Tenet (2020)

Matt (00:00:00):

Hello and welcome to the Summer of Nolan on 1-Week Rental. I am Matt Stokes.

Laci (00:00:52):

Can I talk now?

Matt (00:00:53):

Yeah, go ahead.

Laci (00:00:53):

I’m Laci Roth.

Matt (00:00:55):

All right, what were you saying?

Laci (00:00:56):

Okay. That I’m going to do a Tenet with this episode, which is to say that I don’t know what my future self feels about this movie because my present self has not watched 40 minutes of the end of this movie. And I feel fully prepared to comment on it because I feel like my future self will help my present self. And this is because of the love of this movie that I’m doing it this way.

Matt (00:01:21):

But what’s interesting is that’s kind of…

Laci (00:01:23):

Not love. I’m doing love. Okay.

Matt (00:01:25):

Are you going to

Laci (00:01:25):

Say I’m not? No, you’re doing love.

Matt (00:01:27):

Present Matt

Laci (00:01:27):

Doesn’t understand

Matt (00:01:28):

Lisa. That’s what we’re always doing when you think about it. You’re

Laci (00:01:30):

Doing a love.

Matt (00:01:31):

Movies are time travel. I don’t know what the movie’s going to be, but Future Me knows.

Laci (00:01:35):

Yeah. And I don’t know what Future Me’s going to think of a movie later in the. See, I’m already confused. All right, so this

Matt (00:01:44):

Is one week. I’m doing a Duffy. We do a deep dive into a different movie every week and on this. During this summer of 2026, we are covering Christopher Nolan. We’ve reached the penultimate episode of the series. We are feeling very melancholy about soon leaving our friend Christopher behind. We’ve enjoyed our time in the surf and sand with Christopher. Laci calls him Chris. Only one episode left, Oppenheimer after this, but we’ve reached Tenet.

Laci (00:02:08):

Would you say we’re going out with a bang?

Matt (00:02:10):

I mean.

Laci (00:02:12):

Most people would say it.

Matt (00:02:13):

My favorite thing about Tenet is the idea that the future is currently pillaging the present because they’ve run out of stuff to pillage in the future. Totally get that. And absolutely, if we found out all these data centers are being built by the future, I’d be like, yeah, that checks out. That makes sense. They’ve run out of water in the future so that they’re just coming back to the past to raid our water, to build AI data centers for nothing.

Laci (00:02:36):

Wait, but if they’re in the future and they know that they’re out of water, why wouldn’t they come back into our present to get rid of data centers?

Matt (00:02:43):

Oh, no, the data centers must keep going. Why?

Laci (00:02:46):

There’s no water.

Matt (00:02:46):

The law of thorough and dynamics.That’s where the money is because it’s the –

Laci (00:02:50):

No, no, because the people are dead. They can’t spend any money because of the lack of water.

Matt (00:02:54):

There will always be people who need money. Wait, okay, listen.

Laci (00:02:57):

There’s always going to be people who need water.

Matt (00:02:59):

There’s a lot of future. Okay?

Laci (00:03:01):

Okay.

Matt (00:03:02):

And there’s always going to be people who are like, “How can I get more money?” And if the world economic system is a sofa and we’re just looking for the change in the sofa cushions, AI is the last bit of change. And so they’re like, “We’re going to ring as much out of this as we can. So we need all the water in the world, but we run out in the future, so we have to go into the past to get more water.”

Laci (00:03:20):

How do you set the Dunkirk? I’m assuming the turn is called a Dunkirk.

Matt (00:03:25):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The turnstiles intent, they’re called Dunkirks.

Laci (00:03:27):

I think because he likes to reuse things, people.

Matt (00:03:30):

Sure.

Laci (00:03:31):

How do you set it to the right temperature? Time? How do you know where you’re going? How do you know where it’s spitting you back out? I should watch that other 40 minutes maybe.

Matt (00:03:42):

It literally just spits you back out one second earlier and then you move backwards through time.

Laci (00:03:48):

Why? What

Matt (00:03:49):

Do you mean why? To

Laci (00:03:50):

Change one second? No, to go as far back as you need to.

Matt (00:03:55):

Yeah. It’s a time travel movie and Nolan’s being annoying. He’s like, “I don’t consider it a time travel

Laci (00:04:01):

Movie.” Everybody

Matt (00:04:02):

Else

Laci (00:04:03):

Does.

Matt (00:04:03):

There are time travel movies like Primer where going back in time involves you having to wait the amount of time that you want to go back. You actually have to spend the amount of time. I like that. And I like that

Laci (00:04:14):

Too.

Matt (00:04:14):

I like that. So the way all of our episodes are structured is we have a history segment where we take you through the making of the movie and then we do a movie discussion segment. But we also have this sort of unspecific part at the beginning of the episode where we just kind of vomit all of our thoughts onto you.

Laci (00:04:28):

Because we’re supposed to save it for the cast. That’s a tagline in our house. So we’re not really talking it through and I’m just sitting with it. And sometimes I’m like, “That shit was fun.” And other times it’s just like math.

Matt (00:04:41):

And so it all just comes out and we front load the front of the episode. So I guess Laci said we should just call this the data dump section of the episode. So if you’re not interested in the data dump, skip, look in the episode description, see where the history segment starts. If you do

Laci (00:04:54):

Like me taking a dump on your chest, do listen. But it feels like a dump because it’s unprocessed. These are not refined thoughts. These are just like without thinking it through, without knowing things I don’t know and processing it with someone else or even just with myself, Leonard or Laura Lee. It’s a dump. Thank you. So in this movie, there are two turnstiles, one in a Freeport and then –

Matt (00:05:17):

One in another Freeport. Another Freeport.

Laci (00:05:19):

Okay.

Matt (00:05:19):

And then actually, and Laci hasn’t watched the end of this movie. And this is what I was going to say is we record these episodes in two parts, so we’re going to watch the movie again before we record our movie discussion. We’re watching it for the first time. And there’s a billion, when they’re doing the big attack assault on the base, there’s like a billion turnstiles that they have that this military force of time travelers that we haven’t seen until they just push me and they’re like, “Hey, here we are. We’re here to do some time travel. Okay.” They have tons of turnstiles. Anyway, only two that you have seen so far. What’s your question?

Laci (00:05:49):

Is that how you end your little stint? You’re like, “I need to go back in time for just now. Just now I made this mistake.” Well, it’s yesterday, so I’m going to go all the way back through all of one day in yesterday. And then when I’m ready to come to now, you go through turnstile?

Matt (00:06:06):

Yeah. And then you’ll have to live again, but live twice the amount of time because you’re starting from behind. All right. Laci seems like she hated Tenet.

Laci (00:06:19):

Is that a question?

Matt (00:06:22):

Do you care to comment?

Laci (00:06:23):

Oh God, no. I’m stupid. I need to just watch it all the way through. I’m aggravated with it. And maybe it’s starting from an unfair set of –

Matt (00:06:36):

Expectations.

Laci (00:06:36):

They are not the right audience, although I’ve never felt like I wasn’t the right audience for Nolan’s stuff up until now. And learning about Nolan and reading the book Variations has made me appreciate even the movies I didn’t like at first. I think I like Momeno now. I always liked following. I didn’t love Batman McGinn’s, but I think everything else I’ve liked, right? Yeah. So I’m thinking I speak fluent Nolan. Now Nolan. Oh bitch, you’re almost a goddamn palin drum. Oh, close. Nile on.

Matt (00:07:12):

That’s got to piss him

Laci (00:07:13):

Off. Oohi. Should have named himself race car. So I remember being frustrated by this movie, being confused and feeling like I wasn’t paying attention or something after, because of course I watched it when I was in theaters. No,

Matt (00:07:27):

No, no.

Laci (00:07:27):

No, I watched it at home. Whenever you made me watch it, that is when I watched it. Okay. Can we go back in time and you didn’t correct me? No, because you’ll just correct me again in the fucking

Matt (00:07:34):

Future. It’s an important part of the story.

Laci (00:07:36):

Great. Anyway, I remember I didn’t have a. There wasn’t the heart that I had been given so much of with Interstellar, and I don’t even know how to put it into words what that is. I’m not a sapitoat. Something to really care about to pull me through all the things I need to let go of or understand about the complications of the way he’s telling the story. And that’s also what kept me from enjoying Memento was I didn’t care about any of these characters, any of them, including the main character. I felt like he was a slying piece of shit. And so I had a hard time like, “If I’m going to do all this homework, I need to care about one of you motherfuckers.” And with following, I immediately liked the guy we started off with, the main man. I liked him right away and I can’t say why.

Laci (00:08:24):

I just did. I love Robert Pattinson. And even his charm isn’t really doing it for me in this movie. And I’d say that the most charmed I am, and I don’t know why I need charm, goddamn it, I’m a simple person, is by Kate. Is her name Kate in

Matt (00:08:40):

Real life?

Laci (00:08:41):

Kat. Kat.

Matt (00:08:42):

Elizabeth DeBecky.

Laci (00:08:44):

Yeah. I really like her. I’m like, oh, she mesmerizes me.

Matt (00:08:48):

Yeah. I think here in Tenet, we are seeing maybe my estimation of Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception has gone up even further where I think you just need that anchor, that emotional anchor. And it’s not like I’m not a sappy twat either, but whatever has kept this movie, whatever is. I’ve never connected to this movie. And I’ve said this many times. There’s two Nolan movies. No, three Nolan movies now that I saw so many times waiting for it to click for me. Yes. Finally, I’m going to see what everybody else sees. And it was Inception. It was Interstellar. And then during this podcast and miniseries, it was The Dark Night. And finally something clicked for me. And I’ve seen Tenet five to eight times now waiting, waiting, come on, come on, click for me. And I enjoy so much of it. And still I feel like I’m not getting this.

Matt (00:09:40):

But last night’s the first time where I felt like that’s not my fault. I think Nolan is not – He’s doing too much. Doing something right here.

Laci (00:09:48):

Yes. Or he put it all on the shoulders of someone who wasn’t able to necessarily carry something this distracting. It was really smart for him to base it in a very familiar formula of a spy Bond movie. I picked up that right away. I understood where I was. I understand who these people are to the extent that I need to. But I find Bond movies much more simple and there’s less layers of like, and then this is a secret, secret place. And then this is where they keep the secrets from the Secret Secret guy. And where this movie just kind of keeps going deep with secrets.

Matt (00:10:23):

So many people love this movie. People I know and respect love this movie. Critics I know and respect love this movie or critics I read love this movie. And then I think I’m just dumber than them. My eyes can’t process the backwards that I’m watching. On a very basic cinematic level, I can’t process the backwards shit. And in the last 20 minute big action spectacle, I check out entirely because I can’t tell what the fuck’s going on.

Laci (00:10:48):

I also think there’s a motion sickness aspect. I’m sorry to cut you off. It makes me dizzy. And so maybe someone where I almost can’t look at some parts, maybe there’s a hindrance for that.

Matt (00:11:01):

Well, so if inception, it’s about the experience of the disorientation of having to live in this world or of having to live in a backwards world, job well done because I do feel disoriented. Very much. But I’m not having fun. Other without lies, I think the movie’s a blast. I think so much of it’s fun. And we’ve said John David Washington maybe not as good as someone like Leonardo DiCaprio at anchoring this insane world, but I still find him charming. It’s

Laci (00:11:24):

Very charming and very believable as a spy. Or he’s very believable in the role he’s in. It’s just that if he’s our shepherd bringing us and helping us let go of things that we’re just not meant for us to get, he can’t do it. It might maybe switch it. Patton’s in it. But I didn’t get to the last 40 minutes.

Matt (00:11:47):

I think it starts with a calculation. This is Denzel Washington’s son. And we are supposed to think of like, okay, this is the guy at the beginning of his career. One day he’ll be Denzel Washington. And the thing is, Christopher Nolan is obsessed with the filmmaker, Tony Scott, one of my favorite directors who made a ton of just like dad watching on the sofa movies that when he was alive, Tony Scott, people kind of dismissed his fluff. Now they look like masterpieces. One of them was Deja Vu starring Denzel Washington.

Laci (00:12:16):

I love Denzel Washington. There’s not a movie that he can’t carry for me. And all different flavors of him too. I never got sick of him. And he just cut me and make a movie twice a year it seemed like for a while there. Sure. So it’s not fair to this guy that that’s his. How are you going to make two? You can’t make two.

Matt (00:12:36):

And when his son sounds exactly like him, doesn’t look like him, but these deliveries that sound exactly like him. But I mentioned deja vu because deja vu, when I revisited it earlier this year and I though, “Oh, Nolan, this is what Nolan wanted to make with Tenet.” There’s parts of that movie where he’s so excited by what that movie’s doing where you can have a camera that looks back four days in the past and like Denzel Washington’s driving on the highway in the present, but looking in through a camera lens at what was going on four days ago on highway. Oh, that’s fucking cool.

Laci (00:13:06):

I could grasp

Matt (00:13:07):

That real easy. Denzel Washington carries that kind of scientific mumbo jumbo so easily.

Laci (00:13:12):

He’s got such a. It’s not that his son doesn’t have confidence. There’s a lot of that, but there’s this stillness to Denzel. Well, you don’t ever know when you’re going to get the big guy, the big voice or whatever, but he’s mainly just this. I don’t know how to explain it except for that it’s confidence without looking confident. He just is. You’re in steady hands. It’s the way I feel Morgan Freeman. It’s the way I feel with fucking. Why can’t I pull his name out of my ass right now? Green Goblin.

Matt (00:13:43):

Willem DeFoe.

Laci (00:13:44):

William DeFoe. If he’s going to be in a scene, I’m going to be in and I’m not going to be looking at the watch. He’s just going to get me all the way through it. And I feel that way now about Michael Kane. I didn’t have such a soft spot for Michael Kane, but when he appears in these movies now, I’m like, “Ah.”

Matt (00:14:01):

Oh, thank God. Yeah.

Laci (00:14:02):

Yeah. Well, not thank God because the movie sucked, but it’s like, whoa, I didn’t really know where he’s going to put him in there. And yeah, he’s alive right now. I didn’t know. I didn’t know he was still alive.

Matt (00:14:10):

Still alive to this day.

Laci (00:14:11):

Good for him.

Matt (00:14:12):

Looking very frail in his one scene. The last scene of a Christopher Nolan movie he’s in. Just wanted to front load a bunch of our thoughts because people love this. Some people love this movie, some people hate this movie. We’re very mixed on it, but I love a lot about it. I love thinking about it. I kind of feel about it the way I do about Dark Night Rises is it’s kind of a mess, but I like watching it and I like thinking about it in a very different way from Dark Night Rises.

Laci (00:14:38):

And I mean, it’s like every other movie of his, I have been thinking about it. And it’s not totally fair because I feel like it’s so long. The idea’s interesting, but I think maybe it’s too long to be keeping this complicated idea in my head. It’s frustrating to have to keep everything in my head for that long. And I know I’m not supposed to overthink it. I know the lady in the beginning that’s like, it’s more about instinct, don’t overthink it. But I don’t know that I have instincts for watching a movie with a concept I’ve never seen before. And there’s so much exposition. So I feel like I’m, well, that’s for me. These two characters don’t make sense the way they’re fucking talking to each other. All this is for me. And I don’t know what to let go of.

Matt (00:15:23):

The spy movie genre is very much about don’t think about it, just feel it. It’s about vibes. You don’t have to understand the complicated machinations of the plot. And I think Nolan thinks that’s true here, except there’s this extremely other complicated layer that my brain is not processing, so I can’t even enjoy this on the level of a spy movie.

Laci (00:15:40):

Exactly. And I really do like spy movies. What I was going to say, I didn’t finish my sentence. I’m not a huge lover of Bond movies per se. I just like the most recent ones. And I love Mission Impossible movies and the Thomas Crown Affair. And I think I’m naming things about spies right now. So I perfectly love the genre. I love the man of mystery or the man that just fucking does nothing wrong or is so good at what he does. I love all that shit. I love gadgets. I love that this movie doesn’t have gadgets really or technology. It’s more just like we need resources. We needed a guy with four trucks. We need an airplane. I like all of that. I’m following all of it. I know he worked with a fucking, what do you call this? Not a physicist. Is it?

Laci (00:16:30):

Is that who I mean? Something mechanics? He worked with a scientist?

Matt (00:16:35):

He worked with a scientist.

Laci (00:16:36):

Who did give him some pointers on what he could say happens in a backwards world theoretically. And one of them was that air won’t flow through inverted lungs. And it’s like that was the most distracted thing to me ever because how is blood beating through an inverted heart? How is dick fucking inverted pussy? How is pee exiting

Matt (00:16:57):

Inverted? Pinning that because I think that that’s something I want to return to.

Laci (00:17:03):

Okay. So I like the other examples. The wind is at your back. The other things are physical. They’re visually physical, maybe because I don’t look at lungs and understand how pulmonary stuff works. Maybe that makes a lot more sense to a doctor. But just I don’t know what ball to look at and I’m tired. It’s not fun. It’s work. That is my problem.

Matt (00:17:31):

We’re going to get now into the history segment of Tenet. Tell you all about the history of where this movie came from and its legacy and its legacy largely wrapped up with COVID. We have a Patreon, patreon.com/1weekrental where we’ve also covered Nolan movies like Insomnia, Dunkirk and –

Laci (00:17:52):

The

Matt (00:17:53):

Odyssey. The Odyssey, yes. And one more, The Odyssey. Yes. I’m never

Laci (00:17:56):

The remember

Matt (00:17:57):

Man. I’m the trigger man. Also have episode on Nightmare on Elm Street. Three is a bonus. So sign up $2 a month, get you two episodes, bonus episodes a month. Otherwise, if you’re listening on the podcast, please subscribe on YouTube. Get bonus content. If you’re watching on YouTube, thanks. Hit like and subscribe. Let’s talk history of tenet. Laci, I have five words for you. Sator. Arepo, tenet, opera, Rotas.

Laci (00:18:47):

Stop it. These are all in the movie. Someone etched it on a man’s door.

Matt (00:18:52):

Let me now read from an article in the telegraph from 2020 by Sam. Oh my

Laci (00:18:56):

God. It’s the same backwards and forwards. All the way up it. Fuck me running.

Matt (00:19:03):

And up and down.

Laci (00:19:05):

No. Who discovered?

Matt (00:19:09):

Why Tenet? It’s no accident. Embedded in this futuristic adventure is one of the oldest pieces of wordplay known to us. The word comes from the so-called Seder Square, a graffito of which survived in Pompeii, but which has also been found in ancient sites all over Europe. No. It’s the central word of five. The square is, you could say, one of the closest things the classical world had to a meme. And it’s a source of fascination. Its translation from Latin is roughly the sower Arepo labors at the plow. But it’s not the meaning of the phrase that has caused it to prove so fascinating. It’s the arrangement of the letters. Seder, Arepo, tenet, operodas. The whole phrase is a perfect palandrome. This it reads the same backwards as it does forwards. And this one’s even better than your common or garden palandrome because it also has four-way symmetry.

Matt (00:19:54):

Arranged in a square and you can read the letters up or down, backwards or forwards, and the same phrase emerges. So these squares date all the way back to ancient Rome.

Laci (00:20:04):

I am erect.

Matt (00:20:06):

You can find them all over Europe and the Middle East and Africa.

Laci (00:20:11):

I want a shirt. I think I’d like a shirt please.

Matt (00:20:13):

Okay. We’ll get you a skirt. So

Laci (00:20:14):

That

Matt (00:20:14):

Was a skirt.

Laci (00:20:15):

Give me a skirt.

Matt (00:20:16):

Get you a skirt. And scholarship has failed to reach consensus on what the purpose of these were. Were they just fun? Was it just like they’re so neat? Or did they ward off magic spirits? Did they believe they have healing properties? They can’t even reach consensus on were these pagan? Were they Jewish? Were they Christian? Were they some combination of all of those? We don’t know, but it’s freaking cool.

Laci (00:20:37):

Basically everywhere Latin exists, this existed, right? Because you need the, what is it called? The Arabic something alphabet. What do you call it that we use?

Matt (00:20:47):

The Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet or the Roman alphabet.

Laci (00:20:51):

Oh, I’m thinking of a calendar. There’s some other

Matt (00:20:55):

Reason

Laci (00:20:55):

To use Arabic. I apologize. I love that there’s a Latin word for all of it until you get to opera. The blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, plow where they just go, I don’t know, Arepo.

Matt (00:21:10):

So are Arepo labors at the plow.

Laci (00:21:12):

Oh, okay. Okay. Sorry. Arepo. And it does stand out as the word that’s not a word the most out of everything.

Matt (00:21:19):

It sounds like a place theme. Well, that’s because Aleppo is a real place. But these are real squares, real fun thing from the ancient world. Okay. Super fun. So who would like something like that? No one. No one we can think

Laci (00:21:33):

Of. The original puzzle box man.

Matt (00:21:37):

Christopher Nolan’s into that. Also, just into backwards shit. We saw momentum. He’s a backwards man. He loves things going backwards. But the thing is cinema. It’s always about cinema, isn’t it?

Laci (00:21:47):

And symmetry.

