TENET And A Celebration Of Vibes Movies 

All those “storys” cross youre videos, give me a Doug Walker vibe Not best vibe Hope youre not gona end up like him

@@denorangeblackandwhite2213 never seen his stuff so i don't even know what this means

Is it too bold to call Michael Bay movies vibe cinema? It feels bold and dare I say, nuts?

my comment is really good

So why no John Wick mention, huh?

Very true

I was wondering what are good examples and this one is perfect. Thanks

Ocean's Twelve is my favourite for this very reason.

Yeah, Tallinn is awesome, makes me wonder if filmwise it will be now considered the city of Tenet or still the city of Stalker 🙂

Tallinn lended itself so well for the movie though as nothing like it had really been used for a locale in a blockbuster before. Seeing my barbershop in a scene was still fucking weird lol.

Ohio better

I've wanted to visit Tallinn for ages! I guess I'll have to rewatch Tenet after eventually do and see if I recognize anything!

​@@Antwannnn let me guess, American who never left the US right? Can I make another guess that you're also overweight?

way too underrated fr

I have harassed everyone I know about this movie. I have always loved it for exactly the reasons Patrick said.

I’ve been a Miami Vice truther ever since I saw it at the cinema

Agreed. I looked forward to Miami Vice for months, and I loved it for all of the reasons in the video. Needless to say, I was a bit dismayed when I saw the critical reception. I believe there's a certain part of me that always understood vibes movies inherently even if it wasn't something I could articulate, and I watched it in that headspace, whereas all those critics were viewing Miami Vice from a simple plot-oriented mindset. Not to say that it's a perfect movie, but that largely the criticism it received came from a place of missing the point.

@@PsyanideInk I’ve got some great essays on Miami Vice if you or anyone else is interested in reading

It doesn't have the murky feeling of those films though. It has more of an upbeat 60s vibe to it whereas Tenet and Miami Vice are much murkier and less glamorous than that film and U.N.C.L.E is more of a traditional plot driven film in my opinion and plays all the traditional beats of one. It's good I just don't think it's as experimental as Tenet or Miami Vice in the way Patrick is talking about. Personally I think the Tony Scott film Deja Vu is a better example of a vibe movie or even Tony Scott's other fim Domino or maybe even Man on Fire. Ot the Michael Mann film Blackhat. Those are just my initial thoughts on it anyway.

Iirc it also has Elizabeth debicki in a leading role

I think it's Alicia Vikander@@iiiivvvv9986

lol literally saving Cat

I'm not sure if I understand the trope, but isn't the protagonist choosing to save the people in the cheap seats in the Opera an example as well?

@@moorederodeo yep. also sticking with his buddies even after they were rumbled at the start.

Will defend it and the 3 layers of "rules" the movie has that unfold perfectly if you're paying attention through all 3 acts

It’s moved up the list of my favorite Nolan movies. I’ve seen it three times now and it gets better and better. Inception is the opposite, it’s a good movie but on every rewatch the exposition gets more annoying to deal with

We live in a twilight world…

Maybe a rewatch could help. I didn't love it back when I watched it in theatres during the earlier covid days. Did have some cool scenes for sure tho.

​​@@thakatspajamaz ...and the constant allusions to THE PINCER MANEUVER and Entropy. It pays off.

Too bad he forgot to film the bad guys in the scene so we get a lot of nice looking shots of guys with guns mostly shooting at the air and trying to get to........someplace.

it's ridiculous to think Tenet isn't about anything more

@@galactic85that was my only gripe with the film tbh

​@@galactic85blame Alec Baldwin and the guy who shot Brandon Lee. There's a reason you're not allowed to point a blank firing prop gun at people during filming these days

@@lithuaniaball Tenet was filmed before Rust??? What are you even on about?

I just wrote a comment like this, my feeling is that John Wick feels a lot like a video game and that holds it slightly back, whereas Fallout feels more like Tenet for example than it does many other MI movies. I think the feel of the movie is important. At the same time John Wick makes me consider quite deeply what the movie is about. Especially this fourth one.

