratives in the past sometimes I think they're slightly missing the point it's not a puzzle to be unpacked uh it's an experience to be had tenet is not a puzzle but an exper expence and that is so important to the movie that the movie itself actually tells us this don't try to understand it but that feels like a bit of a copout right like we can just handwave away plot holes or poor characterization because oh we're not meant to understand it well yes and no what's the answer the

re's no answer it's Paradox a fundamental part of film criticism and media literacy in general is when you consume a piece of media look at the choices the artists made and ask why they made that choice a lot of the things people criticize tenant four like the incomprehensible dialogue the flat character that's all they've told you the complex plot like five and wheel notion of a positron an electron moving backwards in time these are all intentional choices now of course that doesn't excuse the

m from criticism but criticizing them on face value like that is a bit pointless when you're dealing with a filmmaker of Nolan's pedigree because what you should be asking is why that decision was made in that regard that's why it's like the perfect movie for me because I go into every movie with that kind of approach I want to meet the filmmaker where they're at understand what they're trying to accomplish with any artist whether you're looking at a painting in a museum or something like that y

ou always want to go in there and kind of like try and wrap your head around what are you getting at what am I getting out of this from like what you're putting in like take the protagonist he is often criticized for being a bland character with no backstory or motivations fither I totally disagree on the first part John David Washington brings a level of physicality to his performance matched only by the likes of Tom Cruz and when the scene calls for it he absolutely draws you into what he is f

eeling or thinking also he's full of SMY one liners that he delivers with the perfect level of irony I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago and I guarantee you no one didn't script that that feels like a John David Washington ISM that he just kind of like threw in there because it felt true to the character kind of like when Sean connory would throw in like onliners or Roger Mor would throwing one liners with his stuff that felt like his kind of like spin on that but as for that broader point of his

lack of characterization well that's kind of the entire point of the character I think there's something for me there's something really compelling about jumping into uh a story and being told essentially to concentrate on the Here and Now ironically it's a film that deals with time but it's really important as you watch the film that you're just kind of looking over this guy's shoulder and going with him it's a very present tense uh presence in the film and and so deliberately not naming him n

ot uh including any of the information about how you know he might have arrived there uh I think hopefully draws attention to that that idea and keeps people really focused on the here and now Nolan wanted us to come into the story in the present the protagonist's background or the specifics of who he is are not important to the story what's important is how he acts and how he solves the problems that are in front of him I started off in in the Noir genre as we talked about earlier and that's a

genre in which you define character through action people can talk about who they are and what motivates them but you don't trust them you wait and see what do they actually do what do they do to each other and that's essential to the way that genre works I think that's the most strong form of characterization to do the inevitable James Bond comparison until Daniel Craig came along the Bond movies did not touch on his backstory at all connory just appeared in the role as a fully formed suited an

d booted 007 and we just followed him on his adventures Nolan has been very open about the extent to which the Bond movies have inspired him but he's also spoken about how the mysterious protagonist has always been a staple of the spy and Noir genres I really wanted to tap into that kind of great tradition of the anonymous protagonist um I mean for me it dates back to to uh you know the TV show The Prisoner for example um where he's known by a number or the number he resists number six you know

was known as The Prisoner so he made an intentional choice to have these aspects of the protagonist's character be left to the imagination and I think the movie is stronger for it criticizing the protagonist for not having a fleshed out backstory or motivation is like saying Clint Eastwood's character in The Good the Bad and the Ugly doesn't have a fleshed out backstory or motivation like yeah that's correct but it's also the entire point of the character who is literally called the man with no

name in both cases The Mystery of the character is Not an Accident it was a very deliberate choice uh I was thinking a lot of Sergio Leon Western like with Clinton Eastwood as you know the man with no name but look I didn't want to make one of those tenet as good actually video essays because there are already several out there that do a better job than I could so I've links to my favorite ones in the description if that's the sort of thing that you want now my aim with this video was to look at

the circumstances of tenet's original release and to explore why it is having a Renaissance As more and more people slowly ReDiscover it so let's invert time and ride in an airtight shipping container all the way back to 2020 because I think the context of tenants release is a major reason why it has the reputation it does what's happen's happened as you might remember there was a global pandemic in 2020 and governments around the world imposed various levels of lockdown to stop it killing ever