Matt (00:21:49):

When cinema started, as you can see in Francis For Coppola’s Dracula movie, they would just have these magic show houses where they’re like, “And look, a little cartoon mouse and it’s presented like it’s a magic trick.” But another thing you can do with magic is, wait a minute, I can make these images go backwards. Crazy. Huh. So this too fascinates Noland. If we’re talking about what kind of time travel philosophy do you subscribe to? He really seems like it’s a what happened happened. You don’t change anything. There’s no going back in time to change things. You’re only going back in time to make what was always going to happen happen. That’s the thing in Interstellar. That’s the thing here.

Laci (00:22:31):

Yeah. Yeah. A Ginny. That was a time travel word you taught me in the last episode.

Matt (00:22:37):

Yeah. A Jenny is an object that seems to have no origin. If Taylor Swift went back in time to her earlier self and said, “Here, I wrote a song called Shake It Of.” And she’s like, “That’s great.” And then recorded it, I’m telling people. And then it became a big hit. The question would then be, well, then where did Shake It Off come from? Where did it originate? And the answer is time. Jesus. Time exists all simultaneously. So effects don’t have to come after causes. They’re happening simultaneously. So

Laci (00:23:04):

As long as we figured out a way to get to the past, then we are affecting the. I have no reason to think that the reason I wore this green shirt today is because in the future I figured out how to get to the past and pick this out.

Matt (00:23:15):

Yeah.

Laci (00:23:15):

Got

Matt (00:23:16):

It. It’s all –

Laci (00:23:17):

It’s none of my business.

Matt (00:23:17):

It all exists. And Laci just keeps saying, “The future’s none of my business.” And hey, I don’t disagree. And someone in tenet raises the like, “But what about free will?” And then someone else kind of just brushes it off. And Nolan, I think, thinks that’s not interesting. And I agree with him. I agree too. I don’t believe in freewill. I

Laci (00:23:38):

Don’t believe in free will either. Yeah, it’s Washington that brings that up.

Matt (00:23:43):

Yeah.

Laci (00:23:43):

Yeah. And then the very direct on the spectrum scientists that I love very much, the lady in the beginning,

Matt (00:23:49):

She’s

Laci (00:23:49):

Kind of like, “Shut up.” She reminds me of the mammalians nurturable woman because she’s just like, “Let me just tell you about the fucking science here and you go away. I get out of my

Matt (00:23:58):

Room.” And that is the actress, Clements Posey, in a very good one scene performance. Yes. Her whole life is just study all the things that are going to kill us all.

Laci (00:24:07):

But you have a cool room to start. Give me a storage box and I’ll give you organization. There’s nothing that makes me want to organize more than a place to push.

Matt (00:24:15):

Yeah, we just keep finding more and more stuff. So here we’re going to read from the Nolan variations by Tom Schoen. Quote, “I remember when the first real good slow motion came into broadcasting. It was on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. When they slowed it right down, I remember the hands of the gymnast going around on the parallel bars. You could see this happening so you could understand and see things you couldn’t see before. You were looking at the world in a new way and reverse imaging is one version of that. Slow motion is another version. Fast motion is another. Time lapse photography, reverse photography. You’re seeing a real thing, but it’s showing you a world you couldn’t see any other way. There is no way before photography to see reverse imagery or even to imagine it exists. And that to me is what makes Tenet the absolute most cinematic film I have ever been able to put together.

Matt (00:25:04):

It can only exist because of the camera.”

Laci (00:25:07):

I can’t argue with you, Christopher. I can’t. I want to.

Matt (00:25:12):

Starting with Memento, he’s obsessed with a story can go backwards. And what will that do to the way the audience perceives it? The prestige is hopping around in time and giving you different perspectives, but also biased perspectives and lying perspectives and all of it.

Laci (00:25:27):

Your unreliable narrator

Matt (00:25:30):

Mixed

Laci (00:25:30):

With reliable ones. But which one’s the one?

Matt (00:25:33):

So he’s fascinated by the idea that the viewer’s going to see a story, but see only portions. And only he, Nolan, the puppet master, knows the whole thing from front to back. He is kind of like the Kenneth Branhau character in Tenet who’s like, “Hey, tell me what happens in this situation. Then I’ll go back through the turnstile and I’ll go in knowing everything that’s going to happen so I can win the scenario.”

Laci (00:25:53):

That’s some confidence though. You could tell me beat for beat what happens in a car chase, car wreck, bamboozle, switching a case off, touching in a lock. And then you could tell me all of that. I have no confidence I’d be able to do that and remember it in reverse order.

Matt (00:26:13):

Yeah. I’d still like hit the curb and go flying out of the windshield.

Laci (00:26:16):

When do you need to tap the lock with your foot? And then when do you throw me the case that’s empty, but then it’s not empty.

Matt (00:26:21):

But this whole thing of he’s using all of this to just get information that the rest of the world doesn’t have yet, that’s just being a rich person. Rich people get all the. They get the memo of what’s going to happen. The senators are like, “Oh, COVID’s about to happen. Let me sell all my stock or let me buy up stock in N95 masks or whatever.”

Laci (00:26:40):

I know he says his movies aren’t political. He finds cool things. They fascinate him and then it gets stuck in his head. And so he puts them in his movies when he can. The Freeport, fuck you that these exist. I know. Oh, heaven forbid we make any fucking tax money to go to other people on your Monet. The loopholes they’re able to achieve by. They’re not transferring this painting to America. They’re selling it to this Freeport and this Freeport’s selling it to that one and that one and that one. And then they’re selling it back to you. Thank you. Now

Matt (00:27:17):

I don’t

Laci (00:27:17):

Need to pay any taxes. I’ve bought it here in America.

Matt (00:27:19):

These are just these barnacles that have grown onto capitalism or these – They found place. They don’t serve any purpose. They don’t create any value in the world or any good in the world.

Laci (00:27:30):

No, no. We realized at an airport you’re nowhere. So you can get perfume duty free. I don’t get it.

Matt (00:27:36):

As long as we all buy in on the same fiction.

Laci (00:27:39):

They’re

Matt (00:27:39):

Like, what are you talking about? We’re not in a place. We’re in Oslo, Norway. No, no, no, no. We’re in the airport.

Laci (00:27:43):

Right.

Matt (00:27:43):

That’s a liminal space. We’re in back rooms.

Laci (00:27:45):

Because maps have lines when there’s land, but then no lines when there’s water. Water is, you can’t own it, you don’t, unless it’s surrounded by land. It’s patrolled by its own fucking law and police force who got to get there on the boat. Just draw lines on the floor that’s underneath the water.

Matt (00:28:10):

He was so pleased when he found out about these Freeports and he said, “This is my Bond movie. And I bet if I could go back in time and tell Ian Fleming about this, he would love this and put this into a Bond movie.” He’s

Laci (00:28:21):

Not wrong.

Matt (00:28:21):

He just must have not known about these.

Laci (00:28:23):

It is fascinating, but because the movie has to do so much and get so much out and explain because they’re this time travel component, I kind of feel like he wasted the Freeport thing. That’s so fascinating to me that it exists. And it wasn’t until listening to that part of the book that I really understood what a Freeport did. They try to tell you. Washington, I can’t remember two names, so I have to just remember his one name. And he has a double name, doesn’t

Matt (00:28:51):

He?

Laci (00:28:52):

Brandon Joseph, whatever. And because he is constantly being quizzed by people and then giving exposition as the answers, I’m tuning in and out. I’m like, okay, this is the third time in this movie the movie’s been on for 15 minutes that he’s had to rattle off some information about some shit he knows to prove he’s a good spy. I don’t know. I think the Freeport is way more interesting than what we really get to learn about it in the movies. So far, who knows what the other 40 minutes hold?

Matt (00:29:25):

They’re all about Freeports. Only in

Laci (00:29:26):

The future.

Matt (00:29:27):

It’s just people looking at art. In Interstellar, he got really into the physics, into the science. And here in Tenet, he’s really following it up. He worked with Kip Thorn again, but here he, as he said to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2020, quote, “I think the scientific method is the best tool we have for analyzing and understanding the world around us. I’ve been very inspired by working with great scientists like Kip Thorne, who I worked with on Interstellar, who also helped me out with some early analysis of the ideas I wanted to do with time in quantum physics on Tenet, although I promised him I wasn’t going to bandy his name about as if this was some kind of Scientific reality to Tenet. It’s a very different kettle of fish to Interstellar.” So it was like, “We’re just going to use science as sort of inspiration.

Matt (00:30:09):

We’re not saying this is plausible.” Now I think he even then tried to make it too plausible. I think if you dumbed this down, the

Laci (00:30:17):

Movie would work better. Yes. I think you got to Interstellar this shit up. Well, it’s hard because Interstellar, I feel like I learned a lot watching Interstellar, but then it lets go at just the right time. And I’m like, I get it. We’ve reached the point of where we really don’t know. So now Nolan is just being an amazing little tiny filmmaker and making something that could be believable as a five-dimensional world or why we’d use it. That’s fucking cool. That’s the right time to pull the plug, flip the switch. This whole movie is interweaving plausible with unplausible. And that is. My brain’s like, let go. Hold on. Let go. Hold on. And because interstellars, hold on, hold on, hold on, let go. It’s enjoyable.

Matt (00:31:05):

I think a different filmmaker like say Tony Scott would be like, you’re thinking too much into this, Chris. When he goes back, “This is fucking cool. He’s going backwards. Damn.”

Laci (00:31:15):

Yes, just show

Matt (00:31:16):

Me that.

Laci (00:31:16):

And

Matt (00:31:17):

You just need to do something fucking cool. So he’s also developing another preoccupation, which is the world is going to end. We noted this all the way back in the Dark Night Rises, continues into Interstellar, continues into Dunkirk, and here starts to really get familiar with nuclear technology as the engine of our destruction. You

Laci (00:31:35):

Want to know something?

Matt (00:31:36):

All right.

Laci (00:31:37):

He gets really caught up with this idea of the world ending when he becomes rich. He’s not thinking about it in Momento or on the following because I think he did the existential crisis thing of making money and went from someone who worries about money to someone who never has to think about it again. And when you reach the end of the game, you start to think about, “Well, now I’m going to die.

Matt (00:32:01):

The game’s over.” So he relates a lot to Kenneth Branhaus’ character who’s like, “Well, I’m dying of cancer, so I might as well make the whole world end as soon as I’m dead because the world does not exist without me.”

Laci (00:32:13):

There’s something that happens to people who stop worrying about money and it doesn’t seem fun. There’s worrying and there’s like, it’s still a factor in my life. And I’m saying right there’s the sweet spot. And he went past it fast.

Matt (00:32:29):

I also think it is because he has so much power. He has a degree of power that no other directors have. But

Laci (00:32:35):

Money and they’re the same love.

Matt (00:32:36):

And that I think makes him start to think like, “What if I had this power in other areas? What if I were a…” I don’t even know. What if I were the joint chiefs of staff and I could order a nuclear striker? I

Laci (00:32:48):

Guess. I think he’s just bummed out. I think that hierarchy of needs thing, he’s gone all the way up or down or however you maneuver it. And he’s like, “Well, now they’re just focusing on me never dying or everything being destroyed.” Because I’ve got all the stuff I want. Now I just need to live forever. And hopefully no kind of thing where they take things from the rich happens. Or like the world ends. As long as those two, three things don’t happen. No dying. No stealing from the rich. No world ending. I can play with all my He was always comfortable though. He was always – He was comfortable. Yeah, but he did not have a comfortable life. He grew up. He

Matt (00:33:26):

Grew

Laci (00:33:26):

Up financially comfortable, but had an uncomfortable life in a way. He was never settled. He was always going this way and I just think he never had any time to rest. I still don’t know that he has.

Matt (00:33:40):

Well, and he’s also a dad and all dads. I’ve talked about this before. When your baby is born, they’re like, “Look, you’re a beautiful baby.” And suddenly you’re like, “But you know what’s really neat is submarines.” And you start thinking about this kind of stuff. And then maybe you start doing some reading about the Cold War. Then you learn about all these very close nuclear scares, how many times the world came close to armaged. And then you start reading about Oppenheimer and he starts to get really obsessed with Oppenheimer because he’s got this natural storytelling brain that’s like. There’s a really interesting figure I can really dive into versus just sort of the idea of nuclear proliferation. But you start thinking about nuclear weapons and it really, really darkens everything. Suddenly it seems like, why isn’t everybody constantly talking about this? That the world could so easily end at any moment and we have just lived with that for 70

Laci (00:34:33):

Years. Well, and that we are slowly introducing new cancer and more cancer to a bigger and bigger population at Infinite. It’s just always compounding because of the nuclear waste that we have, even without using the weapons. There’s whole populations we’ve killed before they were supposed to be dead because of just fucking around with uranium.

Matt (00:34:56):

Yeah. And- And

Laci (00:34:57):

This movie is about someone forced to fuck around with uranium.

Matt (00:35:00):

Right. If we had ended nuclear testing in 1945, which we didn’t, we continued to do it, the waste from then would still be here – 25. Poisoning us. And it’s like it’s the sort of reverse Tenet. It’s the past is still here to poison us versus the future sending poison back.

Laci (00:35:20):

We weren’t thinking generationally like interstellars trying to. We were thinking of right here, right now, we need to get through this moment and this is the thing we’re going to do. And the half-life of uranium is 25,000 years and that’s just for it to die half. That’s for it to become half as potent. And it’s still got two more quarters to go. You can’t even think it. We fucked ourselves then. We are all downwind from uranium. There is nuclear waste in every state in the country. In every country on the planet nearly.

Matt (00:35:53):

With the nuclear bomb, you have the nuclear waste and then you just have the destructive potential of the bombs. And we’ll talk way more about this next week with Oppenheimer. But that movie ends with Oppenheimer being concerned that this bomb we built right here, it’s powerful, but what comes next is going to dwarf it in terms of how powerful it’s going to be. And it will end the world. I don’t know when it’s going to end the world, but that’s coming one day. And so when you start thinking about this, you just could get to a really dark place and think, I can’t ever stop thinking about this. There’s a point in history that he gets really fixated on, which is the end of the Soviet Union. Are you saying Nolan does? Nolan

Laci (00:36:28):

Does. Okay.

Matt (00:36:29):

I’m sorry. That

Laci (00:36:30):

They

Matt (00:36:30):

Talk about in this movie the most dangerous time for nuclear weapons because the Soviet Union had so many nuclear weapons and there was this question, what’s going to happen to them now? Who gets them? Russia gets most of them, but Ukraine gets some and Belarus gets some and uh-oh, are they going to end up on the black market? That kind of stuff. So he kind of builds that into the movie of this Kenneth Branhaw character taking advantage of that moment.

Laci (00:36:52):

Well, and the concept of how it could be a helpful thing to have the technology to undo the past, to go back and kill Oppenheimer or whatever. Someone was always going to make it is always the argument. But I think that the idea of knowledge is power, but also knowing things is also bad. Knowing things is bad.

Matt (00:37:14):

How can we get people to not know things?

Laci (00:37:16):

Sure. And her knowledge of selling a fraudulent piece of art, right? She can’t unknow that. And it’s what holds her to him, which is such a flimsy thing to me. I don’t know. It’s like who gives a shit?

Matt (00:37:28):

I can make a Batman movie and it can make $2 billion and everyone thinks it’s the greatest movie ever made. Dark

Laci (00:37:34):

Fucking hero movies.

Matt (00:37:35):

And now this is the only thing Hollywood, the only thing I care about in the world, movies. The only thing the movie industry is interested in is superhero movies, copying what I did. And

Laci (00:37:43):

I’ve doomed my best friend Robert Pattinson to also have to play a

Matt (00:37:47):

Batman,

Laci (00:37:49):

A poopy one.

Matt (00:37:49):

Can I spend the rest of my life building a time machine to go back and stop myself from making Batman Begins? Yeah, but

Laci (00:37:55):

Then you’ll have built a time machine, which is probably even more dangerous than. There’s no one doing it. The toothpaste will kill us all

Matt (00:38:04):

Outside

Laci (00:38:04):

Of the tube.

Matt (00:38:05):

He also starts to get obsessed with Soviet architecture and this sort of parallel world he didn’t know about though. The hidden Soviet cities. And most of this movie does take place in Eastern. It takes place in Estonia and Ukraine and Russia and he’s so – In concrete.

Laci (00:38:21):

So

Matt (00:38:22):

Invigorated by this brutalist architecture.

Laci (00:38:24):

When I found out that that fucking opera house with the closing concrete walls was real and that they fluffed it up to make it work again. It’s just been sitting. Yeah.That was brave. 500 extras in there.

Matt (00:38:41):

In real life, it’s in Estonia. In the movie, they say it’s in Ukraine. But

Laci (00:38:45):

It’s just so cool. Was it for acoustics? Why close the walls? They didn’t like people going pee while they’re performing.

Matt (00:38:55):

So he’s getting obsessed with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is mentioned in this movie. Not only is he mentioned, but the thing that the character Prius says about him, that Oppenheimer became convinced that by doing the nuclear test, they might set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. That’s how Oppenheimer, the movie ends with the world. So it’s like, this is what it’s all about for him. I’m going to read from the Nolan variations. “Oppenheimer is a perfect intellectual foil for Nolan. Tall, thin, highly strong with an air of the aristocratic bordering on arrogant. He was in the days following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts a nervous wreck. He smoked constantly, constantly, constantly, “said Dorothy McGibbon, the office manager at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project. One day, noticing that Oppenheimer seemed particularly distressed. His secretary, Anne Wilson, asked him what was wrong. He replied,” I just keep thinking about those poor little people.

Matt (00:39:46):

On November 25th, two years after the Nagasaki bomb incinerated nearly 80,000 people, Oppenheimer gave a public lecture entitled Physics in the Contemporary World at MIT in which he said, in some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish. The physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. It is among those included in an anthology of speeches Oppenheimer gave after the war threading the needle of his ambivalence about nuclear technology, which Robert Pattinson gave to Nolan as a gift at the film’s wrap party, the rap party of Tenet. “That is another thing that I find fascinating about this movie is all about can we put the toothpaste back in the tube? That’s what this whole organization is devoted to doing, Tenet.

Laci (00:40:30):

But the movie also answers the question, which is that the way to put it back in the tube is also just squeezing something else out of a tube and creating a technology even worse.

Matt (00:40:41):

Yeah.

Laci (00:40:42):

So the answer is no. No, you

Matt (00:40:43):

Can’t.

Laci (00:40:45):

But you got to do something in the famous words of Matt. So they just keep fucking being Spartan thinking of different ways to destroy the earth. Got

Matt (00:40:52):

To do something though. Yeah. So casting this movie. John David Washington playing the protagonist, not even given a name. I’m the protagonist. Pretty

Laci (00:41:02):

Cool name, to be honest.

Matt (00:41:03):

John David Washington, the son of Denzel Washington, was 35 years old at the time of filming. He was briefly a pro football player, star of ballers with the rock in Spike Lee’s Black Klansmen. Christopher Nolan met him at a screening of Black Klansmen at the Khan Film Festival. Spike Lee invited him and he said, “It was kind of tense with Spike right behind me, but seeing John David up on the big screen playing a leading man, it felt meant to be. I don’t think of actors when I’m writing. You’ve got to write the character the way you think. But what happens is every now and again, usually just in one scene, they just intrude. The actor puts himself in there. In this case, it was actually the scene that he plays with Michael Kane at the members only club in London. At some point, John David just stuck himself in that scene and I couldn’t get rid of him.” I mean, certainly seems notable this is his first black protagonist, first black lead.

Laci (00:41:52):

And I though it was kind of a commentary on how there’s no black bonds and there’s always a big deal about it. That’s what I though he was doing. But then I was like, no, this is Christopher Nolan. Nolan doesn’t get into the politics. But he wants to make a bond film and he did and he had a black lead

Matt (00:42:05):

Whether

Laci (00:42:05):

He wanted to do it politically or not.

Matt (00:42:07):

There’s this element of class where this guy’s good at fitting in the world of the ultra wealthy, but they keep pointing out like, you’re getting it a little bit wrong, kid. He

Laci (00:42:16):

Doesn’t have pedigree. He’s corrected on not knowing who’s knighted. So sorry. This random guy’s a knight. I didn’t fucking know. Sir Michael.

Matt (00:42:25):

Well, James Bond is an orphan who was basically adopted by the state. And I think Christopher Nolan, who gets to move in these elite circles, probably thinks James Bond would not be able to fit in. They just have this telepathy. They can smell it on you.

Laci (00:42:40):

Yeah. Well, and the exact kind of person that needs to be a spy is a person with no people. And if there’s an antithesis to that, it’s royalty. They’re just people. They’re just having people. They’re all about their lineage. An orphan literally has no lineage.

Matt (00:42:54):

Yeah. So this guy who is the son of Hollywood royalty, but trying to infiltrate the very white, rich, upper crust British world, getting it pretty close to right, but people can still smell it on him. You’re not dressed exactly right. When

Laci (00:43:07):

He makes fun of a Brooks Brothers suit, my soul hurts. I’m like, I thought that was the fancy kind of

Matt (00:43:11):

Thing. Yeah, I know.