Yeah I feel that the latter John Wick movies fit Patrick’s definition of vibe movies perfectly: a lonely protagonist in a convoluted plot (but it doesn’t matter since we always know his immediate goal) with a presentation HEAVY on style and glamour. And everyone wears tuxedos.

john wick laps every other movie for a vibes movie

@@Si-Horrocks I guess you can argue that John has more clear personal stakes in the story than any other protagonist in vibes movies. Nevertheless, when I was watching John Wick 4 in the theater, I definitely vibed

I'd say that John Wick is basically just a stunt movie, whose inspirations are old action and kung-fu movies. The mood and emphasis is completely different. What PW is talking about is mostly modern noir, i.e. Michael Mann.

The Green Knight is one of those movies that permanently sits in my mind. I can’t get it out.😅😁

Probably another movie saved by the great vibes

And, see, in how I would define a "Vibes Movie" (Fantastical or surrealistic imagery OR Non Human Perspective on normal things, low to no dialogue, low to no violence and a score/soundscape designed to calm the viewer, not pump them up) The Green Knight (yep, 20 minute endgame sequence with no dialogue so yep, just TWO (kind of extreme) acts of violence in the movie and a pretty great fitting score by Daniel Hart), ABSOLUTELY fits. It almost certainly wouldn't fit this video's DEEPLY WEIRD definition at all (too grimy, too few countries, not enough spectacle, not enough momentum), but, well, my take on it is this: If I wouldn't describe a video game doing this stuff as a Vibes Game, why would I call you a Vibes Movie? And, note, this is a day off of playing Stray, from start to finish. TALK. ABOUT. VIBES.

Some of the best Cinematography ever. It is so beautiful .

John wick

Tron Legacy is amazing, I agree, it’s definitely a vibes movie.

Came here to second Tron Legacy. It deserves way more love.

I think the original Tron would work, too. Lots of technical jargon that makes no sense , the whole movie is defined by a single mission, and the main character doesn’t really change internally.

Totally agree about Tron Legacy. If you watch it for plot it's miserable. But if you just revel if the visuals and the vibe it's an astonishing work of art.

Real Genius, great Kilm

Blade Runner leans more towards the "tone poem" side of things, IMO

@@michaelotis223 definitely adjacent, but less grounded than most of the vibes movies. Incidentally, the OG Blade Runner and its director Ridley Scott are also known strong influences on Nolan. Scifi Vibes movies could almost include their own category. The Scott directed Alien franchise installments have a few elements of technobabble and unclear plot elements. It's definitely what The Chronicles of Riddick movie is aiming for with its obviously dense yet completely unexplained lore and plot. The Cantina scene in Star Wars is like the distillation of the scifi version of this and the OG Star Wars movie in particular definitely has a sprinklings of this with an unexplained price on Han's head and Luke's unexplained father who was apparently the best star fighter in the galaxy and this Tarkin guy who seems to order this giant black cyborg wizard around.

I would say the OG blade runner qualifies more on this category than 2049.

​@@v-trigger6137Final Cut yes, less the theatrical

​@@caffetiel Yeah, I was thinking that whatever version that doesn't include Ford's narration qualifies a vibes film. We know nothing about Deckard's personal life, no detail about himself that isn't relevant to the case at hand.

This. I don't mind any spoilers. If a film or a tv show catches me, it catches me. Moving over to TV for example, I knew before what the Red Wedding in GoT was, yet watching it still left me devastated because of how it was presented.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. For the better part of a decade, in fact, I’ve gone out of my way to find spoilers so I can get the context out of the way and focus entirely of the execution.

Until they're horror flick spoilers which completely remove the tension from it all and thus the vibe lol. Or mystery spoilers. Or really anything that relies on not knowing how it ends in order to hold the vibe in place at all.

Yeah seriously, people are too concerned with what happens at the end of films. They seem to think that knowing how a film ends, means you can't enjoy the rest of it, as if the only important part of a story is the last few minutes and that the journey _TO_ the end is unimportant. It's a ridiculous attitude to have. The journey there _IS_ the film, not just how it ends. If knowing what happens at the end was the only important part, then why do these people even bother watching any films at all? Because going by their logic, they could simply read the plot summary of a film on Wikipedia and that would be equally enjoyable to them as sitting down and watching the entire film. But obviously it's not.

I don’t think Nolan himself understood the concept throughly and frankly it shows in the film! The plot is so complex it feels contrived. Also the lead actor was the wrong choice!

@@hekikoka5792 to me the whole "Tenet" is confusing to understand thing was compareable to "Only 1% of the people can solve this puzzle" clickbait images online. Tenet is not hard to follow and it's filled with errors and inconsistencies, even if you suspend your disbelief.