yone and the film industry wasn't isolated from that you know most people were just staying at home inside days blending together movies weren't getting released instead they were going straight to like VOD and they were all like reject weird seist movies like you know it like nothing good or substantial was really coming out because entire theatrical slates were like shifted back a year but tenet only got pushed out by a month from July to August and I think that ultimately was what had the big

gest impact on tenet's initial reception everyone knows that Nolan is a passionate advocate for the Cinematic experience and he fought tooth and nail with Warner Brothers to give tenet the full theatrical release it deserved Warner Brothers on the other hand were hesitant about whether or not audiences would show up at all given the state of the pandemic at the time people weren't really concerned like a priority was not going to the movies for them it was it was like other stuff it was like mak

ing sure that they didn't get sick that other families didn't get sick I mean Nolan must have known that releasing tenet into a world very much still trying to understand the pandemic would lead to a poor box office result but from Nolan's point of view he wanted tinet to be what top gun Maverick ended up being the movie that got everyone going back to the cinema I know people were kind of like they they kind of soured on him a little bit for what he was trying to do thinking like he was arrogan

t and irresponsible and and and all of this stuff but I I think the reality was that he saw an industry that he loves dearly which is the theatrical Marketplace movie theaters suffering and he wanted to do whatever was in his power to try and help them out what you can distribute is a film you can give people a a reason to go back to the movies which is what he I mean he happened to have a movie coming out that year and so for better or worse that was kind of what he he put tenet on um and so I

remember a lot of people kind of like challenging him on that and being like oh this is like you know we have a pandemic going on and stuff like what what are you thinking about like what why are you why are you doing this the reality was that theaters were operating they they had protocols in place prior to the release of tenant uh but they weren't doing well people didn't necessarily want to go back to the theater to see Raiders the Lost arc when they could just watch it at home in the middle

of a pandemic so they needed a reason to go back to the theater um which is where Nolan kind of comes in with that but Nolan played his hand too early I totally agree with him that tenet should not have been a streaming first release but I do think that Warner Brothers were right to try and delay the release until people were ready to go back to the theaters after all this is what happened with other successful post-pandemic blockbusters like no time to die and well top gun Maverick also I have

absolutely no proof of this whatsoever but my crazy conspiracy theory is that Nolan is such an obsessive that he wanted tenant to come out in 2020 so that it would keep the symmetry of the date to match the title paland Drome when people wrote about it ridiculous absolutely true definitely not the sort of detail a perfectionist like Nolan would care about 100% anyway regardless of the reasons or intentions tenant's release was a misfire by Nolan standards while it is a testament to his pulling p

ower that it still made over $300 million in the midst of a pandemic it was still the first Nolan movie to not turn what the studio would consider to be a healthy profit on its $200 million budget in its domestic run in the US it only made $58 million and for context that's less than morbius it's a kind of movie that relies on repeat viewings and so during a pandemic you're not necessarily going to go back and keep seeing this movie I know Nolan probably you know foolishly so thought oh this is

great it's a movie that relies on repeat viewings we're going to get people coming back for more and coming back for more after they've already kind of experien this and then on top of just like him wanting to help something that was personal to him um but I I just think people were at a different place and it was like if they didn't really get it the first time around like are you going to risk going back to a theater again I was lucky enough to see tenet for the first time in a mostly empty th

eater but the box office numbers Pro that most people didn't that means they ended up watching it for the first time on some form of Home media months or even years later which is exactly what Nolan had tried to avoid and by the time they got around to seeing it a consensus had already formed based on its lukewarm critical reception and The Wider conversation around the movie focusing quite a lot on things like it sound mixing all the complexities of the plot the critical reception to that film

definitely feels linked to everything else that was kind of going on uh in the world at that time like people were like like I remember reading reviews that were like pretty critical of him releasing the film and I'm like wondering um oh how much did that affect your overall enjoyment of the movie your overall takeaway so a lot of people went into the movie with all of this context shaping their opinion consciously or not what the was going on in that movie do you understand and to be totally ho

nest I kind of felt a similar way when I first watched tenet and I did see it in a theater I had thoroughly enjoyed it but I was also confused by the story and annoyed at the sound mixing and the inaudibility of lots of the dialogue I was kind of disappointed that Nolan had delivered such an impressive High concept movie but that it seemed to have dropped the ball on some of the fundamentals but then something happened I couldn't get the score out of my head and as I went about my days I just ke