Laci (00:43:12):

Oh, fuck. Armani, what are we doing?

Matt (00:43:15):

When I went to a lawyer’s conference and somebody made a joke about, yeah, and they’re in a men’s warehouse suit. And I’m like, well, I’m in a man’s wearhouse.

Laci (00:43:21):

And that was expensive.

Matt (00:43:21):

Yeah. We

Laci (00:43:22):

Spent $400 getting cup of

Matt (00:43:24):

Suits. We spent hundreds of dollars on this. This performance is really, really difficult. Nolan said, John David had to learn how to fight four different ways. He had to be able to fight as the protagonist. He had to be able to fight as the antagonist. He had to be able to fight as the protagonist backward. He had to be able to fight as the antagonist backward. Very, very complicated. What I didn’t want to do was shoot it with John David as a protagonist, then as the antagonist and just mix and match shots. The number one rule we realized is you can’t steal a shot from one scene and reverse it. It won’t work. Weirdly, almost everything was done in camera. So he really is fighting someone backwards. Someone is choreographed to move backwards. And then he is choreographed to move backwards. Which

Laci (00:44:07):

Is insane. That is fucking wild. And the flips are particularly really cool because they go a little too fast in a certain direction. They’re supposed to be a flip is what, the fastest at the beginning and then you kind of have some airtime. But a backwards flip is like airtime flast. And that’s how you can tell something’s not quite right with this flip, but it looks really cool.

Matt (00:44:30):

Yeah. He loved Robert Pattinson from The Lost City of Z. And he hired Robert Pattinson and Pattinson said he modeled some of his performance off of Christopher Hitchens, just being a sort of snooty bitch. Emma Thomas was a big champion for Elizabeth DeBecky. For Kat. Noland had only ever seen her in the movie Widows. That’s the movie that put her on the map, but it’s a very different character from Kat. And then Brana, Kenneth Branaw had played a Russian oligarch in a Jack Ryan movie that he had directed Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit from 2014, a terrible, terrible movie. But Nolan’s like, at least he can do the voice. There’s

Laci (00:45:07):

No

Matt (00:45:07):

One

Laci (00:45:08):

Else that can. I mean, I think he’s good.

Matt (00:45:10):

Nolan said, “Ken had to dig very deep for the characterization because he kept wanting to find the poetry in Seder. And I kept saying, No, he’s a brute. Just

Laci (00:45:20):

Be a meanie. I’ve heard

Matt (00:45:21):

A lot of people make fun of this performance. I really enjoy it.

Laci (00:45:25):

I think it’s completely believable. There is nothing wrong with it. I like that it’s kind of every day. I like that he’s kind of the gangster from Dark Knight. It’s like, yeah, this makes sense. This guy is a guy that would find some technology and just use it to be a fucking meanie. I don’t need a mastermind. A person doesn’t care about other people.

Matt (00:45:49):

Yeah. I think people think like, okay, this Borat voice you’re putting on, you’re way too – That’s a

Laci (00:45:54):

Voice.

Matt (00:45:55):

Yeah. People sound

Laci (00:45:56):

Like that. This

Matt (00:45:57):

Is Nolan’s first time working with Hamesh Patel, who comes back later for a big role in the Odyssey. And he brings back Martin Donovan for the first time since insomnia 18 years earlier. He’s the guy who tells John David Washington at the beginning, “I only have a word for you. Tan, it opens some doors for you.” And this is last time working with Michael Cain, playing a character named Sir Michael. And John David Washington says to him like, “Farewell, Sir Michael,” or whatever. So it’s like his goodbye to. I don’t know if Michael Caine. I

Laci (00:46:25):

Think so. I mean, if they’re going to innight the two guys from Spider-Man, I mean, X-Men.

Matt (00:46:32):

Yes. I

Laci (00:46:33):

Mean, I figured, but it seemed as like one of those Princess Leia moments where they really get on his face. Sir Michael. Yeah,

Matt (00:46:40):

You’re

Laci (00:46:41):

Right. It was, “Goodbye, Leia. Dead lady.”

Matt (00:46:45):

RIP, Leia. This was an enormous production. Went all around the world. California.

Laci (00:46:51):

Wow.

Matt (00:46:53):

Estonia, Norway, Denmark, Italy, India, England. This is also when he starts working with some new collaborators. He’s cycling out some of the old crew. Lee Smith, the editor gone, replaced with Jennifer Lame. And

Laci (00:47:04):

A different composer. First

Matt (00:47:06):

Time not working with Han Zimmer, replaced with Ludwig Gorenson.

Laci (00:47:09):

Something’s spicy about that. Oh, I love the score in this movie. What does that mean? You’ve literally worked with me for over half your career and then I’m just, I’m just going to go a different way.

Matt (00:47:22):

Ouch. Well, I think that you could certainly say part of being an artist is I need to collaborate with new people to find new directions. I don’t want to get stale.

Laci (00:47:34):

Okay. But Han Zimmer’s the entire middle chunk. I don’t know. I think he maybe just had a bad taste in his mouth for how long it took to find the right. No, no, no. He had a really good experience with Interstellar finding the score. It was Dark Night Rises. That was hard.

Matt (00:47:52):

And they worked together on Dunkirk, but then that was it. They haven’t worked together since. And this is his last movie with the production designer, Nathan Crowley.

Laci (00:48:01):

So

Matt (00:48:01):

He is out with the old and with the nucleus. He

Laci (00:48:03):

Needed very specific things here though. Nucleus, shut up. He needed someone that understood brutalism, right? And he needed somebody. The sound part, I get mixing that up. I mean, he is so motivated by the right sounds for his movies that I could see him needing that to help him have the energy or even some direction to do such a complicated story.

Matt (00:48:28):

I just think that’s a thing you find bands doing. They work with the same producer for a long time and then they decide, not because we don’t like the old producer, but we need somebody who’s going to bring something different out of us.

Laci (00:48:38):

There’s a moment where you’re like, “I have cobwebs and I need to shake them off.” But then before that you’re like, “This was such a groove. That last project was so good.” You’re on a roll, but at some point the role becomes cobwebs.

Matt (00:48:51):

But the movie’s biggest legacy is COVID-19. Is it? Warner Brothers had a nearly year-long marketing campaign for this movie. Teaser Trailer released the previous summer before Hobbs and Shaw. They did the thing where they played the IMAX prologue of this movie, the opera house sequence before Star Wars Rise of Skywalker. They

Laci (00:49:08):

Had all the masks in the movie, so that was good. Just

Matt (00:49:11):

Ready to go. Yeah. They were betting this is going to be huge. Now, I’m curious, how big of a hit would this have been in a non – COVID world? Because it’s a kind of an off-putting movie. Warner Brothers, they were betting this would be huge. This is going to be Inception again. In fact, people speculated this is a secret sequel to Inception. Gross.

Laci (00:49:33):

That

Matt (00:49:33):

It looks like it looks kind of inceptiony. I

Laci (00:49:36):

Could see you thinking it from the previews, yes.

Matt (00:49:38):

Release date of July 2020, but then that pesky coronavirus hit. The last major movie release in America was Onward in March of 2020. I have here the weekend charts from Box Office Mojo of that year where you go, March 13th, there’s the $53 billion in ticket sales. Next weekend, March 20th, $4,160 in ticket sales. Wow. And I remember being. I took our kid to see Onward that weekend. It was creepy as hell. The movie theater smelled like Clorox or whatever. There was no one there. And we saw Onward. And it was like, oh, maybe this. That maybe was my first feeling like, oh, maybe this is a real thing, this COVID thing. Yeah.

Laci (00:50:18):

I know it came to us slowly. Just different experiences at different places where we’re like, we shouldn’t be outside right now. I mean, I shouldn’t be in this store right now. I was still penny shopping, I think, for freaking the Dollar General. And it was such an addictive thing that we were getting into the times where we should not be in sharing spaces in stores without needing to. I remember penny shopping and being like, “What am I doing? I just got 50 packs of paper plates with American flags on them and I might die for it.”

Matt (00:50:52):

It was like during the week. So Onward is March 13th. I think maybe by March 17th was when all the announcements were like, “Yeah, world’s over. No more stuff anymore, you guys.” So Warner Brothers is like, “No problem.” Except

Laci (00:51:08):

For gardening. Look

Matt (00:51:09):

Out,

Laci (00:51:09):

Office, Home Depot, whatever.

Matt (00:51:11):

Well, it just stinks that there was so much bad information back then that they could have told everybody outside is fine and see friends just stand kind of far apart and you’ll be fine. And that would’ve saved people so much just cabin fever. So

Laci (00:51:31):

Much

Matt (00:51:31):

Domestic

Laci (00:51:31):

Abuse, so much suicide. Yeah.

Matt (00:51:34):

Your friend can come over and just put chairs kind of 10 feet apart and talk to each other in your backyard.

Laci (00:51:40):

But they

Matt (00:51:40):

Didn’t know shit like that or they just weren’t telling us.

Laci (00:51:43):

Or they knew people are people and they’re going to hug each other. They’re going to end up touching things.

Matt (00:51:47):

So Warner Brothers is like, “No problem. We’re going to postpone the release of Tenet two weeks.” Oh, that’ll handle it. August 2020. And at the same time, Warner Brothers is completing its merger with Discovery. New CEO, David Zaslav emerges as this major new Hollywood villain. And Warner Brothers is launching its streaming service, HBO Max. And they want to have Tenet debut there. And Nolan says, no fucking way. This movie’s meant to be seen on a big screen. A big, big screen. It was

Laci (00:52:15):

All shot in IMAX? A lot

Matt (00:52:17):

Of it was shot in IMAX. And

Laci (00:52:18):

In those locations with that heavy kind of hundred pound fucking camera,

Matt (00:52:22):

You

Laci (00:52:22):

Want that IMAX scene. Yes.

Matt (00:52:24):

Well,

Laci (00:52:24):

In the vast landscapes of moments.

Matt (00:52:27):

The

Laci (00:52:27):

Rest of the time he wants it to feel small. I am understanding Nolan. I do speak Nolan. Why can’t I?

Matt (00:52:32):

He has come under some criticism for insisting the movie open in theaters. They negotiated and Warner Brothers agreed to open the movie overseas in countries where COVID had been handled a lot better. And then in September of 2020, it opens in select theaters in the United States with extreme COVID protocols. Bring

Laci (00:52:49):

Back the drive-in, y’all. And

Matt (00:52:52):

It ends up becoming the highest grossing movie of the COVID era, $365 million worldwide, which is shockingly good. Wow. But really, how would this have played in a non – COVID?

Laci (00:53:02):

You can’t really compare it because so many movies decided to do a different kind of premiere and didn’t. I mean, the competition just wasn’t there. Or you can’t say what it would’ve been had regular movies also been making regular decisions as to when to release

Matt (00:53:17):

It. If there were no COVID though at all.

Laci (00:53:20):

No, that’s what I’m saying. Is that then he would just be in a regular world where he’s releasing with all the movies that would’ve released at the time and had more competition. Instead, he’s releasing in a COVID world and acting as though there’s not any COVID where the other movies are like, “No, maybe we should premiere on streaming.” You see what I’m saying? Yes, I

Matt (00:53:40):

Do. I’m just saying Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, huge enormous hits. Would this movie have been a big hit like those? I’m sure

Laci (00:53:46):

There would’ve been a hit, but probably not as big. I think there’s other things that would’ve come out. And just what were your choices at the same time that Tenet was out?

Matt (00:53:57):

The Fast and the Furious. I’m sure there would’ve been a Marvel movie, Black Widow or something. And these

Laci (00:54:01):

All had theatrical. There

Matt (00:54:03):

All would’ve been theatrical releases, but every time there’s a Nolan movie, it gets like three weeks as the big centerpiece tentpole movie. Yeah.

Laci (00:54:11):

I mean, he was on such a run. I think everyone’s going to go try it. What I don’t know that you’re going to get are the re-watches. Yeah.

Matt (00:54:17):

And it’s just not crowd pleasing in the way that Interstellar or Inception is. And

Laci (00:54:22):

You’re going into it knowing you’re not going to have fun, but you are going to try to figure it out again. So if you go for a second time, you’re almost aggravated.

Matt (00:54:29):

Here we have this picture of Tom Cruise who went to the scene in London in a theater, and he made a big famous social media post where he films himself wearing a mask and being like, “Great to be back at the movie theater.” Wow,

Laci (00:54:39):

Famous. Talks

Matt (00:54:40):

To people. It was charming, but he was like – Going

Laci (00:54:42):

To go to the ravioli store after this.

Matt (00:54:45):

Even more than Nolan, he’s like, “Movie theaters are the only thing that matter. We have to keep them open.” I

Laci (00:54:51):

Love that.

Matt (00:54:53):

After all that, and we will tell more of this story next week, was Nolan’s divorce from Warner Brothers. They were the only – God, I

Laci (00:54:59):

Was like, Emma, they got a divorce, Matt. When were you going to tell me? He

Matt (00:55:02):

Divorced the Warner Brothers, Yako, Wacko and their sister Dot. He’d only made movies for them. But when they announced that in 2021, all of their movies would be opening in theaters, but also opening on HBO Max at the same time. Fuck that.

Laci (00:55:19):

Nolan

Matt (00:55:19):

Led the charge against that. It

Laci (00:55:21):

Is stupid. So you’re just kissing your sister at that point. A tie. Who wants to split a box office and then the other part’s a mystery? Because right? He wouldn’t have known really how his movie did if he would’ve kept it behind a streaming service. Yeah.

Matt (00:55:35):

Aside from just love for the theaters, this created all kinds of legal issues because producers and stars and directors had point profit participation for box office. So they’re like – Right.

Laci (00:55:46):

But streaming services can even just keep numbers. They can just say this is number one in the country, but

Matt (00:55:51):

Even though

Laci (00:55:52):

You can’t prove it. But at least with the kind of release he would’ve had, you paid 20 bucks for it, right? At least there’s money that marks it kind of like pay-per-view. If

Matt (00:56:00):

They did it for tenet. The kind of

Laci (00:56:03):

Release they’re talking about was the $20 one, right? I

Matt (00:56:06):

Don’t remember if they were talking about that or if they were just saying it’s just going to open on HBO Max.

Laci (00:56:12):

Yeah, I guess I

Matt (00:56:13):

Can’t really

Laci (00:56:13):

Imagine HBO charging money for it when they’re already charging HBO prices. Because

Matt (00:56:17):

What they did the next year was every movie, you didn’t have to pay extra for it. It’s just like Godzilla versus Kong, you can watch on HBO Max. And it’s also in theaters. I remember seeing the Matrix resurrections in theaters and there was like 40 minutes left and I was like, “Eh.” And I just left and watched the rest at home because I had to – I

Laci (00:56:37):

Could

Matt (00:56:37):

Be jerking

Laci (00:56:37):

Off while watching it.

Matt (00:56:39):

I felt like jerking off. Pulling

Laci (00:56:41):

On the old

Matt (00:56:42):

Bud. The reaction to this movie was kind of mixed. Now, as we see, it has a 70% on Rotten Tomatoes and people were like, “Yeah, it’s good.” Kind of confusing though. But there were some actually really negative reviews.

Laci (00:56:54):

Well, you never asked me what category this is in for me of my two Newland categories. Stupid

Matt (00:56:59):

Movie for smart people or smart movie for stupid people? What have we got? Long

Laci (00:57:02):

Movie for smart people.

Matt (00:57:04):

Okay.

Laci (00:57:05):

And I mean it in the sense that it feels long because it’s work.

Matt (00:57:09):

Here’s Michael McCahill from IndieWire. He said, “What kind of picture is this? It’s big, certainly. IMAX scaled and a half to 150 minutes even after a visibly ruthless edit. It’s clever too. Yes, the Palin Dromatic title has some narrative correlation. Albeit in an exhausting, rather joyless way. As second comings go, Tenet is like witnessing a sermon on the mount preached by a savior who speaks exclusively in dour, drawn out riddles. In awe is flattened by follow-up questions.” Because when he was reviewing that, it was like this movie was positioned as this movie can save cinema. And critics went to see it. You’re going to

Laci (00:57:52):

Break it.

Matt (00:57:53):

Not this movie.

Laci (00:57:54):

Yes. No. Even the heart that is forced through it. Well, number one, we never meet Max, so I don’t care about that kid so much. I believe that she really wants her kid. But then they build this kind of thing that’s between the two of them. Why are you risking the world’s safety for this one woman? He got a connection to her so quickly. I don’t feel

Matt (00:58:19):

It.

Laci (00:58:20):

It’s forced. I don’t know why it’s there. I think it’s there to help us get pulled through because you need a love interest or like a, huh, I wonder what this is. The heart. And it’s like, I’m not fucking buying this shit. Robert Patton’s next to her more than he is. Yeah.

Matt (00:58:37):

The heart for me is only, and you haven’t seen this part yet. It’s barely there, but it’s Robert Pattenson announcing, “I’m from the future. You and I are best friends in the future.” Oh,

Laci (00:58:46):

I got goosebumps.

Matt (00:58:48):

But you don’t know it yet. And that idea of like, oh, oh, we have a very profound relationship. We just haven’t started it yet. I love that. Okay.

Laci (00:58:55):

Here’s what would make me care about that. How much of that does Robert Pattinson know? He knows

Matt (00:59:01):

All of it. But

Laci (00:59:02):

Why?

Matt (00:59:03):

That’s

Laci (00:59:03):

What I’m saying. Why doesn’t Washington know all of it if Patton could. And why isn’t he wearing a snorkel and what the fuck?

Matt (00:59:12):

Presumably he had to spend a long time in a chamber going way, way, way back in time so he can do all of this. I don’t know. We’ll explore all of that in our movie discussion of Tenet. Looking forward to that Seder, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, Rotos. He did

Laci (00:59:28):

It.

Matt (00:59:39):

So I’ve now watched the movie again, and this is definitely the most I’ve ever understood it. The question is, does it make me like it more? Do you

Laci (00:59:48):

Want to talk to future Laci who has seen the other 40 minutes of the movie? Let’s

Matt (00:59:52):

Hear from her.

Laci (00:59:53):

Okay. Hey, it didn’t get better. It didn’t get better. If it’s a movie where you You have to just let go and don’t try not to be all in the weeds. Then don’t give me so much weeds to whack and make it fun if it’s a ride. If it’s a ride of a movie, I should be like, woo. And I’m just like.

Matt (01:00:17):

I think that’s the fundamental thing that doesn’t work is it’s you can’t let go. Whereas I think with Inception, you actually could be like, I don’t know what’s happening, but this is pretty cool what they’re doing with Joseph Gordon Levitt and he’s running around in the hallway, so training all stuff. I don’t get it, but it’s fun. And the

Laci (01:00:33):

Difference is you’re following a lot of good actors’ emotions. And I’m not saying that Washington is not a good actor. The kind of actor he is, we already said he can’t. The only thing to override science in a science movie is the emotion of the character or the way the character’s responding to the things. And because he is a spy, that character’s written to be very flat, unemotional, unattached. You can’t have attachments. In fact, those are liabilities. So you pick the wrong genre if you’re trying to move us along through the science with emotion.

Matt (01:01:07):

I don’t know that it’s just that though, because when you’re watching Joseph Gordon Levitt, I don’t care about Joseph Gordon Levitt, but I can follow the action on screen in Inception. And just in a fundamental language of cinema way, the final 20 minutes at Stalsk 12, when you got four different people moving at four different temporalities, I just can’t follow it and I check out. But I think it’s cutting with this stuff on the yacht between Elizabeth Becky and Kenneth Branhau, and that stuff’s really good. And

Laci (01:01:33):

Reminds you of inception in the way that we’re cutting back and forth between the three temporalities or four. That’s probably the best stuff is the boat stuff. It’s her. Anytime she’s in it, I’ve got. She’s so good. Everything’s on her face. I’m responding the way she’s responding. She’s enough of a novice to be interacting with this information the way that we are and not trying to over-explain it. She’s just like, “Fucking, just give me the mask. I’ll just do it. Just give me the

Matt (01:02:01):

Mask.” And we’ve talked in the past about is the flaw of a movie if you can only enjoy it once you’ve seen it multiple times? And I don’t want to live in a world where you can’t have movies like that. No, no. Just like music, there could be really, really complicated songs where you have to listen to it a lot and then suddenly it clicks and you could like, “Ooh, I hear sort of the pop melody beneath all the complicated stuff.”

Laci (01:02:25):

Totally.

Matt (01:02:27):

It just has never happened for me with Tenet and I still like so much that’s going on. And this time really paying attention and typing down all my notes as it went. I was starting to understand stuff I had never understood before, but my enjoyment is still not going up.

Laci (01:02:41):

Right. There’s still something that’s not transcending the complication of it even once it clicks. And we were sensing that. When there’s a powerful story narrative or a compelling, any one component that’s just really fucking compelling, you start to enjoy it. And I can’t even –

Matt (01:03:02):

This movie has dozens of moments where I’m like, “I’m pumping my fist. I’m really excited.” So I don’t want that to deter anybody who’s annoyed that we’re not so celebratory about this movie or that we’re also not the podcaster who are going to be like, “If you don’t understand Tenet, here’s how we’re going to make it make sense for you.” Yeah,

Laci (01:03:21):

That’s not us booboo.

