Nolan has great technical skill but his overwritten plots aren't as deep as folks pretend and his characters are cold and empty shells. There is a reason his only memorable characters are either from Batman films or films where his brother was involved in the writing (and not coincidentally TDK happens to be both).
I can make an argument that my favorite Nolan character ever is TARS, the AI robot shaped like a square with legs. No one wants to hear the dreaded "F" word in Nolan context, but TARS is probably the most fun character in any of his movies including the Batmans.
I'm looking forward to watching it on HBO Max mainly so I can hear the dialog better. The sound was really muffled at the theater I was at so I couldn't hear certain things unless it was quiet.
They showed trailers of King's Man, New Mutants (releases her next week) and Wonder Woman 1984. They didn't play the trailer but Antebellum is releasing in two weeks too.
Nolan has great technical skill but his overwritten plots aren't as deep as folks pretend and his characters are cold and empty shells. There is a reason his only memorable characters are either from Batman films or films where his brother was involved in the writing (and not coincidentally TDK happens to be both).
I like all of his movies, but this did make me realize that my favorites are the ones that had involvement from Jonathan. Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Interstellar. Didn't care for The Dark Knight Rises. The mission is never over for Batman.
Okay, so now that I've seen it I'll say it's an alright film. Personally I liked it a tad better than Inception (which is a shyt film) and that's mostly because I'm just a sucker for time travel films and this turned out to be much more of a traditional time travel film than I thought it would be. In fact, the whole "inversion" concept really just seems like an excuse for Nolan to make a very standard time travel plot appear more complicated than it really is.
In essence, rather than a time machine that transports a character back in time to replay the same event from a different angle they use doors that allow them to physically move backwards through time so they can even affect the event while traveling backwards.
Unfortunately it takes the film almost half the running time to get to the part where this plot gets interesting, and that first half might seriously be the most dull filmmaking Nolan has ever attempted. It's all setup for the interesting part of the film and it's an absolute drag that boils down to "stuff happens, more stuff happens and then stuff happens". There is zero reason to care about pretty much anything in the first half and then there's the incredibly clumsy dialogue which offers misfire after misfire. Christopher Nolan singlehandedly disproves the myth that all British people have a natural sense of humor as flat one-liner after flat one-liner reduce Washington's character to an uncharismatic lame. I almost felt embarassed for his character at one point after he dropped possibly the lamest retort I've seen on-screen in years.
When the film finally gets to the interesting half it does pick up but as someone obsessed with time travel concepts I also picked up every single clue in the first half and pretty much predicted the rest of the film. In that aspect it really doesn't do anything that films like Predestination, Timecrimes or Primer didn't do years before. Yes, there's the inversion gimmick but in the end it's mostly a visual gimmick that sometimes looks cool but just as often looks clumsy and dumb. It accumulates in what I guess Nolan envisioned to be an amazing action set piece but he's still so bad at shooting action that it just does not work. Sure, there's a cool moment or two sprinkled in there with the inversion gimmick but they feel like random injections in an action scene that any arbitrary VOD director could've shot.
Regarding the cast, I have no idea where the praise for Washington and Pattinson comes from. They have nothing to work with and at best you can say they do a good job of doing their job. All the heavy lifting is done by Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh. I'm very curious about Debicki's career trajectory because it feels like there's almost no place in Hollywood for a 6ft 3in actress who towers over every male (some of the supposed-to-be threatening henchmen look like goddamn midgets next to her) but you can't argue against her talent. Meanwhile Branagh makes the absolute most out of the typical 'British actor does Russian accent' shtick, he puts up a far better and intense performance than such a cliché character deserves. It's just a shame that Nolan pulls his punches so much, there's a few moments where you could actually get to hate the bad guy but Nolan shies away from clearly showing any violence one could deem "edgy". It almost makes you wonder how this is the same man who once directed the pencil scene from TDK.
