An opportunity to point fingers at a bad brief presents itself unexpectedly
2020 was a complete disaster for avid movie goers like me. However, I had the privilege of watching one of the major cinematic events of 2020 — Christopher Nolan’s Tenet — at its scheduled IMAX theater premiere in September. After waiting for 2 weeks+ post premiere, my sister and I bought earliest tickets on the weekday and made it to the theater equipped with masks and big cups of strong coffee to process a potentially mind-bending movie. We were right to bring coffee, but it didn’t help.
Sometime mid-movie our brains refused attempts to track everything that was going on. We compensated for that lack of brain activity in the theater with dissecting Tenet whichever way possible with whoever possible in the days that followed.
~ spoilers for Tenet and random Nolan movies ahead ~
~ spoilers for Tenet and random Nolan movies ahead ~
~ spoilers for Tenet and random Nolan movies ahead ~
Needless to say, this is not a movie review. This is a love story (dramatic look at the camera).
I love what I do for a living with (some say) unhealthy intensity because of the way advertising and strategy overlap with other things I love. Discussing Tenet gave me a ton of pleasure and great conversations with friends, but it also surprised me with being quite a metaphor for creative strategy.
If you saw Inception, you likely remember how DiCaprio’s character Cobb explains the movie in a nutshell: idea is the most contagious thing in the world.
In this scene Cobb is giving Saito the insight and we, the audience, now also know this major key to everything that happens in the movie. Infecting others with an idea is the key to getting Cobb’s life back, getting Ariadne’s character to join the team, etc.
The mechanic of how they do it — by dreams within dreams within dreams etc etc — is secondary and wouldn’t be as appealing if we didn’t know what was driving characters through it. Inception is not a simple movie to understand, but having a centering point of clarity sure helped process the multi-layered storytelling around it.
Unlike its predecessor Inception, Tenet is missing that insight — the crucial piece of information that gives meaning to everything onscreen. There’s nothing in the movie that clearly and concisely explains what the central idea is, making it hard to follow and unsure where we landed in the end. Just like a bad brief, Tenet confuses much more than impresses with putting a mechanic at its center instead of a sticky, inspiring idea.
I’m sure some will disagree with me on the strategy part and these disagreements will likely overlap with the arguments of those who disagreed with me on Tenet. That’s okay, for me this is an end of a beautiful friendship. It could be just the beginning for some of you if you tweet thoughts on the above @ me.
