Saw Tenet today. That was just a waste of time. Enough said on that.
No that’s a terrible Haiku, but then it was a terrible movie so shrug. I feel, awkward when I criticize art given I know I am not all that great myself yet, and that my best work still isn’t quite at ‘consistent greatness’ level yet, but here’s the thing: when your film is supposed to be about manipulating time and using that power against nefarious forces with the same ability in high intensity action sequences, don’t make your ‘fun and games’ a bunch of people sitting around talking about that. There was so much exposition where there should have been cool experimenting with the concept, and by the time they got to that, I was bored. And then the finale was full of complex explanation and exposition too, when we should be getting payoff, we instead got homework. And man, talk about flat characters that I could not care less about.
Ok no one reads this blog but SPOILER WARNING. There is a bit in the plot where the characters break into a high security facility where one of the time manipulation machines is. They fight two masked people who are ‘inverted’ – meaning they are travelling the other way in time. Spoilers, but this is them from the future, and our protagonist – who refers to himself as the protagonist all over the place because oooo look at me I’m self aware media, god that’s annoying – he fights himself. And I wanted to laugh because it’s exactly the same person. There is zero character development or arc between the first encounter and when he’s in the past fighting himself. They’re pretty much clones because he hasn’t progressed an iota. This film played itself harder than Cookie Clicker, which is a damn sight more engaging than this drivel was.
Ok, ok I’m done now. Onto my terrible writing. TWO is, well it’s going. It’s plodding along. I feel like I need to rethink the balance between day to day life and action in this, even though I have more action than say, a movie that spends the entire fun and games section talking about drawings and moseying around on a boat ok no I said I’d stop. It’s a problem for the next rewrite, but when I compare it to say WHT, which had action every other scene and in many places chapter after chapter, I worry I’m being too dull. If I am, I may need to play around more with what the outside force is able to do, and perhaps show more of that on screen. The more horror elements of it – and I stress, TWO isn’t a horror – are about the psychological idea that the universe might be against you after all, but I don’t want to drown that too much in the human side. Even so, I need some of said human side so any of it matters to the reader.
One to think on. Don’t watch Tenet.
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