Anyway, in the end I gave this a 6/10 on IMDb and that 6 is almost entirely earned in the second half since the first half of the film is the absolute dullest trash Nolan has ever made. As a time travel film fanatic the story is mid without surprises, the inversion gimmick too often makes things convoluted rather than interesting and at many points Nolan blatantly rehashes storytelling tricks from Inception showcasing that he's becoming more and more of a one-trick pony.
This is just one more example of Nolan being bigger on ideas than he is on execution and reaffirms how much of a joke it is that a writer/director with such blatant limitations is widely heralded as the best filmmaker alive.
Okay, so now that I've seen it I'll say it's an alright film. Personally I liked it a tad better than Inception (which is a shyt film) and that's mostly because I'm just a sucker for time travel films and this turned out to be much more of a traditional time travel film than I thought it would be. In fact, the whole "inversion" concept really just seems like an excuse for Nolan to make a very standard time travel plot appear more complicated than it really is.
In essence, rather than a time machine that transports a character back in time to replay the same event from a different angle they use doors that allow them to physically move backwards through time so they can even affect the event while traveling backwards.
Unfortunately it takes the film almost half the running time to get to the part where this plot gets interesting, and that first half might seriously be the most dull filmmaking Nolan has ever attempted. It's all setup for the interesting part of the film and it's an absolute drag that boils down to "stuff happens, more stuff happens and then stuff happens". There is zero reason to care about pretty much anything in the first half and then there's the incredibly clumsy dialogue which offers misfire after misfire. Christopher Nolan singlehandedly disproves the myth that all British people have a natural sense of humor as flat one-liner after flat one-liner reduce Washington's character to an uncharismatic lame. I almost felt embarassed for his character at one point after he dropped possibly the lamest retort I've seen on-screen in years.
When the film finally gets to the interesting half it does pick up but as someone obsessed with time travel concepts I also picked up every single clue in the first half and pretty much predicted the rest of the film. In that aspect it really doesn't do anything that films like Predestination, Timecrimes or Primer didn't do years before. Yes, there's the inversion gimmick but in the end it's mostly a visual gimmick that sometimes looks cool but just as often looks clumsy and dumb. It accumulates in what I guess Nolan envisioned to be an amazing action set piece but he's still so bad at shooting action that it just does not work. Sure, there's a cool moment or two sprinkled in there with the inversion gimmick but they feel like random injections in an action scene that any arbitrary VOD director could've shot.
Regarding the cast, I have no idea where the praise for Washington and Pattinson comes from. They have nothing to work with and at best you can say they do a good job of doing their job. All the heavy lifting is done by Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh. I'm very curious about Debicki's career trajectory because it feels like there's almost no place in Hollywood for a 6ft 3in actress who towers over every male (some of the supposed-to-be threatening henchmen look like goddamn midgets next to her) but you can't argue against her talent. Meanwhile Branagh makes the absolute most out of the typical 'British actor does Russian accent' shtick, he puts up a far better and intense performance than such a cliché character deserves. It's just a shame that Nolan pulls his punches so much, there's a few moments where you could actually get to hate the bad guy but Nolan shies away from clearly showing any violence one could deem "edgy". It almost makes you wonder how this is the same man who once directed the pencil scene from TDK.
Anyway, in the end I gave this a 6/10 on IMDb and that 6 is almost entirely earned in the second half since the first half of the film is the absolute dullest trash Nolan has ever made. As a time travel film fanatic the story is mid without surprises, the inversion gimmick too often makes things convoluted rather than interesting and at many points Nolan blatantly rehashes storytelling tricks from Inception showcasing that he's becoming more and more of a one-trick pony.
This is just one more example of Nolan being bigger on ideas than he is on execution and reaffirms how much of a joke it is that a writer/director with such blatant limitations is widely heralded as the best filmmaker alive.
Just watched it and nolan needs to fix his audio mixing. Damn everything just sounded jumbled, it was difficult to hear important dialogue at certain points.
I need to watch it again because the plot points were so scattered.
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