Matt (01:03:22):

Well, there’s movies I can sort of do that with, but on a more thematic level. Here I’m thinking I certainly get. All right. Years and years and years ago, we did an episode on Back to the Future part two wherein in that movie, they time travel into the first movie. And you and I were talking about it and realized if this were possible, if it’s possible for a future you to travel into your own life, then you should just assume future selves are everywhere, that everything that happens in your life is the result of somebody some tinkering from the future. Yeah.

Laci (01:03:55):

Future self.

Matt (01:03:56):

And I think Tenet is kind of like the serious version of that movie where every single thing is a thing from the future. And

Laci (01:04:01):

I feel like we even said this on that episode, but anytime someone’s covering the face…Because the thing about the future self is they know they’re the future self and they need to hide from you. So anyone is being incognito at all or wearing a hat or a hoodie, turn me into this. I’m going to be like, “Don’t touch me.”

Matt (01:04:17):

And so there’s things that improve Robert Pattinson’s performance when you know everything that he’s saying to John David Washington, he already knows what he’s going to say and he has to pretend that he doesn’t know things and he has to hide that he’s not in love with this man and maybe even in deep sexual longing for this man.

Laci (01:04:35):

Well see, and it would be more to me

Laci (01:04:40):

Unless I’m still not totally getting it. But the most I love Washington’s acting is when he is red-eyed and teary-eyed when he realizes he’s saying goodbye to his best friend, but Pattinson isn’t. And so then I’m like, wait, wait. But Patson also asked, am I still the fastest person to unlock a blah, blah, blah? And the other guy’s like, I know no faster locksmith. Well, that was the whole way that worked out at the end. Does that mean that these guys are reliving the same thing over and over and over again? They have to keep making sure?

Matt (01:05:17):

I think so. I think they’re in some sort of time loop where he has to keep dying like Q Jackman in the prestige. But he doesn’t die. He does die. Neil dies. Oh. Neil at the end knows he’s going down there to die. That he’s the one, he’s the guy who. We’ll just talk about it when we get to that part of the scene. Yeah. But he lived his life so much in reverse that it’s not sad for him to reach the end of his life because he’s already lived his life.

Laci (01:05:45):

I thought maybe it wasn’t sad for him because he’s just going to see him again.

Matt (01:05:49):

Then I think there’s also a way to read it that yeah, he will be stuck in this loop again and again and again and again. And they’ll start

Laci (01:05:54):

Over

Matt (01:05:55):

Again. And then I even thought, is all of this just one giant loop and they’re the ones who hid all the shit and then more people are going to come and they’re going to take the stuff from them and hide it and then people are going to. Because if you can go back in time, there’s this metaphor of like if you close your eyes and you go into a room full of hats and you’re told there’s a hundred hats in there, 99 are blue and one is red. All right, reach out and grab a hat. What color do you think it is? You should logically say.

Laci (01:06:21):

Blue.

Matt (01:06:22):

Yeah. And so it’s like if people can travel back from the past, from the future, then you should assume everyone is from the future. So this mission can just happen again and again and again, and every generation can take their own stab at it.

Laci (01:06:34):

But they’re doing fine. I

Matt (01:06:36):

Don’t know. They did

Laci (01:06:37):

It.

Matt (01:06:37):

Yeah, I guess they did. Maybe there’s no people from the present. Let’s talk about this movie. Okay. It opens at an opera house and we’re getting in tune. Nolan is a conductor. He’s the conductor up on stage. Let me tune up all. He wants

Laci (01:06:51):

To die.

Matt (01:06:51):

Tune up the instruments. Please, please, please.

Laci (01:06:53):

Death wish because he’s the first one down. Oh

Matt (01:06:55):

Yeah.

Laci (01:06:57):

I still don’t know what the opera scene’s for. I still don’t know. I

Matt (01:07:01):

Can tell you. I think I can tell you.

Laci (01:07:04):

I do love the juxtaposition of the really ugly. I mean, it just is that much concrete, that much dirty concrete. The exterior of the building compared to the interiors is shocking.

Matt (01:07:14):

Yeah, those Soviets, man, and their architecture. But

Laci (01:07:18):

What are they doing? They’re saving the good stuff for the inside. They don’t want people flying over seeing all their good stuff.

Matt (01:07:23):

They

Laci (01:07:24):

Want everything to look hard and maybe this is the military. Maybe there’s missiles in here. You flyovers.

Matt (01:07:31):

I’m no expert on brutalist architecture. I know it’s in rooted in efficiency. I don’t know. But boy, this seems like a popular opera. All these people are so excited to go to the opera. Wow, the opera. Or maybe it’s not an opera. Men, women, and

Laci (01:07:43):

Children.

Matt (01:07:44):

Actually, it’s just an orchestra. Maybe they’re just going to play Christmas songs for all we know.

Laci (01:07:49):

An opera. I mean, if anything, it’s an.

Matt (01:07:51):

It’s an opera house and they keep referring to this as the opera siege. I

Laci (01:07:54):

Know. And that’s why I was like, maybe Nolan doesn’t know that he made a mistake and put an orchestra in here instead of a fucking opera. I mean, I know you can call this kind of facility an opera.

Matt (01:08:07):

This opera house really is in Talon Estonia, though they’re saying this is in Kiev, Ukraine. The movie mostly takes place in.

Laci (01:08:15):

It is immediately. Because you know the composer is the most important person on the stage because of the hierarchy and we all understand it. So just the symbolism of him getting shot in the chest immediately is like, “That’s the guy. He’s important.”

Matt (01:08:30):

And then what I love is these thugs smash the elbows.

Laci (01:08:36):

Okay, please tell me. Why is this? All

Matt (01:08:38):

Right. So we got this opera house and outside we have a sort of SWAT van. And it’s confusing because soon they are joined by other SWAT vans. But this SWAT van is our hero, John David Washington. Presumably he’s with the CIA or with some JSOC organization, but it’s just he’s working for an intelligence operation. He’s

Laci (01:09:00):

Actually doing a test. He doesn’t know he’s being tested.

Matt (01:09:02):

Right. And the people who are in front of the van know that something’s about to go down and they’re like, “All right, it’s happening. Wake up the Americans.” And it seems like John David Washington might be asleep. They’re like, “Hey man, get out there.” And they give him some patches so that they can fit in with the Ukrainian SWAT team that is now arriving. And they all go in. And so these bad guys, these terrorists are taking over the opera and hitting the conductor and smashing the oboe and ripping pages of sheet music off of the stand. And then there’s this guy in a luxury box. He’s got the security detail. They’re like, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. We got it. We’ve got guns and stuff.” Okay. But this guy presumably is an intelligence asset that John David Washington has to go extract from the building, which he does.

Matt (01:09:51):

And he’s like, “Ooh, we also got to get my package. It’s at the coat check.” And they go get the package and inside is what he later thinks is plutonium and then even later learns is actually a piece of the algorithm.

Laci (01:10:02):

Right. Oh, okay. Okay. That was the point of this mission. I lost track of that. Is to get the eighth piece or nine, whatever it was.

Matt (01:10:10):

The ninth piece. Yeah. Just in terms of filmmaking, I mean, did you find this exciting? It’s very reminiscent of the dark night opening.

Laci (01:10:18):

It’s not fair to, because I think this is going somewhere and I’m like, “Ooh, this is like trap. Ooh, stuff’s happening in a big fucking auditorium or whatever.” And I was fully ready to enjoy the whole movie. So I’m like, “I’m paying attention.” So was this enjoyable? Only in such a way that I though it was leading to somewhere. I like the idea of a whole bunch of people passed out, like hundreds of people. And it’s nice that they’re passed out and not dead, but you got to step on them. You being around them is leading people to put bullets near them. It’s just interesting to use a whole bunch of extras as part of the set.

Matt (01:10:59):

There’s a thing where the bad guys have put all these bombs in the crowd and John David Washington, the protagonist, it’s annoying that he doesn’t have a name. His teammates are like, “Let him go off. They’re not our assignment.” And he says no. And that’s supposed to signal to you the audience right away. Oh, he’s a good guy. He cares about innocent lives being lost. And he goes and gets the bombs and then chucks them into the luxury boxes up ahead. And you see a really great practical explosion. And it is cool that the hundreds and hundreds of extras are beneath what is presumably an explosion really happening, a controlled explosion, but they’re all passed out. But then it cuts so quickly and you think it would be cool to just watch them not react for even longer, but I guess you can’t actually do that.

Matt (01:11:44):

Like the

Laci (01:11:44):

Scene and it whenever they’re in the library and only we could see the balloons of blood popping in front of them.

Matt (01:11:49):

Right. Then you’d have to do it CGI. Then you’d have to do it in post because you can’t actually make extras not react to a –

Laci (01:11:56):

Explosion?

Matt (01:11:57):

To an explosion. Yeah.

Laci (01:11:58):

But the explosion doesn’t have to be real.

Matt (01:12:01):

It’s real in a sense. It’s like when you go to Disney World and they show you controlled explosions and they’re still going to feel heat. He gets his team out and he gets the guy out, the intelligence asset, but then he himself gets captured by the bad guys. And they take him to these train tracks and – Where

Laci (01:12:19):

We walk upon Sergo, Seder for the first time and realize he’s been torturing someone. No, this isn’t Seder. Show me.

Matt (01:12:29):

It’s not Seder, I promise. It’s a different guy.

Laci (01:12:32):

You’re positive.

Matt (01:12:33):

One billion percent.

Laci (01:12:35):

Well, whoever it is, they’re Russian. And they’ve been taking teeth out and it eventually led to the death of one guy that we can’t see his face. Oh, damn it, don’t make me know things. Things are occurring to me. Okay.

Matt (01:12:50):

I don’t

Laci (01:12:51):

Like it. Anyway. Wait, what

Matt (01:12:52):

Is occurring to you? It

Laci (01:12:53):

Doesn’t matter. And then we see kind of two teeth being removed from the protagonist. So he’s not going to talk.

Matt (01:13:06):

Nolan has now switched editors and I still feel like I have the issues with his movies where I can’t feel the passage of time. I can’t feel like spatial relationships. And then there’s the confusing thing where the guy says, “You’re trained to hold out for 18 hours. You got till seven o’clock till your friends are clear or whatever.” And so I’ve still never totally cleared on exactly what happens here, but he withstands torture long enough to take his poison pill.

Laci (01:13:30):

He doesn’t want to withstand that torture. Whoever’s in front of him is taking out the poison pill for him. Right.

Matt (01:13:38):

So he has withstood enough torture and takes advantage of the opportunity to take the poison pill. That’s what I meant.

Laci (01:13:46):

He proves he will kill himself rather than give away information. Yeah. I don’t think he had to withstand any torture at all. He just happened to need some time. But what I just realized is the guy that gives him the poison pill is definitely fucking Neil. Gets him out of that situation. There’s a reason why we don’t see him. There’s a reason why this man is taking something out. He got it out for him, right? It wasn’t just in his hand. Yeah, he did

Matt (01:14:10):

Get it out for him. He

Laci (01:14:10):

Did get it out for him. I don’t know that it’s Neil. Okay. But that’s just like whenever the guy who is laying on the ground, we need a locksmith. A locksmith. He jumps up and saves him in the nick of time and then he’s out of there.

Matt (01:14:22):

Yeah. And that guy is Neil.

Laci (01:14:24):

I know. Okay. Hence the little orange key chain on the backpack. I know that. But I’m telling you, I think it’s anytime we can’t see someone’s face and they help him, it is Neil.

Matt (01:14:34):

Yeah. Futureself.

Laci (01:14:36):

No. In

Matt (01:14:37):

A sense. It’s not Neil. In a sense.

Laci (01:14:40):

I don’t know that there is a present self of Neil. No,

Matt (01:14:42):

I know because Neil right now is also at the Russian city, Soviet City doing all that stuff because all of that stuff is happening at the same time in the timeline as all the opera stuff. I only picked that up this time, that the opera stuff happens at the exact same time as the big assault on Stalska 12. And so the movie does reach almost. I mean, it goes more than halfway and then goes backward in time to the beginning of the movie’s timeline. It just doesn’t end in the same geographical place. That

Laci (01:15:13):

Would’ve helped, Knoling.

Matt (01:15:15):

He swallows the pill. And it is cool that he swallows the pill, his eyes turn red and then – No,

Laci (01:15:20):

He already had red eyes because he’s getting his teeth pulled out. This is excruciating. Well,

Matt (01:15:24):

We’re getting a closeup on his

Laci (01:15:25):

Eyes. Yeah, but you could see that’s what’s so effective about his acting in that moment. I’m like, oh, he’s really going through some shit. He’s sweating. He’s like when our kid came out of getting the dentist and had to be strapped down and was screaming for five minutes.

Matt (01:15:38):

And then the word Tenet comes on screen. And then he wakes up sometime later with Martin Donovan watching over him and says, “Welcome to the afterlife, son. You’ve been in a medically induced coma while we rebuilt your mouth. The suicide pills were fake. Yeah, man. A test. And you passed. You chose to die instead of giving up your colleagues.” And then he explains, “We all believe we’d run into the burning building, but until we feel the burning heat, we never know. But now you do.”

Laci (01:16:07):

Call back to Matt Damon.

Matt (01:16:08):

Yep.

Laci (01:16:09):

Plus he asked Dr. Mann.

Matt (01:16:12):

Which is handy. If you can just go back in time, this is a great way of testing everybody. All right, fail the test, go back, start over again.

Laci (01:16:20):

I don’t think you’re going to get a different answer with the same person. No,

Matt (01:16:24):

But you can go back and get a different person without wasting time. I don’t know.

Laci (01:16:29):

Not a lot of Dr. Mann’s out there, man. You just got to. I don’t know if you want to know.

Matt (01:16:34):

So he’s like, “Yeah, you have a new assignment. Okay. Your duty transcends national interest. This is about survival. Who’s? Everyone’s. There’s a Cold War coming as cold as ice. To even know its true nature is to lose. This is knowledge divided. All I have for you is a gesture in combination with the word Tenet. Use it carefully.” I’d say he’s not exactly careful about using it. He uses it everywhere. He flashes the symbol everywhere and everyone. Hope he does

Laci (01:17:01):

It.

Matt (01:17:01):

He just

Laci (01:17:01):

Doesn’t once. No,

Matt (01:17:02):

He’s doing it all the time. No,

Laci (01:17:04):

He’s not. I think he does it once or twice. No,

Matt (01:17:06):

He’s trying to get an every club. Tenet maybe. Tenet, Tenet, hand thing, the hand thing. He’s

Laci (01:17:11):

Trying to shake hands like this.

Matt (01:17:12):

What

Laci (01:17:13):

If we’re both Tenets?

Matt (01:17:15):

Gets dropped off at this windmill on the ocean. And my favorite thing about this movie is just the random weird locations like this. And that

Laci (01:17:22):

They’re real. Oh

Matt (01:17:23):

Yeah. Nolan went on a trip and saw thousands of windmills just in the middle of the ocean. I

Laci (01:17:27):

Also like that they’re standing all over the place. And who knows how far down the pylands go to keep them above the water that way? Because it’s an ocean. So you’re dodging windmills to sail in an ocean. That’s fucking interesting. Number two, it makes it look like the water planet because these things look

Matt (01:17:45):

Like

Laci (01:17:45):

They should be above on the surface. So them just standing up everywhere, it’s like their light poles. I mean, they are serving as that too. But yeah, call another callback, Matt. Woo, ring the callback. Siren, ring it.

Matt (01:17:59):

And they put him up in the windmill and he just has to live as this lighthousekeeper for who knows how long, probably a day. And then gets picked up by the windmill employee crew the next day and taken to shore. And goes to this brutalist building and he meets Clements Posey. He’s in Estonia in this building, Clements Posey. And she’s like, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m like a science person and I study all this stuff and I’m kind of bummed out about it.” And he’s like, “Hey, you’re Tenet. Tenet maybe?” And she’s like, “Yeah, Tenet. Yes, Tenet. Hand signal thing. All right, let me tell you about all this stuff. Our mission is we’re trying to prevent World War III.” And he goes, “Nuclear Holocaust?” And she says, “No, something worse.”

Laci (01:18:43):

Okay. Is this like baby language for people so smart?

Matt (01:18:47):

I mean, what –

Laci (01:18:48):

Acid rain?

Matt (01:18:49):

No. Thermodynamics. We’re seeing Nolan with his little trick of loving for one person to say a sentence, the next person to. And instead of finishing the sentence, have the next person set them up to say something dramatic. Yeah.

Laci (01:19:01):

A lot of – Way

Matt (01:19:03):

Worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of volleys. There’s a lot

Laci (01:19:06):

Of volleys.

Matt (01:19:07):

So she hands him a gun and she’s like, “You see that big concrete slab? Shoot at it.” And he’s like, “But this chamber in this magazine is empty.” And she’s like, “Well, try anyway.” And oh my God, it did it.

Laci (01:19:18):

Why do you already accept this? He

Matt (01:19:20):

Does accept it very quickly. Yes.

Laci (01:19:22):

And that it is a new kind of weapon once it’s going backwards. And that’s something that had to be explained to me. I mean, and reading the Nolan variations book really explained it too, that he literally taught John David to fight forwards as a protagonist, fight forwards as the antagonist, fight backward.This is backwards fighting. This is not reversed fighting on a camera. This is him doing things in backwards. So my point is, if he can be a weapon in reverse his body, then so can the bullet. And I understand that now. And it’s not like I didn’t understand it a couple scenes in either, but I don’t know. It’s annoying that nuclear Holocaust, it’s literally the thing that everyone learns about in fucking fifth grade, whatever. Two, oh yeah, I’ve seen these munitions before. A backwards bullet.

Matt (01:20:20):

But it’s like a describing part of the elephant thing without seeing the hole. Oh yeah, backwards bullets, of course. I think I read about this in popular mechanics. It’s just like, no, no, listen, you don’t understand.

Laci (01:20:31):

I feel like he’s in the business of needing to. Well, he’s constantly being questioned. He’s constantly working with other kinds of people that don’t know his reputation that are from other kinds of services. So it’s like he’s constantly having to prove that he knows what the fuck’s going on. And so that’s what that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen this before.

Matt (01:20:48):

So we think it’s a type of. It’s inverted. It’s entropy is reversed. What does entropy mean? Yes, entropy. Fucking. I tried. I tried. Did

Laci (01:20:58):

You Google it? Yeah.

Matt (01:20:59):

I mean, I read on Wikipedia about the second law of thermodynamics. I know it’s about energy in a closed system and the direction it moves in. But I don’t know. I was always bad at physics. I don’t get it. I

Laci (01:21:11):

Understand a closed system. I understand energy in a closed system. Meaning every. It’s like what? Every action has an equal and positive reaction. That’s the law?

Matt (01:21:19):

I think that’s the first law. The second law is that in a closed system, entropy only increases. It doesn’t decrease.

Laci (01:21:30):

Got it. But

Matt (01:21:31):

We’ve reversed its entropy, you see?

Laci (01:21:33):

Fantastic. We

Matt (01:21:34):

Think it’s a type of radiation triggered by nuclear fission. And he says, “What? You didn’t make it? No, we don’t know how yet.” Which is just like in Interstellar where Tarz is like, “But humans couldn’t make this big time library. Don’t you see slick? We don’t do it yet. We do it in the future.” See,

Laci (01:21:50):

And I appreciate. I appreciate this folksy ass idiot who’s actually really brilliant, explaining us to something that maybe we don’t understand, but in a normal person way. Not in these little quippy. No, the future’s attacking us. No, it’s the past. Yet. Oh, but before. Tomorrow. Every little reference to time is sassy in this movie and it makes me feel like the asshole.

Matt (01:22:16):

I just don’t see that. Dude,

Laci (01:22:19):

Instead of explaining what she’s talking about, all she says is this provocative yet as if she’s asking him to ask a follow-up question. Just fucking say what you’re going to say, doctor. Why make him go, “What do you mean yet?” Well, what I mean is just fucking spit it out.

Matt (01:22:36):

I like this performance because she’s playing it with this existential despair of knowing this is all. Everything I’m getting is because we know some sort of global cataclysm will happen. And

Laci (01:22:48):

They’re all working with this need to know, divided bullshit. They all have a piece of the puzzle, right? Because if any of them had all of it, and that’s for the algorithm and for the knowledge, then they’d have to be killed. So it’s like they’re all also just offering the part that they understand, but you can’t rely on any of them to be telling the truth because they’re on a need to know basis. And so speaking to the person they’re speaking to, they give them as much information as that person needs to know. I can’t tell who’s being cute and who’s just limited in what they can share. And it’s frustrating. So she

Matt (01:23:22):

Tries to explain how this works. Okay, try to pick up this inverted bullet and he can’t. And she’s like, “Well, you see, you need to have dropped it. Don’t try to understand it. Just feel it.” Which is also what Nolan is telling us, the audience. And I

Laci (01:23:35):

Get it. I get she’s there to help us through the movie, and that’s why she’s so early in the movie. And then he’s just like, “Instinct.” And there he goes again like, “Okay, know it all. Yeah, you knew a word.” I’m trying to figure out what it is that aggravates me about the writing in this movie, and this is how I’m processing.