pt hearing it so I pulled it up on Spotify and played it and as it played I could see the images of the movie in my mind the Opera Siege the Free Port the car chase the final battle this shot this movie had Inception its way into my brain and I could not stop thinking about it and I wasn't thinking about the muffled dialogue I was thinking about how it felt to watch this so I went to see it again and then it clicked tennis is [ __ ] [Music] awesome well I've seen too much tennis is awesome speci

fically because it is not a movie that is trying to be understood it is trying to deliver an experience and once you put aside your preconceptions about how a movie like this should tell its story and build its world you can just fully immerse yourself into that experience and just let yourself be swept up in it to explore this a bit more let's listen to how Nolan talks about his first time watching another movie that is just as complex and ambiguous as tenet is I did have the very special exper

ience of going to see 2001 uh on a film print remember just feeling the enormity the image and the potential for that screen to kind of you know just take you anywhere I saw it when I was 7 years old and I I think I understood it certainly as well then as I do now maybe better I think maybe better because you just you take it for granted you experience it and the the Beauty and the magnitude of the images and and the feeling of you know traveling across the solar system or whatever I mean that t

hat the point of the film it's a sort of wood for the trees thing I think as a kid you're actually pretty open to those visceral experiences uh and I think a lot of your appreciation of movies and the entertainment value of movies is very uh simple now putting aside the fact that a 7-year-old Christopher Nolan watched 2001 and enjoyed it I love that comparison about watching movies when you were a kid and how you didn't really care too much about the story or plot holes or whatever it is the int

ernet tells you to care about it was just about the experience and the magic and instead of getting hung up on the details you can just see the whole thing and take it in it's kind of like how you can't always hear or understand all the lyrics in your favorite song but that doesn't stop it from meaning something to you the important thing isn't can you read music it's can you hear it let's come back to that interview with Steven colar you're not meant to understand everything in tenner it's not

all comprehensible it's this sort of it's a bit like asking if I know what happens to the spinning top at the end of inception uh or the particular you know what happens to the spinning top at the end of inception I have to have my idea of it for it to be a valid productive ambiguity but the point of it is an ambiguity something I love about inception is how perfectly crafted it is and how the story while complex is fully explained within the movie except for that final ambiguity you don't get i

t all when you first watch it but if you see it a few times then you realize that you are given all the clues you need to understand it the same goes for momento Interstellar and the prestige are you watching closely tenant does not give you all the clues and that is intentional and it's intentional in the way that the ending of inception is intentionally ambiguous about whether or not carb is still dreaming there are hints of course but it's not explicit and that is the point because otherwise

the ending wouldn't have the same impact and as Nolan says focusing on those details is not really the point of the ending as emmer always likes to say you know the point is that the character doesn't care whether it falls or not tenant is a featurelength version of the Inception Cliffhanger the point of it is that it's an ambiguity there is no right or wrong answer and the film tells us this what's the answer there's no answer it's Paradox but that takes time for people to appreciate and for mo

st of us it requires seeing the movie more than once to understand it and that is why we are now witnessing I talked earlier about some of the video essays explaining tenet and I do think that videos like these have really helped audiences connect with the movie over time they invited people to give it another shot and to reconsider their possibly negative First Impressions by giving them A New Perspective with which to watch and appreciate what the movie is trying to do another reason for the t

enance was its IMAX re-released ahead of Dune part two for a lot of audiences this would have been the first time they have had the chance to experience it as it was meant to be seen I was lucky enough to see it on the biggest screen in the UK a few weeks ago and what can I say it absolutely rocked and it was also pretty much completely sold out and even though the IMX re-release is the sort of thing that appeals to film Geeks like me it just highlights how consistently popular Christopher Nolan

is as a filmmaker and the fact that tenet's original performance in 2020 had so much more to do with the wider circumstances of its release than it did with the quality of the film itself I genuinely believe had the pandemic not happened that tennet would also be up there with like really high performers I still think it would be like divisive but I I just by nature of of like how complicated it is or whatever but I think people would be willing to give it a bit more but I think the reason you'

ve probably been hearing a lot more about tenet in recent months is because of Oppenheimer Oppenheimer is the most commercially successful Christopher Nolan movie since the Dark Knight Rises which is over a decade old his movie since then consistently turned a profit and made a big splash but Dunkirk came out 3 years before tenet and as we have seen tenet underperformed by Nolan standards and then it took another 3 years for Opie to come along so until Oppenheimer General audiences who don't spe

