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psocopteraTenet. Entirely behind a spoiler cut so that I don't have to decide what's a spoiler. The central gimmick of this was neat - I like time games - but in fact none of the big time-reversal set pieces got me in the gee-whiz feelings the way I would have wanted them to. Maybe because I find fast-cut action hard to follow anyways, or maybe because at the end of the day, they were basically just a hand-fight scene, a car chase, and a war scene with a little added complexity, like, there wasn't anything really *different* there. And then it didn't really have much emotional underpinning to go with the gimmick - I guess we were supposed to Care About Neil, and his big scene at the end, and his relationship with the Protagonist, but I didn't. And Kat spends half the movie as literal baggage on a gurney and half being helpless and then deciding to stop being helpless at the least useful minute, ugh.
I liked that the Protagonist turned out to be many of the important people in the story, very "All You Zombies", and the 12-Monkeys-ish fate-vs-manipulation idea, or, at least, I liked the *idea* - it's been a good 25 years since I saw 12 Monkeys, but I recall actually caring about the Bruce Willis character. I never felt like we really got to know the Protagonist as a character, like, okay, he's a good person, he cares about the symphony audience, and his team, and he's obviously an extremely competent secret agent, but, I don't know, maybe a moment of backstory? A personal opinion?
... Ok, I wrote that much a few days ago and have now forgotten most of what else I wanted to say, but there was something else. Oh, this was part of it! I think the most interesting thing in the movie is actually the idea that due to climate collapse the future is so terrible that they're willing to gamble changing their own causality on this entropy solution. Pastwatch has always been one of my favorite time travel novels (despite OSC) - the willingness to completely wipe out your timeline in hopes of something better, damn - and I feel like there could have been a "wait, we've been fighting on the wrong side" moment here, or, like, a tragedy of the failure of past and future to work together, and I wish they'd really dug into that. I mean, I see that Nolan wanted to make a spy thriller and not a Star Trek episode, and the whole "grimly preserve the status quo for now as long as we can" does feel right for the Cold War-bleakness of the genre, but, I don't know, imagine cutting to a scene of the future at the end, and it's all Noble Last Stand of Humanity beats and scared-but-determined kids or something. Kat's plot is nominally about her kid, so what if they actually did something with that, dig into what we owe our children/the future vs living our own lives. (I guess, maybe, in a way, they did slightly... Kat's inability to not taunt Sator maybe mirrors the Protagonist's inability to not prioritize his own time period...) but it could have been so much more explicit and more interesting. Alas.
I liked that the Protagonist turned out to be many of the important people in the story, very "All You Zombies", and the 12-Monkeys-ish fate-vs-manipulation idea, or, at least, I liked the *idea* - it's been a good 25 years since I saw 12 Monkeys, but I recall actually caring about the Bruce Willis character. I never felt like we really got to know the Protagonist as a character, like, okay, he's a good person, he cares about the symphony audience, and his team, and he's obviously an extremely competent secret agent, but, I don't know, maybe a moment of backstory? A personal opinion?
... Ok, I wrote that much a few days ago and have now forgotten most of what else I wanted to say, but there was something else. Oh, this was part of it! I think the most interesting thing in the movie is actually the idea that due to climate collapse the future is so terrible that they're willing to gamble changing their own causality on this entropy solution. Pastwatch has always been one of my favorite time travel novels (despite OSC) - the willingness to completely wipe out your timeline in hopes of something better, damn - and I feel like there could have been a "wait, we've been fighting on the wrong side" moment here, or, like, a tragedy of the failure of past and future to work together, and I wish they'd really dug into that. I mean, I see that Nolan wanted to make a spy thriller and not a Star Trek episode, and the whole "grimly preserve the status quo for now as long as we can" does feel right for the Cold War-bleakness of the genre, but, I don't know, imagine cutting to a scene of the future at the end, and it's all Noble Last Stand of Humanity beats and scared-but-determined kids or something. Kat's plot is nominally about her kid, so what if they actually did something with that, dig into what we owe our children/the future vs living our own lives. (I guess, maybe, in a way, they did slightly... Kat's inability to not taunt Sator maybe mirrors the Protagonist's inability to not prioritize his own time period...) but it could have been so much more explicit and more interesting. Alas.