Matt (01:23:54):

Well, what I like about him right here is he’s like, “Okay, yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. So why does it feel so weird when I shoot the bullet?” It’s like, Because you’re not shooting it, you’re catching it. He’s like, damn. Asks some questions like, oh, maybe the mixture of Allies could tell where it comes from. And then he stops himself and he’s like, “To be honest though, I’m not feeling like nuclear arm again in here with all of this.” And she’s like, “Don’t you get it? All of this debris, I’m finding it’s from the future global war that’s going to destroy everything. Even a nuclear weapon can only affect our future. An inverted one can affect our past as well.” She opens up her drawers and is showing all her findings. All the stuff. Now that we know what to look for, we’re finding more and more debris everywhere.

Laci (01:24:34):

Why does our past matter? Huh?

Matt (01:24:36):

Why

Laci (01:24:37):

Does that matter? If we’re going to die now, what does it matter that our past died too? Because

Matt (01:24:41):

We’ll die now.

Laci (01:24:43):

Yeah, we were already going to die now. I don’t care if it’s because my past died and then it kills me now or if it kills me now because it kills me now. I don’t care. Y should care

Matt (01:24:51):

If

Laci (01:24:52):

You die right now.

Matt (01:24:53):

I’m dead.

Laci (01:24:53):

She’s saying there’s a difference between someone going, “Pow, you’re dead because I shot you right now.” And butterfly effect, that killed you now. They both just killed me now. And she’s just acting like it could destroy our past. It’s like some kind of big, whoa. Again, if I’m not here to care, I don’t care.

Matt (01:25:13):

I just think it’s equivalent to we are getting killed right now.

Laci (01:25:17):

But he just

Matt (01:25:18):

Said

Laci (01:25:18):

We’re getting killed right now. I get it. The difference is we’re going to go into a war and we’ll have had that preparation. We’re in the war. Oh, I died. But what she’s saying is one day it would just be light sound. But again, I’d rather not go to war.

Matt (01:25:35):

This has always been your thing is like, if the world ends, the world ends. As long

Laci (01:25:39):

As we’re all going.

Matt (01:25:39):

If we’re all going down, that’s fine. You’re like Seder at the end of this movie. I’m dying, lights out forever.

Laci (01:25:45):

I would not take everyone out. But if we all died at the same time. It’s not moving to me at all. If there’s no one here to feel human emotion and sadness about the death of something. I don’t care. No one should. This is just ego caring about the human population existing again. No, but their things will be gone. So.

Matt (01:26:06):

Yeah, you’re more like Katherine when they tell her about the coming, “Oh, everything in the world is going to be destroyed.” She goes, “Including my son.” She

Laci (01:26:16):

Shouldn’t care because as long as everything’s going, as long as she’s going too. If you can guarantee me we’re all out of this bitch, I’m sad, but that’s better than me knowing I’m leaving a sad husband and sad children. That hurts. Okay,

Matt (01:26:34):

I agree. So if no one who’s now obsessed with nuclear war, the thing that happens when you start reading about nuclear war is you realize that we will die one day. The world is going to end because of this. Sure. The world is not going to. Climate change is going to make the world terrible, but nuclear war will end the world. Well, and

Laci (01:26:49):

It could be climate change that makes it to where we go to nuclear arms because

Matt (01:26:54):

Of the resources. Absolutely. Yes. And so this is getting the evidence ahead of time and being horrified by it. That’s why I like this scene so much. Well,

Laci (01:27:02):

And to have such a technology, but it’s actually so fucking limited. It’s truly amazing. You can go back into the past, but you don’t just get to go in the past, do a little thing, pop back out. You have to live it again. You

Matt (01:27:18):

Have

Laci (01:27:18):

To feel backwardsness. It wears and tears your body. It wears you out emotionally. So it’s like you could still have a newish body, but if mentally you’re like fucking Leo from inception, just a tired old man sick of doing the same thing over and over and over again. And

Matt (01:27:37):

Your body would age.

Laci (01:27:39):

It seems like it would.

Matt (01:27:42):

Even though your entropy is running backwards, whatever that means.

Laci (01:27:46):

I mean, if they’d explain, hey, but as much time as you go backwards, that’s how much juice you’re saving up for when you come back over. That would be cool. The fucking witch that brushes the hair over punzl. You brush the hair long enough and you. I’m pretty. Exactly.

Matt (01:28:01):

Come back

Laci (01:28:01):

A little hotter. Or your wounds are healed or something. Something like that. Your nails are growing.

Matt (01:28:06):

Well, they do. I mean, she has to go back in time because of the inverted bullet, but I think that’s just. But she

Laci (01:28:14):

Has to go back in time because she needs to stop him from killing himself.

Matt (01:28:20):

No, first they have to send her back because that’s the only way to stop the inverted bullet. But I think that’s because she was shot with an inverted bullet. In the same way that you can save somebody by performing surgery on them to get a bullet out of her, they have to invert her while they’re doing that for something. Fine.

Laci (01:28:37):

But she also needs to get better because she’s the only way to get Seder not to kill himself. Therefore, ending all of. I don’t understand. How does he know it’s time to kill himself? He knows he got all nine things. Dude, fuck it. Fuck it. My favorite part of this movie is the way that they bungee up to see Priya. Priya. And the little things they say and the way they leave her. I wish this whole movie was full of that. Yeah.

Matt (01:29:12):

That

Laci (01:29:12):

Was fine. The

Matt (01:29:13):

First 45 minutes are my favorite part of the movie, definitely. So they go to Mumbai, he needs to get to Sanjay Singh. And so he’s assigned a new contact in Mumbai, Neil. You’ll meet him at the Bombay Yacht Club, and it’s Robert Pattinson in just the most charming performance you could ever give. Knows everything about John David Washington, including he likes a Diet Coke. Oh,

Laci (01:29:36):

That’s true.

Matt (01:29:37):

And so once you know that they’re best friends and possibly lovers – Yeah, I could see that that’s true. You see the awe and admiration for him all over his face, but also like, “But I can’t tell

Laci (01:29:46):

Him.” I know.

Matt (01:29:49):

So they need to get into Singh’s apartment and Neil’s like, “It’ll be tricky, but I know a way. We’re going to bungee into it and it’s awesome.” And they get to sign Jay Singh, but quickly find out he’s just a front man for his wife, Priya, played by the actress, Dimple Capadia. She flashes the tenet sign at John David Washington. He’s like, “Oh, great.” Oh, Tenet. Yes, Tenet, Tenet. Yes, Tenet. Yes. So they’re sitting down and having a drink and she’s like, “Listen, I’m a weapons dealer. My husband’s a front for me. I’m going to point you in the direction of Andre Sater. He’s a Russian oligarch who’s in exile from the Russian government right now. Michael Cain will later tell us he has British citizenship. He made his billions in plutonium. This is a thing that happens with Russian oligarchs. You got to be on Putin’s side or else you got to stay far away.

Matt (01:30:35):

Stay on your yacht, stay on the move. Don’t drink any tea that you haven’t seen, that you don’t trust anyone who poured it.

Laci (01:30:43):

I mean, we are in a linear timeline with John. Do you want to know how I remembered his name finally? Jonathan Davis. I had to think of corn. Scare the shit out of me. His interactions with Neil from the time we meet John David to the time and he first links up with Neil, that feels very linear. And maybe that’s just because my brain is only capable of that. Here is us and we’re starting our relationship and then we get to the end and we’re partying. Our relationship’s over. And then Neil’s like, “It’s over for me, but it just begun for you.” Is it back at the Diet Coke place? Is that what he’s talking about? Is it just this? Is this a fucking

Matt (01:31:29):

Infinite.

Laci (01:31:30):

Are you sure?

Matt (01:31:31):

I’m positive. Yes. Because he goes on to found Tenet. He goes on to hire everyone. That’s true. He has a long life ahead of him. And they get up to some stuff. And the way Neil says, when we get up to some stuff, it’s like, “I’ve seen this movie. You didn’t get up to the stuff that that sentence implied.”

Laci (01:31:47):

Yes, but look at them. They’re running up a fucking building on a bungee.

Matt (01:31:50):

This isn’t stuff though.

Laci (01:31:52):

Fine. Yeah. The only thing that convinces me that it goes on is the scene at the very end where he kills

Matt (01:32:00):

Priya. But

Laci (01:32:03):

Man, did he show up fast? I feel threatened.

Matt (01:32:06):

Oh, because it didn’t need to be fast for him. She just needed to make a call. And he could have heard that a hundred years from then. That’s the thing about time travel. I mean, he would’ve had to wait a hundred years to travel back in time. That’s just an example. But they’re saying that all the time. Anything you say is communicating with the future. And what Seder does is just says like, “Hey, I want gold here.” And at some point in the future, it could be hundreds of years from now, they put gold there for him. And so it’s instant for him basically. So she calls, she makes a call and he’s instantly there, but it’s not instant for him.

Laci (01:32:41):

What if she needs DoorDash?

Matt (01:32:42):

Same thing. So you sold – We’re DoorDash

Laci (01:32:45):

From the past. We’re there for right there.

Matt (01:32:48):

And you know that’s how it would end up being.

Laci (01:32:49):

Yes.

Matt (01:32:50):

Just we’re going back in time. We’re getting –

Laci (01:32:52):

For race people only though it’d be like, do you want that? Do you want to wait and do it in the green way on an Amazon Prime delivery day or do you want it from the past?

Matt (01:33:02):

Yeah. And we’re getting people from the 1500s. We’re getting Russian surfs and we’re paying them. That way we don’t have to pay. We have paid them a cent an hour.

Laci (01:33:10):

Decrepit people with little pointy shoes.

Matt (01:33:13):

Which was a South Park episode. People from the future are coming to the past and they’re ticking our jobs. All of this, I mean, the thing is all of this, there’s been a billion jokes made about this concept way before Nolan ever. There’s a book, John Schwartzwelder, one of the great writers for The Simpsons, wrote like 20 novels after he stopped on the Simpsons. He

Laci (01:33:34):

Had a lot to say.

Matt (01:33:35):

And I only discovered them in the past few years and was like, oh my God, it’s like a golden era of The Simpsons, but in a book. And they’re detective novels. And so it’s kind of like if Chief Wigham were the star of a detective novel. And the first one is called The Time Machine Did It. And it’s about time travel. And all

Laci (01:33:51):

The dumb ways we’d use it.

Matt (01:33:53):

Yeah. And so he’s like, all these criminals are going into the past and looting the past and then showing it. And so the detective’s like, “I noticed all these criminals I’m normally on the tail of and they’re walking around with Faberge eggs and stuff.” So I mean, that is kind of just the same thing. It’s like I can go anytime in the past and just steal stuff.

Laci (01:34:09):

So really recession right now and inflation and all that shit could just be the result of too many times the rich people coming back from the past, taking resources. Our world is deteriorating and we’re going to a more bleak place, but we don’t know it’s because of time travel.

Matt (01:34:30):

Right, right. We’re just like, “What is a resort fee?” Why are all the

Laci (01:34:33):

Eggs gone?

Matt (01:34:34):

That’s the explanation. Where’s our money go? Inflation, all this

Laci (01:34:39):

Stuff. They’ve used all the oil in the future. And so it just keeps going up and we’re like, “Oh, it’s a war.”

Matt (01:34:45):

Yeah. Ticketmaster service charges. What are those? And the answer is the future stole from us. We got to pay for it somehow. So where are we? Yeah. You sold Seder inverted munitions. She’s like, “Well, they weren’t inverted when I sold them to her to him. He’s working as a broker between the past, the present and the future. And the future they can invert things and such and such and so-and-so. Listen, go get in touch with Seder. It’s tough to get in touch with Seder, but you’re a fresh-faced protagonist. Me thinks you can do it. I have a contact at British Intelligence. He’ll help you out.”

Laci (01:35:19):

But she’s just a guide too. Neil’s just a guide. I don’t understand why they can’t tell John David anything, but they all know something. I guess her and Neil and then the military we see later, they’re all in the Pincer move this entire time.

Matt (01:35:39):

And they don’t know enough.

Laci (01:35:43):

I think they’re the ones who do know. They’re the ones that guide him. And every step of the way, I also think Michael Cain. I think the whole time there are people put there to get him through this storyline.

Matt (01:35:54):

Yeah. And also his future self.

Laci (01:35:59):

When do we see him?

Matt (01:36:01):

We don’t see him, but they talk about him. How he recruits them all in the future to help him in the president.

Laci (01:36:05):

I know, but why doesn’t he know that? When do they go back and talk to their selves that don’t fucking know anything? I don’t know. Matt, you put this in there to make me sad. Look at him. Oh, he’s got his hand up his asshole using him as a puppet, don’t he? This is Christopher Nolan looking very young. Why does he look so young? I guess just because he’s sitting next to withering Michael Kane in the. I mean, he truly looks like he just popped out of a hospice bed and plopped down. He’s not even ironed. Look at him.

Matt (01:36:35):

86 years old in this movie. Don’t know if this is his final movie. And he’s still alive, but he retired. John D. Dubbs goes into the Snooty British gentleman’s only club and the actor from following is playing the Maiter D and he’s like. But he’s like, “Well, I’m here to see Michael Crosby. You mean Sir Michael Crosby, I believe. And Sir Michael Crosby is Sir Michael Cain and looks so much older than he looked at Interstellar. This is only six years later. Very

Laci (01:37:10):

Much. Yes. He has gone through something.

Matt (01:37:12):

And he was a voice in Dunkirk, but he wasn’t on screen in Dunkirk. So this is his last collaboration with Nolan. But yeah, I’m told you are interested in a certain Russian national. He’s tapped into our intelligence services. I’ve told him it’s feeding them rubbish, but they don’t seem to care. I mean, I love that this is a Bond movie, but now it’s also sort of a John La Crorey thriller because it’s sort of about just intelligence operations and the sort of bureaucracy of it where these people, these spies just sit at desks and all they do is hear intelligence from their sources. And it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not. It’s like, we just need to fill out some paper. So this guy, Seder, he tells me all these lies. As long as I can go tell my boss, Hey, look at all this intel I’m getting.

Matt (01:37:58):

It doesn’t matter. Yeah. So he tells him about these Soviet cities, including the ones Seder grew up in, Stalsk 12. In the ’70s, it had a population of 200,000, but now it’s abandoned or though abandoned because it’s still used for underground tests. And two weeks ago, the same day as the Ukrainian opera siege, we spotted a detonation in that city.

Laci (01:38:19):

So because he got the final piece during the opera thing and brought it to Salk 12.

Matt (01:38:27):

Stalsk 12.

Laci (01:38:28):

Stalsk 12.

Matt (01:38:29):

Yes.

Laci (01:38:30):

And he made it go boom?

Matt (01:38:32):

Yeah. His whole thing is to make it go boom. What I still don’t understand is why the good guys also want it to happen. But it’s because he can assemble it for them so that they can disassemble it. Don’t know. Don’t get it.

Laci (01:38:47):

They want him to try to use it and they want to get it before it goes boom so that they can have it assembled. They just need him away long enough and they need. So that’s why they have such limited time between. He has to have wanted to leave because the explosion’s happening. He just left.

Matt (01:39:04):

So it’s like they would’ve needed to find all this stuff anyway and he’s just ahead of them. So just follow him and he’ll lead us to it.

Laci (01:39:12):

No, they already knew where to look. They already knew the significance of that place. They just needed him to go there, put all the pieces together and be confident enough that no one was going to stop the explosion he was creating with all the pieces, that he could leave it and get away from it and do whatever the fuck he was going to do. And in those short minutes or minute, or I don’t even know how much time went by, are he left, they go in. And this is coming from someone who doesn’t know, so I don’t know.

Matt (01:39:44):

All right. Now, the thing about Seder is he grew up as a poor person, but he emerged from this obscure Soviet city with ambition and enough money to buy his way into the British establishment via Catherine Barton, his wife, who’s from this noble family. Also, she works at Shipley’s as an art authenticator. That’s how she met Seder.

Laci (01:40:06):

And he’s a brute and he knows that. He operates from the position of this whole industry does in fact. What you want to do is not know anything because unfortunately in this business and with him, once you know something, you die. And so that poor guy who’s digging the fucking plutonium with him, he looks at him, cracks him with the shovel. I mean, he’s been operating this way. If you look at this stuff and you know what it is, you’re going to die. So

Matt (01:40:38):

Don’t

Laci (01:40:38):

Accidentally look at my things. And that’s with her too. He got a stolen piece of, I mean, he got a forgery piece of art that she thought was real. And so either she’s bad at or she’s fucked either way. I’m bad at my job. I don’t have Shipley’s job anymore.

Matt (01:40:57):

It was because she was having an affair with the forager who made it.

Laci (01:41:01):

Oh, right.

Matt (01:41:02):

And she did that while she was married to Seder.

Laci (01:41:05):

Was his name Orepa?

Matt (01:41:06):

Arepo, yeah.

Laci (01:41:07):

Oh, I was

Matt (01:41:07):

Kidding. Arepo.

Laci (01:41:08):

I was kidding. I was just picking one of the names.

Matt (01:41:12):

So a fake Goya painting. Goya.

Matt (01:41:16):

Goya. She authenticated it and it would ruin her reputation if it was discovered. So this is your way. This is your way of infiltrating the Seder circle is the fake Goya. And then he’s like, look, no offense, but when someone’s claiming to be a billionaire and he just points his big fat finger at him, Brooks Brothers won’t cut it. Brooks Brothers. So he’s like, “But I’m assuming I’m on a budget.” And he’s like, “Assume the very opposite and slides him a black card.” All right. And then he stands up and he looks into the camera and he’s like, “Goodbye, Sir Michael.”

Laci (01:41:49):

Yeah. Princess Leia, who died recently?

Matt (01:41:54):

So Jonathan Davis is watching Katherine, Elizabeth DeBecky, talked to her little son outside of a school. Now it took me watching the movie 10 times to realize what’s happening is this is basically the only time she gets to see her son. Every day is right after school. In these few minutes before their hired help comes and picks him up. Yep.

Matt (01:42:17):

Very sad. Maybe if the movie were edited better, I could feel more emotion about that. But he pays her a visit at Shipley’s and he brings her his new fake goya. And she’s like, “Ooh, that’s extraordinary.” And she starts looking at it with a microscope and he’s like, “What’s it worth?” And she says, “Oh, it’s much too soon for that.” And he says, “But what does your heart tell you?” And he’s like, I guess because the camera’s pushing in on him as he watches her and we’re supposed to feel like, oh, he’s really seeing something special in her or really falling in love with her right now.

Laci (01:42:45):

And this is where the movie gets kind of fucked over by the fact that they figured it out during the process of filming, that the heart of the story was between the two men and not between. It’s supposed to be between Kat and him that they are building to that. We’re not stupid for thinking that’s what’s happening. And then they realize, no, the ones with the chemistry or the really sweet story is with the guys. So it shifts from very bro-y to sentimental between them. And it never quite shifts away from them, from Kat and John David hinting at something, especially because he’s fighting for her life. He’s seemingly putting everything at risk for her and her son. In his line of work, it does not make sense. It doesn’t make sense what he’s doing for her. He got what he needed from her and needs to move on.

Laci (01:43:35):

But so they are setting up a romantic relationship the whole time. So it’s just strange for it to abruptly switch gears.

Matt (01:43:42):

Because no one’s never had a romance. He’s never successfully –

Laci (01:43:45):

But it was written to. He was going to let Jonah have his way or whoever wrote that part. But then they saw something different when they were watching the dailies or whatever. And so when she sees him on the head or something and then leans her head on his shoulder and by forever, it’s just so weird.

Matt (01:44:09):

Well, I was complaining about this with the new Spider-Man and see our Patreon episode about Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is you watch those Toby McGuire, Kirsten Dunce movies, and those actors are fucking heaving with horniness for each other. Yeah. It’s like you almost have to look away. It’s obscene. But ooh, it’s got you so charged up. And they kiss upside down. And it’s wet. And the nipples are hard. It’s wet. Oh,

Laci (01:44:31):

I’m fat.

Matt (01:44:32):

The new Spider-Man, you have little bitty babies in Daya and Little Bitty Baby Tom Holland. Little bitty baby

Laci (01:44:37):

Nipples.

Matt (01:44:38):

Little pecks on the cheek and then ooh, and then pull their faces away. Ooh, that’s only for mommies and daddies to peck on the cheeks. So

Laci (01:44:45):

Maybe these movies are not about the sex, Matt.

Matt (01:44:48):

So maybe they looked at the dailies and they’re like, boy, not feeling a charge between these two actors. We have to figure something else out.

Laci (01:44:53):

Except for in what he’s doing. He’s not emoting these things. You don’t see it on his face. It’s just when he’s away from her and these decisions he’s making, it’s like, okay, I get it. Because at the Opera House you were picking up the bombs and this mission wasn’t about that. It was about saving the world, but you’re picking up the bombs.

Matt (01:45:09):

So that’s the kind of hero he is, like Ethan Hunt. A bad one. I can’t let anyone die.

