Tenet

[Geoff Jones]

I saw TENET tonight at AMC Westminster Promenade in their liemax auditorium (#13).

This was my second ever liemax viewing. The first time was a 2k showing at a different AMC several years back, and it felt like watching the movie through a screen door.

AMC installed a 4k laser projector at the Promenade location last year, and I'm pleased to report that it looked good, even from the 4th row. I believe this is the only 4k laser liemax in Colorado.

Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with all AMC theaters in Colorado, they can't seem to keep stray light off the screen. Both bottom corners were bathed in blue light from the floor lighting, which could easily be masked with a little effort.

The aspect ratio changed frequently throughout the movie, but it wasn't a significant change. Looking at IMDB, I think it was switching between 1.9:1 and 2.2:1. I also believe the very beginning (and nothing else) was 2:39:1. Seeing it in liemax meant I got more picture... but seeing it at an AMC meant the bottom corners were a little washed out.

I chose a sparsely-attended showtime. There were 9 people in a 300-seat auditorium, and I sat several rows forward of the next closest person. I wore a mask the entire time. Last weekend, I bought tickets to see TENET but ended up returning them as that showing grew "crowded" (22 people).

As for the movie itself... It's an amazing, convoluted mess. I really got the sense that there is an awesome film in there somewhere... but It didn't make it to the screen. It was impressive, but it was also tedious and difficult to follow. And yes, the dialog is painfully difficult to understand.

[Mike Blakesley]

We've had several walkouts (usually teenagers) and several people who came twice. One guy said "I watched it twice and still don't get it" while another guy said "the second time helped." So who knows. I have zero interest in watching it again.... if I had even gotten a single kernel of knowledge of what it was supposed to be about from the first viewing, I might have wanted to see it again, but it just left me cold. I often have a hard time with movies that have convoluted storylines, anyway. Give me a straightforward narrative and I'm happy.

[Mike Blakesley]

Well Tenet limped to a close here after 3 weeks, although our gross in week 3 actually bested week 2 by a bit thanks to a good Saturday. But after that, it went south fast. Our last four nights were:

Monday: 2 people
Tuesday: one guy
Wednesday: zip
Thursday: zilch

But, kudos to WB for at least bringing the movie out.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Tenet did well for most exhibitors around here, despite the challenging times. It's getting a lot of heat, for not being the most obvious choice to try to jump-start the exhibition industry, but then again, someone had to test the waters.

For the movie itself: I think Geoff really hit the hammer on the head with his comment, that there somehow is a great movie in there, it just doesn't make it onto the screen.

I'm afraid Nolan got so caught up in the details of it all, that he totally forgot the bigger picture. In the end, if you unwind all the time-twistyness, the premise of the movie is rather dull and shallow. The characters are completely undeveloped and you utterly fail to connect to any of them. It's not that their performances are bad, they're just largely unremarkable and the plot doesn't allow for the audience to connect with them. It might be great that a lot of them are performing their own stunts, but this doesn't really add anything of value on screen. In the end, only what makes it on screen matters, it matters less how it actually got there.

The plot itself is just a race from one MacGuffin to the next. The settings in which it happens are just a tool to this race, and despite their bold, often pretty unique setup, add little to nothing to the story itself.

In the end, the time-twisting feels more like a gimmick than a real plot device. A lot more cool, deeper stuff could've been done with it, without an unnecessary convoluted plot.

A lot has been said about the sound mix, which is, unfortunately, truly awful...

[Per Hauberg]

I premiered Tenet in ordinary 2D digital. Before the premiere, I had allready announced, that this was a film, You should see several times to get the mening. At the same time, I could tell my custumers, that their second time by me would be in 70mm, as I am reinstalling one of my old DP70 and a platter. After seeing the film in its full length, I'm crying my eyes out for having promised this re-run - and mostly for spending so much money to be able to... I have not used my non-rewind for 70mm before, but will hve to this time, because the digital thing takes up the space for projector 2 - money out of the pocket. I have not been running 70mm with digital sound before, more money... DTS subtitles - money... New spare sprockets for stand-by to be custum made - more money...
That alone, having to go to the dictionary to understand a film dialogue, is not giving extra points from me. The story is a mess, the film is to long, but stunts and filming fine Yet another mishap in a raw of bad films, that should have been the relaunch of 70mm to a wide audience. I certainly do hope, something better is coming up. Will Mr Branagh do better on the Nile than in his totally unecessary remake of the Orient Express ?
My beloved film format is being used for films, I wouldn't have shown, if the Corona had not held better films away. (Goodbye, Disney. The cinemas made You big, but maybe You forgot that...

[Randy Stankey]

I saw Tenet a few days ago. I didn't think it was great but it wasn't bad, either.

The first thing I noticed was the weirdness of the image. It had weirdly stark contrast and it looked like it was shot with a long zoom lens. All the perspective was compressed that it was hard to tell which objects were close or in the background. It looked like the whole movie was shot like a bad, 1980's low-budget soap.

After thinking about it, I decided that it must have been shot that way to cover all the CGI. There was a lot of CGI in the movie. Virtually every major shot. If you look, you can pick it out. I think the movie was shot so weirdly to make it harder to pick out the CGI.