nd their free time watching video essays on YouTube or playing the docking sequence from interstella on repeat probably hadn't seen one of Nolan's movies in a cinema for about 6 years like it reminded them like oh yeah this is why we like going to the movies like not just for like Avengers 15 or whatever like it's it's something with substance it's something with with craft uh with with stuff on its mind I think Oppenheimer reminded people what it was they liked about Nolan's movies and that mad

e people decide to give that tinant movie another shot but this time it was different like a temporal pins movement they were coming back to the same thing but with a totally different perspective because they had a renewed appreciation for Nolan style but then also like on on a more thematic level I think Oppenheimer watching that film and seeing all the things that like he's kind of musing on in that movie is is in conversation with with tenet in a weird way with tenet Nolan kind of made a seq

uel to Oppenheimer before he made Oppenheimer which is a very tenant thing to happen after Oppenheimer audiences had a better understanding of Nolan's subjective approach of following a story from the perspective of a particular character they were reminded how he uses sound and music to enhance the story and to convey what the character was thinking or feeling they saw how he played with a linear flow of time in a way that enhanced The Narrative and Revisited previous scenes in a way that gave

us New Perspectives on them and they saw how he managed to capture everything in camera Oppenheimer reminded people that Nolan's movies feel real and that there is a huge amount of work going on behind the camera in order to deliver the best possible cinematic experience I was I was fortunate enough to go to that um the the 70 M millimeter IMAX screening where he and VNV had that conversation but the thing that I kind of latched on to um that that I haven't heard him talk about uh but make so mu

ch sense why like I'm kind of addicted to this film in a weird way is it's only a movie that could exist on film it specifically uses the language of Cinema in order to evoke an emotional response and it's not necessarily something you can articulate it was this really fascinating exercise for him on um emotional intelligence and like how how do you how do you play with with that while like kind of ignoring the The Logical side of it well like not trying to I guess like talk about it if you like

d Oppenheimer then chances are you'll enjoy rewatching tenet with that new perspective on n and style and the clues that the movie as a whole will be better the second time you watch it are baked into the film itself tenet revisits previous scenes within its own narrative and when it does so it is giving us a new perspective on them like when you watch the protagonist fight himself for the first time it's confusing and disorientating but when we come back to it we suddenly have a whole new persp

ective on the same scene and so we experience it completely differently because something you'll notice about this fight when you rewatch The movie is that when you see it for the second time it's not just the same fight with the film reversed it's shot differently and the edit places a different emphasis on the M protagonist because that is the person who we're experiencing the fight with this time you'll even notice that the lens of his mask is clear in the second fight whereas it's totally bl

ack when you see it for the first time because we are always seeing things from the protagonist's point of view in his own timeline so when he first has that fight he is fighting for his life against a mysterious antagonist but the second time he's just doing everything he can not to harm his former self and just to escape to the Turn Style and that is conveyed in the film making Language by shooting and editing it in a different way even if you didn't consciously notice it it is something you f

eel and you see him get into the room with the Turn Style and and you're sort of like oh [ __ ] is he the is he the guy who comes out on the other side and then it's like when it actually happens the way the score kind of kicks in the way that John David Washington just like full-blown Sprints out of there I mean it was funny just like watching it with some people who you know have never seen it and they're just like holy [ __ ] and it's just like there there's so many moments in the movie that

are that that just elicit that response out of people and just like how watching this F or the plane crash or the car chase the second time in the movie gives you a different perspective so to does watching the entire movie a second time once you have seen the complete hole going back and watching it again will feel like watching a different movie and that feeling never goes away the magic of tenant is that you always find something else to love and appreciate and yet the thrill it gives you nev

er goes away it is so rare for a movie to be able to achieve that a lot of people had a bad first impression of this movie because of the circumstances of its release and that could be hard to shake off but tenant has always been telling you to go back you have a future in the past so try and watch it again with an open mind and ideally a good sound system but this time don't try to understand it feel it a huge thanks again to Griffin from film speak for agreeing to talk about tenet with me for

so long go watch his videos if you haven't already and if you want to see our full chat I've uploaded the whole thing for patrons at the second breakfast tier and hire we basically talk about tenant Nolan and James Bond for the better part of an hour so go check that out if that's the sort of thing that you're interested in plus if you do watch it you will even be able to get to see what I look like when I'm not pretending to be a cartoon penguin talk about exclusive behind the scenes stuff and

if you join the patreon then you also get access to the back catalog of bonus videos and a bunch of other cool stuff and you help keep your videos like this one sponsor free thank you so much for watching let me know what you think of teners in the comments below and I'll see you next time