Laci (01:45:14):

A bad one. That’s not your fucking job. If it’s really the world or this chick, you’re fucking thinking with your dick and I didn’t mean to rhyme there.

Matt (01:45:26):

Yeah. The paintings, what does your heart tell you? And yeah, I know it’s a fake. It’s a fake. It’s a fake. We cut ahead to them having dinner and he tells her a story about I bought it from an irate Swiss banker. Then I traced it to Arepo and that led me here to you. And can you get me in touch with your husband please? And she’s like, no, no, no, no. No one meets my husband. And he’s like, yeah, but if you don’t let me meet your husband, I’ll tell him it’s a fake. And she says, no, he knows it’s a fake. It’s his leverage over me. You see?

Laci (01:45:57):

Let me tell you a whole lot about my personal life.

Matt (01:45:59):

Because Washington’s like, he knows that he spent $9 million on a fake. And she’s like, yeah, that barely covers the cost of the holiday. He just made me go on. And he says, where’d you go? Mars? God. And she’s – No,

Laci (01:46:12):

Vietnam. And I really though I could love him again. Why are you telling me this strange lady?

Matt (01:46:18):

Who can she talk to? All she talks to is hired goons. But him saying that is like, listen man, you’re trying to fit in this world. You can’t do things like hear $9 million and go like, gazonga. That’s a lot of money. Yeah. You have the look, the clothes, but you just don’t carry yourself like you belong. The poor dad under the sofa in Parasite, the rich dad can smell you. So the drawing, the drawings, his hold over me, he threatened me with police in prison.

Laci (01:46:47):

Oh, no.

Matt (01:46:50):

You said this was legitimate, but it’s not. But yeah, I mean, I guess that is, you got your abusive husband and then rich abusive husband, that’s the works. I

Laci (01:47:01):

Mean, the real power is like you’d never win in a custody battle. You never would. He’s got infinite money glitch. So it’s not the fucking painting, dude. It’s overly complicated. It doesn’t need to be this way. They just needed a fucking Arepa in the goddamn story. I’m convinced. She needed to love her for no fricking reason. She doesn’t need to be held there by a painting. It’s stupid. I mean, it’s a McGuffin. I don’t know what it is. It’s a widget so that he can then prove his loyalty to her by going to the Freeport and destroying it, even though he doesn’t.

Matt (01:47:36):

Well, yeah. And then it’s to show that Seder, you cannot defeat him because he has the cheat of, I know the future. I know everything that’s going to happen. So I went and removed the painting before they could steal it.

Laci (01:47:47):

I lied. My favorite part of the movie is when she’s talking. And it’s such a weird moment too because she’s like. And then I saw a girl jump and I was jealous of her. And he thinks jealous because she was with your husband. We’re taking some leaps here, but okay. No, because she was free. So I do like that it ends up being her.

Matt (01:48:08):

I do too. It’s something nicely poetic of, I’m jealous of me, of my future self. But you get me an introduction to your husband, I’ll steal the drawing from you and I’ll be good. But then the hired goons come and have a big battle with him in the kitchen, including cheese grater on the face. But he easily overpowers all

Laci (01:48:29):

Of them. Yeah. I am impressed with his physicality as an actor. If he learned to fight for this movie –

Matt (01:48:34):

Yeah, me too. It’s good.

Laci (01:48:35):

I mean, it’s convincing. He’s one of those people who you’re going with it.

Matt (01:48:39):

But still another thing with Nolan is kind of bloodless. You don’t see the impact of the cheese grater. And this movie’s rated R. She showed me a little blood.

Laci (01:48:48):

Okay, but I don’t want to see the cheese grater face.

Matt (01:48:50):

So he goes and meets up with her after she talks to her son after school. The kid’s name is Max. Why

Laci (01:48:58):

Is this movie rated R?

Matt (01:49:00):

Some fucks. Look at me. I’m a fucking tiger.

Laci (01:49:06):

What a weird reason.

Matt (01:49:07):

It doesn’t need to be rated R. It

Laci (01:49:09):

Doesn’t.

Matt (01:49:10):

Maybe it’s not rated R.

Laci (01:49:11):

Okay. Because I mean, he’s blockbuster guy. I don’t think Spielberg has any rated Rs and neither does he.

Matt (01:49:16):

Oh, Oppenheimer and Odyssey are both rated R. PG-13. Yeah. But they say fuck. It

Laci (01:49:21):

Didn’t feel like an R, but you get a certain amount of fucks and you can trade them for a shit.

Matt (01:49:26):

That’s true. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well – He’s

Laci (01:49:29):

Christopher Knulling, baby.

Matt (01:49:31):

So she’s picking up her son Max from school and he’s like, “Anna says she’s going to take me to Pompei and we’ll see the lava.” And she’s like, “Yeah, well, I’m going to be there with you too, darling. I promise. I’m totally not lying.” And he’s like, “All right, bye mom.”

Laci (01:49:45):

She really did think she was going to

Matt (01:49:46):

Go. And oh, recall that Pompe is where one of the sator stones was discovered.

Laci (01:49:52):

It also was leveled by war, right?

Matt (01:49:54):

Oh, lava.

Laci (01:49:56):

That’s what we were just talking about. Okay.

Matt (01:49:59):

The protagonist arrives and he’s like, “He’s a cute kid.” And she says, “He’s everything.” So she starts telling him about the Freeport at the Oslo Airport. Her husband started a company called Rotas, a construction company called Rotas.

Laci (01:50:12):

I’m so glad you’re letting us know that.

Matt (01:50:13):

That built a network of freeports around the world to store art that can’t be taxed. She helped him do it. I didn’t catch

Laci (01:50:20):

That part. I didn’t catch that part. Okay. Oh, okay. He’s the reason there are freeports?

Matt (01:50:25):

Not the reason they are freeports.

Laci (01:50:27):

Specializes in them.

Matt (01:50:28):

Yeah. Which I think is like –

Laci (01:50:32):

And they all come with this turnstile, but what do we use it for? Don’t

Matt (01:50:35):

Ever use it. Don’t ask. Interesting stuff going on with him as this, you can squint and see this commentary about the wealthy, of he just emerged from nowhere

Matt (01:50:46):

And bought his way into the establishment. And the thing is, go back, take any wealthy family, go back, I don’t know how long, and you will reach a point where there was just a guy who probably committed a crime of some sort, and then just jump ahead hundreds of years and now it’s a wealthy family. And he just had a cheat code to jump ahead. And I think in The Odyssey, you have that with Robert Pattinson’s character who’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to try to become king. I’ll marry the queen.” And you think, oh, that’s so dishonorable. But Odysseus’s father or great-grandfather or somebody did something similar. Yeah.

Laci (01:51:16):

You got to get in.

Matt (01:51:18):

And then these freeports, it’s like we have this fiction of an airport as a non-taxable area, and the rich want a place to smuggle their goods. So we’re going to build billion dollar industries to facilitate it. To just have this parasite growing on top of the global economy.

Laci (01:51:36):

It’s like a stamped collection they never get to see. It’s just they know they own it and they can go visit it if they want to, right?

Matt (01:51:42):

Oh yeah. And so much – You

Laci (01:51:44):

Can get it from there if you want to, but it seems like the point is having it there.

Matt (01:51:48):

Yeah. So if you actually bring it into the country, you have to pay import taxes on it.

Laci (01:51:52):

Well, right. And also it’s a lot of stolen art. So if you bring it into the country, you also get arrested.

Matt (01:51:57):

That too. But they say in the freeports, nothing illegal. But then they also say, “But we don’t ask questions.” Yeah, but in

Laci (01:52:04):

The book, they do say that these things are full of stolen things. Things you can’t actually buy or trade because they’re known to be stolen and they’re so well known that you’d be caught to have it. But to own a Monet, even if it’s stolen, at least you could put it in a freeport.

Matt (01:52:19):

Right. But it’s one of those things where like, but the legal thing is also a scandal on its own. Why is there this tax-free area?

Laci (01:52:28):

I just think it’s interesting that you steal a Monet and you just want the. It’s cool enough to own it even if you never get to see it. It’s in this place that keeps it safe from people knowing it’s yours. And it’s like it becomes anonymous once it’s in this thing, but you know you own it because you can’t even hang it up at your house if you did

Matt (01:52:50):

Jail. Most billionaires don’t buy art because they like art. It’s money laundering. You just have to put your cash somewhere.

Laci (01:52:56):

Got it.

Matt (01:52:57):

Put it in

Laci (01:52:57):

The back of the frames.

Matt (01:52:58):

Art, guitars and guns are the things you buy. They’ll always be good to exchange for cash.

Laci (01:53:06):

Are you giving money laundering

Matt (01:53:07):

Fucking advice? I guess I am.

Laci (01:53:09):

And Toyotas and Hondas.

Matt (01:53:11):

I love this Norwegian tour guide. We have no priorities. He’s

Laci (01:53:15):

So into it.

Matt (01:53:16):

Yes.

Laci (01:53:16):

He’s such a little salesman.

Matt (01:53:19):

And the score of this movie is so great. And I love it’s just going fucking nuts right here. And I love that the dialogue’s going in and out as he just looks around at the freeport and asks all these questions.

Laci (01:53:30):

Who cares what that man is saying? Yeah.

Matt (01:53:33):

And you just know, Nolan must have had such a fucking big boner about this when he learned about Freeport’s.

Laci (01:53:38):

Yeah. He stuck it in his little head to use it at a different time. He just knew it would be a perfect bond height situation.

Matt (01:53:45):

And then an even bigger boner when he’s like, wait a minute, an airplane crash on the ground. An airplane crashes into the airport. Holy shit.

Laci (01:53:55):

And gold bars are shooting

Matt (01:53:56):

Out of death. Gold bars shoot out of the airplane. Wow.

Laci (01:53:59):

A perfectly normal man does a normal thing where he puts it in his jacket, then he gets killed with it. There’s blood there. It slips out of his hand, the

Matt (01:54:06):

Gold bar. You’re right. We meet Hamesh Patel as Mahir and he’s a lot of fun in this movie. And maybe this guy’s also inverted because he’s just kind of got this like, I’m fucking over it attitude. Yeah, no fucking problem. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll get caught as terrorist. We’ll figure it out. It doesn’t matter.

Laci (01:54:24):

You know what? That’s kind of fucking interesting. Everyone that’s kind of over it is your tell. And I wish I’d though of that sooner because yes, because Pyra. Priya? Priya seems over it. She’s just like, no, this is a dialogue I’ve said to you a million times. I’m going to do this so you know enough to get through this mission again. That’s how she’ss talking. Michael Cain’s like, he sure looks like shit. Maybe here’s the card, do it again. And it’s all –

Matt (01:54:51):

Yeah, that guy’s birth certificate, he’s 30 years old, Michael Kane. He’s just going backwards so much.

Laci (01:54:56):

Well, I just mean that I think you can read this movie as this is a loop that they’ve all done a bunch of times. And I’m sure he gets a little bit out of it and they figured out a little bit more, a little bit more. But to get this just right, they’ve had to do it a lot. And maybe this is the 50th, 75th time they’ve all done it and it worked this time.

Matt (01:55:18):

It’s Groundhog Day.

Laci (01:55:19):

Well, right. He did the right kind of life. But that would be so interesting if we learn like he finally got it, bro. Bye.

Matt (01:55:30):

But unlike something like Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow, they remember it all. They’re not forgetting it with each loop recently.

Laci (01:55:36):

That’s why I think that we get up to some stuff means everything we’re watching in this movie. I don’t think they have a

Matt (01:55:41):

Life

Laci (01:55:42):

Beyond here.

Matt (01:55:43):

Yes, they do. I mean, it’d be kind of funny if that were it.

Laci (01:55:47):

I don’t think it’s funny. I think they’ve gone through a lot here. That’s a lot of life to live, what they’ve been through.

Matt (01:55:53):

Because he’s talking about stuff that you protagonists are going to experience in the future. You haven’t lived it yet. He

Laci (01:55:59):

Is because he keeps getting wiped fucking clean over and over again.

Matt (01:56:02):

No, his memory doesn’t get erased.

Laci (01:56:04):

You don’t fucking know that. I could be just as right about this.

Matt (01:56:08):

If they get caught, he’s helping them plan the thing. We’re going to hijack a freight plane that’s carrying all these treasury gold bars. We’ll make the crew slide off the plane.

Laci (01:56:20):

Which looks painful

Matt (01:56:21):

As shit, man. I know. And Washington’s like, “I mean, what about the crew?” And he’s like, “Oh, what? What fucking? They’ll be fine. They’ll be fucking fine. It doesn’t matter.”

Laci (01:56:27):

But it’s not a bounce house, my pilot man. You didn’t have to go whooping. Boom.

Matt (01:56:35):

Always wanted to do it though. Always though about it.That’s

Laci (01:56:37):

Fine. But gently get down. You’ve had training on this, I’m sure. You gently get down and then slide down it so you roll onto the ground. Not bow.

Matt (01:56:45):

You’re not trained to do it at gunpoint.

Laci (01:56:47):

In

Matt (01:56:47):

The

Laci (01:56:47):

Land.

Matt (01:56:48):

At gunpoint.

Laci (01:56:48):

You’re supposed to land in water.

Matt (01:56:50):

Right. And what he says is we’re going to dump the treasury gold and people will be paying attention to that instead of, oh shit, the plane just ran into the back wall of the freeport. And I do love the shot of when all the gold spills on the runway and everybody’s just standing there like, “What are

Laci (01:57:08):

We doing?” It feels like it’s illegal.

Matt (01:57:10):

Yeah. Yes. Nope. My hands are up here.

Laci (01:57:13):

Right. I have not been practicing how to fit gold bar size items on my asshole for years. I have not. Future self here.

Matt (01:57:21):

And they say, “Well, what if you get caught?” And they’re like, “Well, we won’t get caught. Okay, but if you do.” And he’s like, “If we do, no one’s going to get killed. They’re going to say it’s terrorism, but there’s no debts. We’ll get extradited somewhere. We’ll disappear into the system. No problem.”

Laci (01:57:33):

No, but you’re right. It’s so much more interesting that. No, he’s just like, “Come on, come on, John David. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Okay. You’re an exhausting man to do something a hundred times with. Can I just tell you?”

Matt (01:57:44):

Right. Because if this guy could not know about backwards stuff, about traveling backwards. He could just be an intelligence operative who’s like, “I work for the CIA. They’ll get me out of whatever country.”

Laci (01:57:56):

I go to prison, man. He is on a need to know thing. He doesn’t know about backwards stuff, but he knows that the same fucking man with the same memory issue comes back and goes. No, because then that would mean that he’s running a plane into a building over and over. I’m telling you, it reads as though he’s done this exact thing a bunch, and he already knows it’s fine.

Matt (01:58:14):

I just don’t think that’s what’s happening.

Laci (01:58:16):

I can’t rely on your brain. It’s let us down.

Matt (01:58:20):

But I love the Freeport heist. It’s so much fun. It’s so well done. And it’s intercut with Washington and Patten Center going through their customers of the Freeport and the very excited Norwegian guys like, “Ah, right here, gentile man.” And very, very excited. And I love Hamesh Patel on the plane. He’s like a cargo guy. And the way he overpowers the security guy on the plane, he’s like, “Hey, does this look like a vegetarian plate to you? I don’t know, because it looks like it’s me. I can’t really tell a vegetarian.” And he just keeps mumbling about this as he chloroforms the guy. And I just love that.

Laci (01:58:54):

You got to think these turnstiles are actual architecture that Nolan discovered. This just really strikes me as something that he will have seen and been like, “I’m using that. I don’t know what I’m using it for. I don’t know what it’s going to do in my movie, but one day I am recycling the knowledge of

Matt (01:59:07):

These

Laci (01:59:07):

Turnstiles.” And the way it’s split like this, this really might be a way that. It’s just an airport protocol. It’s security. This old-fashioned, let me see if you have a plutonium on you or something. And it’s divided and you can see through it because it’s just a way of keeping security. It’s something simple and old-fashioned.

Matt (01:59:26):

And once again, production designed by Nathan Crowley. Great work. And we’re looking at the screenshot of the turnstile. It looks really old and worn out. And presumably this thing’s been around for hundreds of years in the future.

Laci (01:59:37):

And what I am implying is that it’s real.

Matt (01:59:40):

It’s a real thing.

Laci (01:59:41):

And that it’s actually been there.

Matt (01:59:43):

And so the plane hits the wall of the Freeport. The fire alarm goes off. Now Pattinson and Washington have to hold their breath while they pick the locks. And the Nolan difference I think is when they get into the room where they can breathe, they’re heaving and you feel, “Oh my God, fuck.” Of course. And in like an MC Yumavu would be nothing. It would

Laci (02:00:03):

Feel like nothing. Anytime anyone holds their breath, you can pretty much rely on a.

Matt (02:00:10):

There’s no interest in making them seem cool. They collapse to the ground.

Laci (02:00:14):

Oh,

Matt (02:00:14):

Sure. They get into Seder’s vault, awesome, the big glass partitions petition with the bullet holes, and there’s one man on each side leading to a turnstile and Pattenson’s like, “The hell happened here.” Almost like he’s lacy dropping the what and just saying, “The hell happened here.” And Washington says, “It hasn’t happened yet.”

Laci (02:00:38):

But wait, for anyone to have been on the other side, they are an inverted. Wait, they can be over there and not be from the past or not be on the same timeline?

Matt (02:00:52):

Yeah.

Laci (02:00:52):

Oh, okay.

Matt (02:00:53):

But they’re walking through and suddenly the turnstile activates and it is almost like a horror movie. What is about to happen here? What is going to come out? It shot so well, it’s so cool. And then someone just jumps out of the other side and fights Washington. And then on the other side, someone fights Pattinson. Yeah. And this is when Laci said, “Oh, he’s not fighting himself, is he?” So she called it right away.

Laci (02:01:13):

He’s the exact same height, exact same build. The moves are mirrored. It’s just.

Matt (02:01:17):

But we see Pattinson rip his guy’s mask off and then run away.

Laci (02:01:21):

And I thought Pattson was fighting himself. I though this is when he realized. I though Neil was finding out at that moment and still not sharing it with. But no, he just sees another protagonist.

Matt (02:01:36):

Now they’re debriefing afterward and Pattinson’s really, really happy. He’s like, “That was a fucking crazy mission and we’re still alive.” So I’m feeling. I don’t know about you. I’m feeling really good. And maybe you’re not going to kill me because he has to play this whole like, “Yeah, man, you’re in the CIA and you’re going to. I can’t know about all the crazy shit we’re finding out about.” But so he starts telling him the truth now. Tells him about inversion and Pattinson has to pretend like he doesn’t know all of this, in fact. In fact, he knows way, way more than John David Washington does, but John David Washington has to be like, “All right, try and catch up, Matt. Keep up, man.”

Laci (02:02:13):

I wonder if the reason why Neil just keeps doing it, if I’m right, is because in all the other missions, he wasn’t charming enough and he does get killed by John David at the end. So he’s finally like, woo, finally made best friend.

Matt (02:02:29):

This is not. Nothing can change. This timeline is fixed. What’s happened happened?

Laci (02:02:38):

Fine.

Matt (02:02:39):

It’s an expression of faith in the mechanics of the universe,

Laci (02:02:41):

Broke. I don’t understand what the point is of interacting. Why is someone’s past self so important that it can’t know what’s going on? I do think the cuts are jarring in this movie. There’s very little like, “And now I’m going to go do this.” It’s just Snapchat Priya. It

Matt (02:03:02):

Feels like Inception. Yeah.

Laci (02:03:04):

Yeah. He’s in a new suit.

Matt (02:03:08):

The argument we made about Inception with the whole movie taking place in a dream and there no longer being a real world.

Laci (02:03:14):

That makes sense.

Matt (02:03:15):

Is the counter argument when people are like, “Well, have you seen Tenet?” That also feels like everything’s in a dream. Where he’s like, “I’m going to go check out on Priya in Mumbai.” But

Laci (02:03:22):

This is a problem that Nolan has when he has so many locations he’s shooting on. She shot in six places for this and they’re in India every time he’s talking to her or whatever it is.

Matt (02:03:33):

One time they’re in Norway, but yeah.

Laci (02:03:35):

Right. So I think he doesn’t know how to. It’s his movies, just like with Dark Night Rises, for whatever reason that the jail with the hole, the sky jail, whatever the hell it is, had to be in a whole other country. But he insisted on shooting there for that, but didn’t seem to have enough thought as to how are we going to show that there was all this travel?

Matt (02:04:04):

Yeah, because it’s like –

Laci (02:04:05):

And Inception has a ton of travel. They’re always talking about traveling or that they’re going to this place as if it’s next door. And they do it here too. I need to go talk to Priya again. I got to go 3,000 miles away by. There’s no talk of that. It’s just there, there, there. He likes all this location stuff for the authenticity, but doesn’t think it matters that we feel disjointed with all the travel.

Matt (02:04:29):

Yeah, I think it is a choice. And I know he would say like, what? You want some freaking cliche aerial photography of Mumbai with sitar music playing over it? No,

Laci (02:04:39):

I don’t. I need him to look affected by the travel. I need Bain to look affected by the travel. And I don’t know how you do that, but jet lag, can you be tired? Can you have a bag of peanuts? Anything, really, just something.