As far as the plot goes, it wasn't as hard to understand as some people made it out to be. It's pretty simple: Russian oligarch plots to take over the world but, if he can't have it his way, he'll destroy the world just as easily. The good guy tries to stop him and ends up in a relationship with the bad guy's wife in the process.

As far as the "time manipulation" aspect goes, it's not as hard as it seems.

The machine doesn't let you travel through time, per se. It allows you to make time run in reverse. Now, you can "rewind" time like a tape recorder and do things over to suit your will.

First, a scientist discovers bullets that fly backward and they wonder why. The explanation wasn't discussed in the movie but it's apparent from the sequence of events. If you make time run backward and you shoot a gun from your "forward" world, the bullets will fly backward. If you want to shoot a gun in a "backward" world, you need "backward" bullets.

Why do people have to wear masks when they go "backward?" Because "forward" people can't breathe "backward" air.
This is also a plot device to help the viewer tell which characters are from the "forward" world or the "backward" world.
If you watch the movie again and keep track of who is wearing an oxygen mask, you can figure out who is from the "forward" world and who is from the "backward" world.

What is this "Temporal Pincer Movement" that they talk about?
If you pick a person, place or event at some moment in time, you can send a team to alter those events and reshape your present to fit your will. You send a team of operatives into the "backward" world to a place that happened before your target event and you have another team, waiting to meet them in the "forward" world they can both work to change events of the target time so that things happen the way you want them. This way you can manipulate the world almost like moving chess pieces on a chess board.

The whole climax of the movie is the "Protagonist" trying to stop the "Bad Guy" from using his "Backward Machine" to destroy the world. In order to do that, we have to go back to the point in time where the "Backward Machine" was first invented so that it will never be built in the first place.

If you think about it for a second, this is just like the standard plot line in just about every James Bond movie.
All you have to do is take out so much of the Sci-Fi "garbage" and add a few more scantily clad women.
It is possible to think that the character of James Bond isn't a real person but a pseudonym. Look at it this way and this might be the next James Bond movie.

I watched this movie on my TV, at home, in my living room. The dialog wasn't terrible. There were plenty of places where it was hard to hear what was being said but it was also during some action scenes where dialog would naturally be hard to hear. Yes, if it was my call, I would have pumped up the dialog over sound effects. I guess this is what the kids like, these days.

I liked this movie but it wasn't the best I have seen, lately. Give me "Thunderball" or "Dr. No" any day!

[Allan Young]

After thinking about it, I decided that it must have been shot that way to cover all the CGI. There was a lot of CGI in the movie. Virtually every major shot. If you look, you can pick it out. I think the movie was shot so weirdly to make it harder to pick out the CGI.

Apparently not.

'Tenet' Has Under 300 VFX Shots, Which Is Less Than Most Rom-Coms" https://collider.com/tenet-visual-ef...stopher-nolan/

[Randy Stankey]

I see. I guess you’re right.

Having 300 shots during a 150 minute movie, that’s still an average of one every 30 seconds, including the titles and credits. Even if it’s less than other movies, it’s still a lot.

The article says that there were a lot of in-camera, practicals, too.

I suppose I’m just quibbling. Yes?

It still puzzles me why the movie was shot with such weird prespectives. The article says they used specially designed lenses and stuff. Does it all come from the choice of lenses?

To me, the whole movie looked like it was shot at a distance using long lenses. It’s a trick that bad, 1980’s TV shows used to simulate car crashes and stuff. The compressed perspectives made it look like things were closer together than they really were.

In those TV shows, it was done for a few scenes to achieve a particular effect. Why, in Tenet, was it done for almost the whole movie? What were they going for? Did they just want everything in the world to look weird?

If that was just an artistic choice, so be it, but I still think it looks weird.

Was he just going for “weird?”

[Marcel Birgelen]

Well, yes, like I also mentioned in another post as a reply to you, there was far less CGI involved in Tenet than in any normal current Hollywood movie. :P The CGI that was there, honestly, wasn't all that noticeable either. Many CGI effects are also just composition effects and not necessarily 3D renderings. Remember the shot where one of those soldiers disappeared into a wall? That was achieved by digitally composing multiple "analog acquired" shots over each other. There was almost no 3D rendering involved in that shot, other than some particle effects for dust. In any ordinary production, this would've been at least 80% rendered digitally.

Other digital effects are mostly stuff like digital mattes or simply hiding artifacts from practical effects like support structures, wires, etc. Almost anything in focus is done via practical effects. This includes some people actually walking backward and performing their actions backward. If the primary action was "in backward", the effect would be achieved by having "supporting actors" perform the actions in backward and by having the main action recorded "forward" and then just reverse the footage in final composition. This doesn't just include photography, even sound was recorded this way... yeah, there are people speaking backward in there... in that awful soundtrack.

Also noteworthy is that the final composition, whenever it didn't include digital effects, was done optically. This includes eventual color correction, of which there isn't a whole lot as you may have seen. This means that all scenes that didn't require digital composition are still 100% analog, just like all previous Nolan movies. Since most of the post-production of the movie happened during the pandemic, this was quite a logistical challenge.

Regarding the "perspective thingy". Christopher Nolan doesn't use zoom lenses whenever possible. Maybe there is some B-roll in there shot using zoom lenses, but none of the primary shots were ever shot using zoom lenses. Everything was shot on spherical lenses and on 65mm film, both horizontally and vertically. I guess that what you're referring to is a lack of depth of field in the movie, which, if used properly, gives you some hints on what you need to focus. The way this was shot, is that in almost all shots everything is in focus. I think this boils down to the ideas of Nolan himself, where it's up to you on what part of the picture you focus. The director isn't giving you any helping hand here. Maybe this is why you think everything was being shot with zoom lenses, which would probably give a somewhat equal look, though would seriously hurt on any scenes with lots of movements.

A whole lot of efforts went into making this movie, it's sad that it turned out to be a somewhat chaotic mess with lots of unfulfilled potential. Maybe, once a few decades have passed, we learn to appreciate it more. It's not like every movie we now consider a classic became an instant classic...

[Randy Stankey]

Yes, I understand.

There is still something weird about the look and feel of the whole movie but it's not just depth of field.
Yes, I saw the depth of field but that's not the only thing I'm talking about.

Do you remember the old TV show, "Dukes of Hazard?" Not the movie. The TV show that aired in the US during the late 1970's and early 1980's.
There were a lot of car crashes in that show but the main car, a Dodge Charger, was a relatively rare, classic car. They couldn't crash a whole lot of those cars because there weren't enough of them to go around. Instead, they often resorted to camera tricks.

One of their tricks was to set up a shot with the camera far away and shoot through a long lens. The resulting perspective distortion would make things look closer together than they really were. They could have the stunt drivers swerve at the last second and miss a collision by only six inches or so. They would run the cars at half speed to make it easier for drivers to perform. Then they sped the film up to make it look like they were going full speed.

The distorted perspective, the "fake speed" and a quick cut-away could make it LOOK like a car crash happened when it really didn't.

If you look closely, in those old TV shows, you can actually see the effect. As a matter of fact, once you've seen, it's hard to "un-see" it.

Watching Tenet, gave me a "weird" feeling that reminded me of those scenes from old 1970's and 1980's TV shows.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Sure, I remember those campy TV shows. All they had were cheap, practical tricks, even optical post-production tricks were too costly for many of them. Many movies from that same era share that look. Shooting with zoom lenses from afar, to hide "near-misses", sped-up footage and other practical tricks, let alone just the stunt driver and dummies inside the cars was pretty common. I guess there was a good living to be made as stunt driver back then. .

It's interesting how you associate this movie with campy, in camera effects of the 70s and 80s. I didn't really get that feeling to be honest, but for me, the whole thing looked pretty rough and unfiltered, more like Saving Private Ryan than Inception. Due to the current zombie apocalypse interfering, I haven't been able to see this movie in 70mm or in IMAX, but I've seen it in 4K.

Since we know that there were no zoom lenses involved in any of the primary scenes, something else must have triggered this in your mind. Maybe it's the lack of depth of field in many shots, combined with the high detail in every shot and plain lightning that subconsciously breaks down suspension of disbelief for you. If I turn on the "motion enhancement" crapola on my TV while watching, for practically anything besides the news, stuff starts to fall apart for me, everything starts to look like a more or less elaborate stage play.

One problem I have with this movie in general is the framing. For me it looks like we sometimes miss part of what's happening, but that's probably due to much of it being filmed with 65mm IMAX cameras. The reduction to scope or 2.20 (which is the AR most people have seen this movie in), obviously requires some re-framing of those shots. If the focus remains in the center of the image, the resulting shot should be mostly fine, but if the focus point ends up far off to the bottom or top of the frame, this can mess with your head, as the perspective of the shot will look odd to you.

Another problem may arise from the "backward footage", of which there is quite a lot of it in this movie. As mentioned before, many of those shots that ended up being reversed, contain actors and other effects performing their cues in reverse. Some actors are even speaking backwards. This may also mess with your mind.

I guess there is still quite some ground to cover in how people watch and perceive movies and what it takes to keep the audience suspended in disbelief. For me, that suspension starts to break down, once the action on screen exits the believable of the universe established in the movie, but it's apparent that there are quite a few other factors at work...

[Bill Brandenstein]

In late March Los Angeles County finally relaxed COVID-related restrictions to the point where theaters can open a few seats. So we ran off to see Tenet at Universal City Imax in 70mm before it got displaced by Kong vs. Godzilla.

Say what you want about plot issues and hard-to-hear dialog, but nothing kicks you like Imax shot in 70mm projected in 70mm. What a great ride. Nolan again makes a case for large-scale story-telling like no other, and the organic nature (i.e., minimized digital effects) of the shooting comes off very, very well, of course. This does compellingly what movies have been doing at their best for over a century: grand visual spectacle that you can't recreate at home.

Our screening was painfully loud. Others who went to other showings told me they were not so uncomfortable, so I guess our showing was juiced a little extra.