Matt (02:04:53):

It is worse than Dark Night Rises with the prison being the most egregious example because it’s literally in one frame and days in Gotham, the next he’s on the other side of the world. And then in the next scene, he’s back in Gotham. What

Laci (02:05:05):

Do you think his luggage would look like?

Matt (02:05:07):

Not big for you.

Laci (02:05:09):

It doesn’t change clothes very often. It’s just like a whole lot of face masks. Different kinds.

Matt (02:05:14):

So he goes back to Mumbai, talks to her on a boat, and she’s like, “Hey, what did you find in the vault?” And he says, “Two antagonists. One inverted, one regular. We took care of the regular one. The inverted one got away.” And she says, “They appeared at the same time. Then they’re the same person.” So at Turnstile, this is the first time we’re hearing about this turnstile. It’s a machine for inverting. And he’s like, “But you told me that technology hasn’t been invented yet.” And she’s like, “Are you paying attention to anything I’m saying? My God. Go get to Seder. Go get to Seder, please.” Here’s where –

Laci (02:05:47):

Wait a minute. Fuck. One regular, one inverted. So there’s three versions of him at this time. Why? And then where did that one go? He didn’t kill him. Neil didn’t kill him. And why was Neil surprised to see a non-inverted protagonist? Why was he like, oh shit?

Matt (02:06:18):

Because it hadn’t happened to him yet. This is John David Washington later in the movie when they go back to Oslo, runs into the freeport, goes through the turnstile, and goes back so that he can start going forward in time again. So he has to fight Neil and get back and get into the ambulance. I know.

Laci (02:06:37):

I don’t like it.

Matt (02:06:39):

All right. So here’s how you get to Seder. The CIA has the only Plutonium 241 in the world. And Seder tried to steal it from them during the Kiev opera siege at the beginning of the movie, but he failed. The Ukrainian security service got to it first. Now they’re transporting it to Estonia in a week. So that plutonium in a case used to. John David Washington didn’t see it. We did. We did see that it’s just like a brick of something. Yeah. And it turns out it’s not plutonium. It’s a piece of the algorithm. What do we know? But yeah, he’s like, okay, you need to pretend to help Seder steal the plutonium, but you need to fail to help him get to it. Okay? Because we need to keep him alive long enough to see what he’s ultimately going to do. She

Laci (02:07:20):

Doesn’t tell him that. She doesn’t tell him she wants him to fail. She just hopes he does and then he

Matt (02:07:24):

Does. No, she says – No. Because she’s still telling him, he says, “I am not going to help an arms dealer steal plutonium.” And she says, “You just need him to think that that’s what you’re doing.”

Laci (02:07:36):

Right. But she still wants him to fail. And she’s not asking him to fail here. He needs to just do it, do the mission, but give him an empty case or something. She’s tempting him to switch it out or whatever. And he does. Because he discovers that she wanted him to fail even though she didn’t ask him to fail later.

Matt (02:08:01):

Later

Laci (02:08:01):

Sater. Oh, why doesn’t anyone say that in this movie?

Matt (02:08:04):

So he goes and he finds Katherine in Italy and he’s like, “Good news. That drawing, it’s bye-bye, baby. No more drawing. So when are you going to introduce me to your husband?” And we follow her over to her yacht, but he’s not invited on the yacht because they’ve got Volkov or Volca or the Volkov is their big club. The scary bulk man. Yeah. Who’s like, “Oh, he’s not accepting visitors right now.” But we finally get our first look at Kenneth Branoff. And I failed to mention Brano was in Dunkirk in the previous movie where he was playing just like the ultimate British patriotic good man. 

Laci (02:08:42):

Very convincing as a brute, but I’m also very impressed when on the boat there’s a warmth. He loves her. Or at least he thinks she’s hot. But I’m like, no, don’t be mean to him. He’s being so nice. He didn’t get to have any of his vodka yet. You just put so much suntan lotion in, you didn’t rub it in. In fact, he’s going to do this whole scene with two giant hand prints of all over his back. Oh, she needed it on his back because she slid him. Fuck cat.

Matt (02:09:11):

I know. I know.

Laci (02:09:11):

Cat.

Matt (02:09:12):

But at that point in the movie, he’s doing the classic abusive husband. I’m really contrite right now. And when you’re an abused person, you’re like, oh, this is the best. I can get anything right now.

Laci (02:09:20):

Thank you for explaining that to me. Yes, I’ve lived

Matt (02:09:22):

It. You’re welcome. Where’s Max? And he’s like, “Yeah, Max went to Pompe with our hired help, Anna.” And she’s like, “But I told him I was going to go eat Pompeii with him.” So he’s such a piece of shit that he’s even making her a liar to her son.

Laci (02:09:34):

That is

Matt (02:09:34):

Me. And they’re having this dinner that night that the protagonist goes to and he sits down to Seder next to Seder and he’s like, “Hey, I’m like a charming man.” And Seder’s like, “Sava, just tell me. How do you want me to suffocate you with your balls?” And he’s like, “Is this how you treat all your guts, fella? You’re going to serve me dinner first.”

Laci (02:09:54):

Yes, it is your balls.

Matt (02:09:56):

I will serve you. Do you want me to

Laci (02:09:57):

Dip

Matt (02:09:58):

Them

Laci (02:09:58):

In

Matt (02:09:58):

Hot

Laci (02:09:59):

Sauce or some sort of other spread?

Matt (02:10:01):

And he’s like, “Before you get to that, do you like opera?” And he’s like, “Oh.” How did

Laci (02:10:06):

You know?

Matt (02:10:07):

Who told you that word? So meet me tomorrow on the water at 8:00 AM. All right. All right.

Laci (02:10:14):

Tentatively 8:00 AM. Tentatively 7:00 AM.

Matt (02:10:18):

So it’s the next morning before they go on their great catamaran adventure. Kat’s having breakfast with her husband and she’s got a little pep in her step. And he’s like, “You have little pep in step. Have I?” And she’s like, “I’m just feeling really good right now. Can’t wait to eat this delicious breakfast. Oh no, it’s the Goya painting.” I

Laci (02:10:34):

Can’t eat that.

Matt (02:10:35):

And he’s like, “Yes. Instinct told me to remove it from vault. I’ve always had instincts about future.”

Laci (02:10:44):

What?

Matt (02:10:45):

You are all mine. You will never leave you, bitch. All right. Now let’s go get on those sailboats. Okay? I don’t understand what the fuck these boats are, these catamarans. These are fucking

Laci (02:10:56):

Wild. I don’t see any appeal at all. Get in the water, get out of it. And also you guys look like fricking dorks. You all look so stupid in your helmets and your halfy wetsuits and your little vests. God, they look dumb. Just supposed to be a thrilling sport. Is this supposed

Matt (02:11:15):

To be

Laci (02:11:16):

Fun? No, it’s supposed to be challenging and then exhilarating.

Matt (02:11:20):

Okay. Should we try it?

Laci (02:11:22):

No. Why? Do you want to be the pulley person or the bike person?

Matt (02:11:26):

No, but what I really want to do is parasail. Will you get mad at me if I do that? I’ve

Laci (02:11:30):

Parasailed it’s fine.

Matt (02:11:31):

Because Laci won’t let me parachute out the plane. I have

Laci (02:11:33):

Parasailed. It is fun. All

Matt (02:11:35):

Right. That’s

Laci (02:11:35):

So safe. Yeah.

Matt (02:11:36):

Okay. So is skydiving. It’s so safe. Yes, it is. Statistically very safe.

Laci (02:11:40):

You’re not doing it.

Matt (02:11:41):

Yes, I’m doing it.

Laci (02:11:41):

You’ll sink like a rock. You’ll Peggy Hill.

Matt (02:11:45):

She survived.

Laci (02:11:46):

I don’t want to take care of you.

Matt (02:11:48):

I don’t want to be taken care of. So yeah, as they’re doing the catamaraning, he’s like, “Tell me about plutonium.” And he’s like, “Well, there’s plutonium that the CIA got in 2008 or whatever.” And he’s like, “Yeah, the thing about you, there’s no information on you whatsoever. You’re so obviously an intelligence agent. But before they can continue their conversation, Kat cuts Kenneth Brano’s harness. He flings into the water and apparently this is going to kill him.”

Laci (02:12:12):

So look how fast they’re going. I

Matt (02:12:13):

Can’t tell how fast they’re going.

Laci (02:12:15):

They’re going super fast. And I mean, it’s basically like hitting concrete. He knocked him out.

Matt (02:12:19):

Okay. All right.

Laci (02:12:21):

She’s

Matt (02:12:21):

Confident. So Washington dives into the water after him. Well,

Laci (02:12:24):

They’re far enough out that he’s. What’s he going to do? Bob up and down. Wait for help.

Matt (02:12:30):

So the protagonist jumps in and saves him. We cut ahead and now they’re on the yacht and cat’s yelling at him like, why didn’t you let him drown? My God.

Laci (02:12:37):

I would be so fucking. I had a whole line. I said, dying hell, you bastard. God damn it.

Matt (02:12:44):

Seder brings John David Washington into his office and we see now his obsession with his pulse.

Laci (02:12:49):

Get off me. Get right. I don’t need your doctor. So what was it? Was it good? I don’t need this doctor. Why is he upset? Yeah. What is that about?

Matt (02:13:01):

I mean, this is pretty well observed about these rich fucks. Yeah, but he knows he’s dying. H has cancer. Yeah, he knows he’s dying because of this bargain he made, but I’m so smart and rich. Is there some way to hack it? Can I just get a little extra? Can I live so pristinely? No,

Laci (02:13:16):

No. The pulse thing is he prides himself on being able to do really monstrous things without raising his pulse level. To him, it’s some kind of even further kind of achievement of. I did that without even skipping a beat, without even raising a pulse. I can beat people up with nothing. Because that’s when he’s like, “But you’re the first person to get my pulse over the…” Pretty impressive. I think it’s how he judges his opponent. It’s his only way of tracking at this point. He’s killed so many people.

Matt (02:13:47):

I though it was part of the life extension thing because that ties into I’m taking the whole world down with me. The only thing that exists in the world is me. And you get to a level of wealth where the only thing that matters is to stand up for it. I

Laci (02:13:59):

Got you. But on this man’s timeline, he’s dying in days on his own accord.

Matt (02:14:04):

So those days. I don’t know.

Laci (02:14:06):

No, it’s not a life extending thing. It’s some kind of macho thing.

Matt (02:14:11):

Yeah. So the protagonist is like, “Hey, can you help me steal the plutonium?” And he’s like, “Don’t talk to me about plutonium. I know everything about plutonium.” And like the Italia Algoul flashbacks, we get a flashback here better than in Dark Night Rises of him emerging from the muck and the mire of this plutonium town, cleaning it up and finding a briefcase with a letter from the future and all these gold bars. A letter that he sent himself from the future, I guess.

Laci (02:14:37):

Yeah. It’s the opposite of go back and kill baby Hitler. It’s go back and give gold bars to baby

Matt (02:14:43):

Seder. Give Hitler a baby Hitler baby gold rattle.

Laci (02:14:48):

Right. Right.

Matt (02:14:49):

And so later that night, there’s the scene where Seder’s about to beat the shit out of his wife with his belt and his cuff links.

Laci (02:14:57):

Right. Inserted into the whole

Matt (02:14:59):

Fuck. And she’s like, “Don’t do it or I’ll scream. And John David Washington will hear and then the deal will be off.” And he’s like, “Oh damn, I need Deal to go down because he knows it’s the ninth piece of the algorithm.” But then she asks like, “Why couldn’t you just let me go?” And he’s like, “Because if I can’t have you love on gain.”

Laci (02:15:16):

I haven’t gotten to experience this amazing accent since The Heartbreakers when you got to do.

Matt (02:15:24):

He’s Bipisca.

Laci (02:15:28):

Oh, that’s a funny word.

Matt (02:15:32):

John David Washington watches Seder’s men bring a creative gold onto the yacht and he beats a man with a gold bar because that man tried to steal that gold bar. And then he gets caught, John David does, and Seder yells at him, but still needs him. He’s like, “Go to Estonia. Go. We’ll figure it out there.” But

Laci (02:15:48):

How will I fund my trip? Gold bar. But again, I’m like, “What are you doing with this? You got to go online. You got to go to Fox News. He’s like gold for cash or whatever the fuck.”

Matt (02:16:00):

Ask Bruce Wayne. He’ll tell you. Don’t buy my gold.

Laci (02:16:05):

It’s interesting. A plane crashed and a ton of gold bars came out and only one was missing. And here you are showing up with this gold bar. I think you could trace it.

Matt (02:16:16):

So Seder takes his wife to the Freeport in Tallon. Talon is in Estonia. And John David Washington and Robert Pattenson are setting up the plutonium hijacking. And so in the Freeport vault, Seder has all these assault weapons laid out for her to see. And she’s like, “Why are you showing me all this?” And he’s like, “You know exactly what all this is, Kat. The filthy business that put your boy through school and those clothes on your back.” I mean, there’s an element of this movie where she is complicit beyond being like a mob wife who just doesn’t ask questions. She’s helped him facilitate business deals and stuff and is doing the like, “But I don’t see the illegal part of the business, but is still very much a part of it.” But

Laci (02:16:54):

She would’ve left him a long time ago.

Matt (02:16:56):

But it’s also, she’s from a noble family that also probably sold arms to Hezbollah and to Israel, to both sides. Just whatever you got to do.

Laci (02:17:04):

Whoever needs it.

Matt (02:17:06):

This is where he yells, “Look at me. You don’t negotiate with Tiger. You sit and admire. It’s fucking nature.” And he starts beating her up and spitting on her and Nolan doesn’t shy away from showing it. And then he goes through the turnstile and he tells this guy, “Tell me everything as it happens.” So then we get the big fucking heist on the highway of Talon with the firetrucks and Commissioner Gordon’s there. He’s dressed as a fireman. Takes off the fire helmet. It was me. And they get the plutonium briefcase, get into the BMW with Robert Pattinson, and then he opens up the briefcase and he’s like, “This is not plutonium.This is just like a block or something.”

Laci (02:17:45):

This is a fucking cinnabite cube.

Matt (02:17:47):

This is the lament configuration. Oh God, even worse. And they’re listening to the walkie-talkies and Robert Pattinson’s like, “I don’t understand what they’re saying.” And John David Washington’s like, “I though you said you speak Estonian.” And this is the first time I watched the movie, he’s like, “Oh, come on.” Because Estonian, to be clear –

Laci (02:18:04):

Dead language.

Matt (02:18:05):

No, but a million people at most speak that language. But he has to know everything. He knows what he needs to know. So of course he would’ve learned Estonian.

Laci (02:18:13):

But why is he confused that it’s backwards? He’s just pretending to be confused.

Matt (02:18:16):

Well, but it’s backwards, you see. They’re speaking backwards. I

Laci (02:18:20):

Got it. But he’s pretending to be confused why backward speaking could be happening. He knows

Matt (02:18:25):

Why. Oh yes, yes. I’m just saying the fact that he knows Estonian is absurd. I

Laci (02:18:29):

Got that. I got that.

Matt (02:18:32):

And then when you know it, a car is approaching them backwards.This is the part of the movie where I start dissociating because I just cannot feel the motion on screen.

Laci (02:18:39):

No.

Matt (02:18:40):

Because I have to sit there and think about what’s

Laci (02:18:42):

Happening. Yes. And I don’t know what is having real effect and what’s going to be erased and what is. You know what I mean? I don’t know what matters. And if I can’t. Action only matters if each action that they are doing has a consequence. And when you remove the possibility of a consequence from action, you’re literally removing anything interesting about it. Cause and effect. It’s just cause, cause, cause, cause.

Matt (02:19:10):

I mean, when we talk about action, we say that’s the most important thing is you need to see cause and effect. And it’s not like those things aren’t here on the screen. Whenever I try to talk about this movie with people and I say, I just feel like my eyes can’t track it. They don’t seem to understand what I’m saying. And maybe other people just can visually take this in better than I can.

Laci (02:19:28):

I can’t. We’re very different people this way. If we’re both not doing it.

Matt (02:19:34):

Seder pulls up in a big SUV holding cat hostage with a gun. And so the protagonist throws in the briefcase and then they get surrounded by the bad guys and Robert Pattinson’s like, “Okay, don’t worry. I’m calling in the cavalry.” And John David Washington’s like, “What cavalry?”

Laci (02:19:51):

I’m so glad that John David formed this company and is at the head of it because he’d be fired so fast. He has the most. He’s not made for this. One woman with a gun pointed to her head and that’s it. Once she’s dead, she’s not going to know she doesn’t have her son anymore. Fucking who cares?

Matt (02:20:09):

Because he just loves her that much. He

Laci (02:20:11):

Doesn’t though. He just met her.

Matt (02:20:14):

What cavalry? But they capture John David Washington, they capture cat, and they take them back to the Freeport. And now we’re getting to see on one side of the partition, it’s inverted. On the other side, it’s not inverted. And Laci’s so bummed out right now.

Laci (02:20:34):

Like you’re putting me to sleep.

Matt (02:20:36):

Yeah. It’s

Laci (02:20:36):

Not your fault.

Matt (02:20:37):

All this shit happens and then finally the cavalry arrives led by Aaron Taylor Johnson. He’s like, “Hello everyone. I’m here on the cavalry. Okay.” I’m

Laci (02:20:44):

Kind of a cunt, but you’re like this way.

Matt (02:20:46):

Temporal pizza movement is what just went down, don’t you, Ari?

Laci (02:20:50):

I’m going to be the rih team. You got to listen to every word I say this pitch over here is the blue team and I’m talking right over her.

Matt (02:20:56):

That’s way up. All

Laci (02:20:57):

You need to know is that she’s saying the same thing I am, but I’m the actor who gets to be heard. Huh?

Matt (02:21:02):

You might recognize her father as playing Chucky and bride of Chucky.

Laci (02:21:05):

The point is we don’t care about her.

Matt (02:21:07):

No, we don’t.

Laci (02:21:08):

We

Matt (02:21:08):

Don’t. Poor Fiona Dorf. As Wheeler, the leader of the blue team. And Ives is Aaron Taylor Johnson. And John David Washington’s finally grabs Robert Patton. He’s like, “You seem to know everything. Tell me what the fuck you know, man.” And he’s like, “Listen, it’s not important for me to tell you what I know. What is important is that you just try – Go

Laci (02:21:28):

With your instincts. Do you love me?”

Matt (02:21:31):

And Aaron Taylor Johnson interjects and he’s like, “They’re running a temporal pincer movement. A pincer movement, ladies and gentlemen, is when you attack an enemy on both sides. Temporal pincer movement, one half attacks from the future, the other from the past.” And that’s how fucking Seder does everything. Yeah, temporal pincer movement, cat’s dying because she’s been shot with an inverted round. The only hope for her is if she goes backwards. So the protagonist is like, “Well, then that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to take her back.” So he goes through the turnstile and –

Laci (02:22:04):

All of that’s just leading him to get her. Because all they actually really need is for her to go fucking schmooze him enough to not die. So they’re even leading him to care about her.

Matt (02:22:13):

They

Laci (02:22:14):

Know he’s going to be like this.

Matt (02:22:15):

They do. And once he goes in, he will need to find another machine to come back because once you start going backwards, Seder will have control of this machine. And he’s like, “Well, I know exactly where to find another turnstile mister. And it’s at the Oslo Airport when I heisted it a week ago.” Well, great. Okay. And so the whole team goes through, but then John David Washington’s like, “Actually, fuck it. Neil, you take Katherine, put her on a shipping container. I’m going to go get other Catherine and stop Seder from killing her because he might kill her.” And Neil’s like, “He’s not going to kill her because she’s alive right now. So we know he didn’t kill her.” He’s like, “Oh, I don’t believe you.” And so now he’s going outside and he puts on the mask and now we see him go out into the inverted world for the first time.

Matt (02:22:59):

And it is really cool.

Laci (02:23:00):

Yeah. And who’s to say that him going back is not what kept her alive? And it

Matt (02:23:06):

Is. That’s the whole thing. And that’s the thing about free will. I don’t think free will exist, but there’s no point in thinking about it. You just have to act like it does. Right. Because it doesn’t matter because no matter what you do, it’s still going to be it.

Laci (02:23:21):

As our kid once said.

Matt (02:23:24):

So the wind is moving backward. The birds are flying backward. It’s all really cool and surreal. The car’s weird, but not. I don’t know. He’s like, “Damn, this car’s hard to handle when I’m backward.” So he goes and does a bunch of backward shit and then it all ends up with it doesn’t matter.

Laci (02:23:40):

It just doesn’t guys. Does not. And this isn’t even the end. That’s what’s crazy. This isn’t the end of the movie. How?

Matt (02:23:48):

Because all of that results in him handing over the plutonium or handing over the piece of the amulet to Seder. And then Seder tries to light him on fire. But because it’s an inverted fire, it actually freezes him so he doesn’t die. And he wakes up on him.

Laci (02:24:01):

Second time in the movie, he wakes up after you think he’s dead in a hospital bed or

Matt (02:24:06):

Whatever. Yeah. And they’re in a shipping container. I do love shipping containers.

Laci (02:24:10):

I do too.

Matt (02:24:10):

And they’re on a shipping freighter that’s going backward. I love the site of the big shipping container, shipping freighter going backward past the windmill farms. And it’s just the most simple thing in the world of just film it and then just reverse the footage. But it’s not. And you’re like, right now. The ship go is not really going backward. They filmed the ship going forward and reversed the footage.

Laci (02:24:31):

Why are you so sure? Because

Matt (02:24:33):

You can’t make waves go backwards.

Laci (02:24:35):

You don’t know that. I don’t know. I don’t understand where it stops and starts because he made it very clear in the book you can’t just reverse a frame. But he didn’t say. See, he was talking about actors at the time, but he didn’t just say. He said he made the car go backwards. How do you make it flip backwards?

Matt (02:24:53):

Because you can have a stunt coordinator coordinate that. You can’t coordinate a ship going backwards. Ships don’t go backwards. Although they do in Titanic, they try to do that to avoid the iceberg.

Laci (02:25:05):

He’s changed the sails. You get all the guys at the bomb that are rowing to go the other way.

Matt (02:25:12):

So he’s like, Neil, you are right. Sorry. I should have listened to you. I gave him the thing. I gave him the plutonium. Neil, tell me who recruited you, Neil? Who recruited you to the tent? A

Laci (02:25:24):

Nice man.

Matt (02:25:25):

And he’s like, “It can’t possibly do you any good to know that right now.” And he’s like, “All right, well, Neil, Katherine needs to know all this shit now.” And he’s like, “But if she knows, then we’ll have to kill her.” And he’s like, “Nah, just tell her.” He’s like, “All right, well, there’s three laws of thermodynamics. Okay?” And then the fucking. Now we learn about the algorithm. Oh, the algorithm. Nine pieces to the algorithm, rendered it into physical form. When assembled, it can invert the whole world.

Laci (02:25:47):

Wow. Me the other way. I don’t care.

Matt (02:25:51):

If that happens, end of play. Everyone and everything that’s ever lived is destroyed.

Laci (02:25:57):

Fine. Sounds good.

Matt (02:25:57):

And Elizabeth DeBecky chimes in, including my son.

Laci (02:26:01):

Anything to not be watching this movie anymore.

Matt (02:26:03):

Including.

Laci (02:26:04):

Invert.

Matt (02:26:05):

Tom Cruise and Bonnie the Dinosaur.

Laci (02:26:08):

Invert me. God, Jesus, invert me right now.

Matt (02:26:13):

I

Laci (02:26:13):

Just try to do a thinness snap and it didn’t fucking work.

Matt (02:26:18):

All right. So as they’re getting close, the whole point is they need to travel back a week so that they can get to the Oslo Airport so that they go to the turnstile and start going regular ways. The closer they get to it, I think it’s cool that John David Washington starts to notice, “Hey, my arm’s bleeding for no reason. That’s weird.”

Laci (02:26:32):

I guess later I’m going to get hit in the arm.

Matt (02:26:34):

Maybe, yeah. And they get there and he goes through the thing and then fights himself backwards. Oh, that was. Let him stand. It was you. It was me. I was fighting myself. Damn. And goes into the forward world, and now Robert Pattinson starts chasing him and Robert Pattonson pulls off his mask. He’s like, “It was you. Damn.” And then backwards, Robert Pattinson has taken backwards Elizabeth Tebecki through the turnstile, and they start going forwards again. Okay? Okay. And I had this realization at this point in the movie. You know what maybe our problem is, you and I?

Laci (02:27:08):

What?

Matt (02:27:09):

Is we’re not gamers. Because I think our son Sully is playing a lot of Mario games way beyond Mario whenever I stopped playing Mario. And so there’s Mario Galaxy and there’s all sorts of weird shit with gravity. And it takes me a lot of time to get used to. And I think that, yeah, maybe if you grow up playing video games, this all seems more natural to you. Physical mechanics seem more natural to you.

Laci (02:27:35):

Well, we do have that in common. We are not gamers. Unless you count Minecraft, baby.

Matt (02:27:41):

Or Dr. Mario for me. Andre Seder has the algorithm now, but they don’t know where or when. We just need to figure out a way to figure out where he will be in time. And John David Washington’s like, “Hold everything. I need to go see Priya again. Okay? Now, I’ve seen her once. I will see her again in one day. I need to have an intermediate meeting. I need to see her in between meetings, you see. So get her. You know how Mumbai’s 10,000 miles that way? Get her to fly to Oslo and I’ll meet her. Okay? Meet her in Oslo. Hi, Priya. What’s going on, Priya?

Laci (02:28:12):

Because she knows stuff the whole time. She seems to him to be the one that knows everything. It’s like, you could just ask Neil. Neil’s right here. You could just ask Neil.

Matt (02:28:22):

Nope, got to ask Priya. And she starts lecturing him about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She says, one day a scientist, a female scientist, the future is female, is going to invent inversion, is going to invent backwards stuff. And she’s like, “Think of her as the Oppenheimer of the future.” And he’s like,

Laci (02:28:41):

“Wow.” Because John

Matt (02:28:42):

David

Laci (02:28:45):

Is a man, so the inverted him is a woman and she’s white.

Matt (02:28:49):

And all dogs are boys and all cats are girls. So

Laci (02:28:53):

You know.

Matt (02:28:54):

And so the science of the future, she invents the algorithm for inverting the world. But as soon as she finished inventing the algorithm, she’s like, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Oh why did I do that? I can’t

Laci (02:29:03):

Know it. Shoot.

Matt (02:29:04):

Decides this is going to destroy everything. So she breaks up the algorithm into nine pieces, hides them in the nine most secure facilities in the world. Nine nuclear powers.

Laci (02:29:14):

She get into these nine places and no one’s like, “Don’t ask questions.” I got to go to the next one. And now I’ve got to devise a scheme to get into here. It’s like a Roman myth or something. And then I scattered it to the four corners of the world.

Matt (02:29:29):

That’s true. And maybe you could read this as all of Tenet is they are doing it for this woman.

Laci (02:29:35):

Yes. Because she’s not a fucking spy. She’s a goddamn scientist.

Matt (02:29:39):

Can you name the nuclear powers, Laci? Go.

Laci (02:29:42):

Russia.

Matt (02:29:42):

Yep.

Laci (02:29:44):

America.

Matt (02:29:44):

Yeah. Ala, we’ve got some nuclear weapons that way.

Laci (02:29:48):

UK.

Matt (02:29:48):

Yeah.

Laci (02:29:50):

China.

Matt (02:29:51):

That’s right. How

Laci (02:29:52):

Many

Matt (02:29:53):

Are there? We’ve got the Koso and the nuclear bomb. Germany. No, not Germany. Who Lex to smoke a cigarette doesn’t have a nuclear bomb.

Laci (02:30:02):

France.

Matt (02:30:03):

Yeah.

Laci (02:30:04):

Is it also Japan?

Matt (02:30:09):

No. Where does Priya live? Oh,

Laci (02:30:12):

India.

Matt (02:30:13):

India, yeah. No,

Laci (02:30:14):

That’s enough. No, we got

Matt (02:30:15):

Six. I wanted you to

Laci (02:30:17):

Get

Matt (02:30:17):

All of them. What’s that pesky country that’s always led by little rocket man? No?

Laci (02:30:22):

Oh yeah, North Korea.

Matt (02:30:23):

So that’s seven.

Laci (02:30:25):

So nothing in South America?

Matt (02:30:27):

Who’s India’s next door neighbor?

Laci (02:30:29):

Pakistan.

Matt (02:30:30):

Pakistan, yes. And then the ninth country?

Laci (02:30:33):

Why get no clues?

Matt (02:30:36):

They’re causing even more trouble.

Laci (02:30:39):

Oh, Israel.

Matt (02:30:40):

Yep. Good job. Nine nuclear powers. So she hid them in the nine. This woman was a very capable woman.

Laci (02:30:48):

Scientist, got a big travel budget.

Matt (02:30:50):

Seder’s lifelong mission has been to find and assemble all nine because he was in the right place at the right time. And so yeah. And he’s like, “Listen, I handed over the ninth piece of the algorithm to Seder, so you’re going to see me again tomorrow on that boat. Tell me not to do that.” And she’s like, “No, no way. I’m not going to tell you shit because that’s not how it works. You see, Mr. We can’t change things. What’s happened has happened.” And he’s like, “You want Seder to assemble the algorithm?” And she’s like, “That’s right.” And he’s like, “I don’t understand why.”

Laci (02:31:18):

To bring all the pieces together, you fucking sembled it.

Matt (02:31:21):

But why?

Laci (02:31:22):

So they can have them.

Matt (02:31:23):

I don’t get it.

Laci (02:31:24):

And disperse? What do you mean that’s the simplest part of the fucking movie? The only reason for him to uncover the other eight is because he’s got the ninth, because he wants to put them all together and go boom. Right? Their whole thing is they need all nine. He’s got eight of them. Now he’s got the ninth one. Now they can get all nine because he’s got them all unhidden. That’s the easiest part of this fucking thing.

Matt (02:31:44):

No, just keep one hidden and it doesn’t matter.

Laci (02:31:51):

One person knowing where that one is makes that person a liability. You can’t have a liability.

Matt (02:31:57):

That’s true. There’s the whole thing. I mean, look, I fucking love the, you can’t read this piece of paper and you’ll die. Right. And the forbidden knowledge thing or the John Carpenter movie in the mouth of badness. Everyone who reads this horror novel goes insane. Would you read that horror novel? It turns

Laci (02:32:17):

Gay.

Matt (02:32:17):

Answer, yes, I would read. I’d have to read it.

Laci (02:32:19):

Right. Okay.

Matt (02:32:21):

So that’s –

Laci (02:32:22):

All right. So

Matt (02:32:22):

Now

Laci (02:32:23):

We’re back in Blondie’s on the boat and I feel like she really wants to show the woman her stomach. And I feel like she has it open for a while. She’s like, “I’m the bitch that got this.” And she’s like, “Look, you think my abdomen’s healing okay? What do you think about my scar?”

Matt (02:32:40):

That’s her version of him doing the hand symbol. Turn it anymore.

Laci (02:32:43):

Yeah, but she keeps it up, just like waits for Neil to come in.

Matt (02:32:48):

Does she keep it up or is this just a freeze frame I’ve gotten?

Laci (02:32:51):

No, it bothered me watching it like, okay, put your shirt up.

Matt (02:32:53):

All right. Put

Laci (02:32:54):

Your shirt

Matt (02:32:54):

Down. How did Seder give this to her?

Laci (02:32:57):

What do you mean? The bullet.

Matt (02:32:59):

Oh, right. He shot her. It’s because he shot her with a gun. That’ll

Laci (02:33:04):

Do it.

Matt (02:33:04):

Our three main friends are on a boat. They’re going backwards again. And they’re going all the way back to the beginning of the movie. All right, here’s the thing about my husband, Seder. He’s got a dead man switch. A dead man switch, a trigger man. A trigger man. I

Laci (02:33:21):

Am the trigger

Matt (02:33:21):

Man. You notice how he’s always looking at his Fitbit? That Fitbit, if his pulse stops, it’ll trigger the trigger man.

Laci (02:33:28):

There’s the answer for the fucking pulse thing, man.

Matt (02:33:31):

No, but if my pulse –

Laci (02:33:34):

He has a trigger in it. I’m sure he’s obsessed with what does make it go up? What makes it go down? I’d be pretty infatuated with it too.

Matt (02:33:41):

Well, I would hope the trigger is – You know how

Laci (02:33:42):

Our angel monitor would just malfunction and we’d think our baby was dead. We’d run up there. He’s probably getting false readings on that thing all the time and it starts doing a countdown. And then he’s like, “No, no, I’m alive.”

Matt (02:33:54):

I would hope the dead man switch would have a little bit of leeway of like, “Hey, if this gets to 120, give it a little, give it some time. Don’t immediately.”

Laci (02:34:02):

It doesn’t.

Matt (02:34:05):

Stop. Don’t worry. It doesn’t stop

Laci (02:34:07):

Because it’s high. It stops because it

Matt (02:34:09):

Stops. I know. So just make sure it stops for what? Make sure it’s not like, “Oh, my watch fell off.”

Laci (02:34:17):

But it’s not his watch.

Matt (02:34:18):

It’s his Fitbit. Yeah.

Laci (02:34:19):

No, it’s in his chest. It’s not his watch.

Matt (02:34:22):

You don’t think it’s in the little.

Laci (02:34:24):

No, I don’t. The trigger man. I like that he’s the trigger man. Can we get a dead man switch?

Matt (02:34:32):

Sure. So they got this dead man switch.

Laci (02:34:38):

Now we know that piece of information.

Matt (02:34:39):

What have

Laci (02:34:40):

Been helpful before, bitch?

Matt (02:34:43):

He has cancer, you see. Elizabeth Dubecki says. He wants the world to end. I mean, I like the way they present this. I do. And of

Laci (02:34:51):

Course, it’s our chickens coming home to roost. Plutonium gives people cancer. He should have cancer. He got rich off of it, but he also was the poor guy that was digging it. He is also the person that was exploited because of it and he’s going to die at an early age. That’s fucked up. He didn’t have to kill that guy with a shovel. He would’ve died soon too.

Matt (02:35:15):

Unlike Odysseus’s great-grandfather of like, “Well, my future generations, they will be set up. I’m going to die early, but they’ll be set up.” He’s like, “No, fuck my descendants. Fuck everyone who lives with me.” Max’s

Laci (02:35:27):

Going to get cancer. They pass that shit on.

Matt (02:35:30):

So got cancer for the nuclear materials. They’re going to have her go meet up with Seder on their Vietnam holiday that costs just a hair under $9 million. And during that time, they pretended to be happy with each other. And this will be the happy moment he will return to right as the world ends. He’s going to choose the time of his own death and the end of the world. Kind

Laci (02:35:51):

Of sweet. It was nice of him to choose that moment.

Matt (02:35:54):

And David W, John David Washington. Wherever in the notes, because the character doesn’t have a name, I just wrote JDW. JDW has the whole team going to Skals 12 because there’s going to be a nuclear test the same day as the operasies. Same day as the Vietnam holiday that costs $9 million. That’s where the final dead drop’s going to happen. That’s where the algorithm is assembled. That’s where the explosion’s going to happen. That’s where the world ends. They divide the teams in two. One inverted, one forward. Aaron Taylor Johnson giving them a briefing informed by the inverted team already what they told us.

Laci (02:36:23):

I feel like the movie gives up here. They’re just like. I feel like you guys don’t return. We don’t know what we’re talking about. We’re saying some shit.

Matt (02:36:29):

No, he definitely. He knows. No knows. Nolan knows. He’s in total control. I just think that this action set piece is kind of a failure because it’s so impressive on a technical level. You know how fucking difficult and they exploded all these buildings for real and they’re fucking incredible, but I can’t track any of it. Temporal pincer movement. We got the red team that’s going normal. We got the blue team that’s going backwards. Now Laci, according to the Doppler theory or the Doppler effect of light, electromagnetic waves, of course, shift blue as an object comes closer to the observer and red as it gets further away from the observer. Hence the red team and the blue team. It makes a lot of sense.

Laci (02:37:13):

Then why don’t they make lights on cars blue and red and not white and red? Stupid.

Matt (02:37:19):

At the same time, Katherine is on the yacht in Vietnam. She’s taken there by Hamesh Patel. Don’t let Seder die until you see me, Hamesh Patel, shoot this flare gone.

Laci (02:37:29):

They’re a perfect fucking match. Kat and fucking J.D. Vance are a perfect goddamn. You know what I mean? J.D. Washington are a perfect match because they’re both just want the thing they want more than they want the world to survive. But I just want to kill them. Can I just kill him?

Matt (02:37:43):

Well, then she’s also a perfect match for Seder. I just want the world to name. They’re going to serve each

Laci (02:37:48):

Other. Yeah, they’re a real Tenet. Fuck.

Matt (02:37:53):

Okay. So this is when we pretended to love each other, but this is also. We were having such a nice fake conversation.

Laci (02:38:03):

A real Tenet. I’m making hand motions. I’m coming up with some stuff.

Matt (02:38:08):

And if you’re not on the YouTube, you got to check this out.

Laci (02:38:12):

Okay.

Matt (02:38:14):

When we fake liked each other, that’s when I saw this is the perfect moment. Hey, will you grant me a divorce in full custody of my child, please? And he’s like, “No, you bitch.”

Laci (02:38:24):

I though you were going to say you want my sausage, my papiska.

Matt (02:38:29):

So they had that conversation and he’s like, “Yeah, I’ll let you go if you relinquish custody of your child forever.” And the reason I hate myself is that he could see in my eyes that I considered it for a second, but then realized, no, I’m a devoted mother and a good woman. But now they’re both from the future, but they’re pretending like they’re from the past to each other, which I think is cool. That is

Laci (02:38:53):

Cool.

Matt (02:38:54):

And he’s like, “Baby, I’m sorry for what I said. It was just a bad joke.” She’s like, “I know. Let’s just enjoy each other and give some sunscreen to each other.” Yes, yes. And he says, “Max should be here with

Laci (02:39:07):

Us.” And the vodka. She’s speaking his language. Vodka.

Matt (02:39:10):

Vodka.

Laci (02:39:10):

From the old country.

Matt (02:39:12):

And maybe it could be delivered in a whistle.

Laci (02:39:19):

I just got it.

Matt (02:39:21):

Tonight will be beautiful sunsets. Max should watch it with us. He’s talking about the nuclear apocalypse that’s coming. We should all watch the nuclear together.

Laci (02:39:30):

No, I think he just remembers that the sunset’s good because he’s already seen it.

Matt (02:39:34):

I know. And I know that he’s going to die and that’s what’ll trigger nuclear war or whatever. But it’s also, you could also read it as what I said. So she’s like, “Here, let me go spray off the deck or whatever.” And he’s like, “One moment for a phone call.” And gets on the phone.

Laci (02:39:48):

Look you son of a fucking bitch. I’m going to talk to you so sexy right now for such a long time. And if your fucking grandchildren’s children. He’s having the weirdest work

Matt (02:39:58):

Call. Yeah, because this is John David Washington on the other end of the call who’s deep in the bunker and getting close to the dead man’s or to the nuclear bomb or whatever. And this is like the Marion Cotiard knife speech.This is when I stick the knife in you Boost.This is

Laci (02:40:10):

Going a little long.

Matt (02:40:11):

When you die, your knowledge dies with you like anonymous builder Egyptian tomb and on and on. The knife that stabs deepest is knife you don’t fish. There’s like a dead soldier on the ground and then he springs up and saves John David Washington. They get the nuke.

Laci (02:40:27):

He’s making that face at the little orange. The little thing that indicates that your backpack is Neil’s backpack, whatever the backpack he’s looking at has the orange thing on it. Fine. But why would he make a face at that orange little tab before he knows it means it’s Neil’s? I think that means that it was in the scene with the pill. We must have seen that backpack before, way in the beginning.

Matt (02:40:51):

We see it in the opera.

Laci (02:40:53):

Yeah.

Matt (02:40:53):

Yeah.

Laci (02:40:55):

Neil. That’s what I’m saying.

Matt (02:40:58):

That

Laci (02:40:58):

He’s been here this whole time.

Matt (02:41:00):

This

Laci (02:41:00):

Is the move. They just keep doing this over and over again. I’m right.

Matt (02:41:05):

They’re not doing it over and over again. I’m right. It’s intercut with Seder and Kat being nice to each other, but then she’s like, “I’m going to rub some sunscreen on your back.” And then she’s doing that. She’s like, “Fuck this. I can’t do this. You’re a disgusting goblin person. You’re gross.” And then she says, “Look in my eyes. What do you see? Despair or anger?” And then she opens up her shirt and shows him, “This is where you shot me with an inverted bullet, you bastard.”

Laci (02:41:30):

Because he knows he said that to her, but she shouldn’t know he said that to her yet. And when he does, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Past you is smarter you and it’s not past you.

Matt (02:41:40):

And what’s great, the great, here’s Nolan’s great editing, is it takes him a second to figure out what it means.

Laci (02:41:48):

Yeah.

Matt (02:41:50):

No. She shoots him like a dog. Like

Laci (02:41:53):

A dog.

Matt (02:41:54):

And I fucking love her pushing him off the sliding him over the deck and then pushing him over, hits his fucking head like Fabrizio and Titanic. He

Laci (02:42:01):

Hits his back too. I think it’s important that he doesn’t hit his head because he doesn’t die yet. And that’s what’s implied is that like, oh, he dies in the water.

Matt (02:42:10):

Well, then he hits his back like Fabrizio. Hits his back with Fabrizio. And right before she dives off the yacht, love this, takes a swig of vodka right before she dives off the thing and then sees her former self.

Laci (02:42:22):

She’s got to not just swim to the boat she has to pull his body.

Matt (02:42:26):

So she’s

Laci (02:42:26):

Really out of it

Matt (02:42:27):

When she gets

Laci (02:42:28):