Tenet was the first film I saw in theaters after Covid. I was so damn hyped for it as I am a mega Nolan fan since Prestige. I went into it so damn excited, finally seeing a movie in theaters, seeing a Nolan film and it delivered on everything. I fucking love this movie and I think it will be like Interstellar, which had mixed reviews and feelings when it came out but is now seen as a gem.

​@@hekikoka5792What entails a "wrong choice"?

I love when Nolan stans will use any excuse to justify any and all decisions he makes lol. The film felt like he completely lost hold of the plot and the themes and just went with the whole “Don’t understand it , feel it” shtick and used that as a crutch throughout.

yes! I did a double viewing recently watching it back to back just for this reason. It's fun studying how he weaved the movement of this movie together. Especially since I absolutely HATED it on first viewing. His workings with time/editing seems to get sharper with every film, or at least explores a new angle of possible time/editing mechanics.

I only watched it for the first time last week, and I was shocked, because, well... people were actually _CONFUSED_ by this movie!? Seriously!? It wasn't even remotely confusing. It's not even the most complicated movie Christopher Nolan has ever made, and his films are all simple to understand. Seriously, was this just some kind of long running joke that people were telling, where they were pretending to be confused by the film? You'd have to be really quite stupid to not understand it. You don't have to watch it multiple times either, if you have a functioning brain then you'll understand it first time. What exactly were people confused about? Imagine if these morons watched something like Primer instead. That's an _ACTUAL_ confusing film, unlike Tenet.

How do you know he hasn't been approached?

He was in talks to do a bond movie several times. In fact that was supposed to be his next project before tenet. He even had an “actor” in mind, Harry Styles.

I think you also need to watch it somewhere with a giant screen and giant speakers

@@tonimashdane33498 I absolutely love American Beauty but just like all the other Bond films I just can’t get into them. For instance, I don’t like marvel at all, and I love Star Wars but the ideas and not necessarily the movies or the shows. But the few movies that I did enjoy were the ones with easily identifiable and or universal themes. Like In No Way Home, the theme is “fixing people who don’t want to be fixed.” Once Peter gets on his healing journey, almost every interaction in the film calls back you the theme, even for the goblin (“I’ll fix you Peter”) in his own twisted take. In Andor and Rogue one it’s the same. They have themes that are in the forefront and build tire to road traction. Bourne trilogy as well, though the theme is usually uprooted by another literary device like Jason’s Emotional Wound, his memory loss and the tragedy of how he became an agent. Then he hunts the people who trained him like he’s in a half remembered dream. But in Bond, no matter who it’s filmed by, there’s no theme or emotional wound that’s interesting enough, in my opinion of course, to gain the tire to road traction from scene to scene. Like in game of thrones, every character has an emotional wound (Jon is a bastard, Jaime is the king slayer, Tyrion is a dwarf, etc), and they continuously bully those characters or do things to remind the audience what their wounds are, It’s as if the characters are vehicles for their wounds. This makes every conversation in game of thrones, where one wound interacts with another, absolutely explosive and interesting in game of thrones. But in the bond movies everything feels weightless, even in skyfall I was asking myself why should I care about this or why is this at all interesting. So in conclusion, I agree that bond needs an auteur but it also needs to challenge itself in pushing cinematic and narrative language forward. Because the themes they introduce if any have been done before and done far better. Bond needs to learn how to stand on the shoulders of narrative giants and take the challenge in evolving film in general. The best movie/shows do this. While bond, marvel, Lucasfilm seem to be operating in a narrative bubble where better storytelling techniques don’t exist

@@tonimashdane33498 I really didn’t get the Mendes Bond films either. I know he’s capable, but I think he was paying too much homage to the past, which I think is inauthentic especially for an auteur. I can’t even assess if his films were better because they feel as weightless as the others (but not as bad as the goldeneye era films). And my theory on bond not hiring Nolan was that he was going to do his own thing (and maybe his choice in bond in Harry styles).

I was looking for this comment 😭

Related to this, the Protagonist definitely does develop an emotional investment throughout the film; but I guess what Pat is saying is that these things get glossed over and are never highlighted. The emotional points exist for show, or for who are looking.

Also, the dialog is really not that hard to follow and it's not an excuse for the plot to go forward, it's the very thing that makes the plot go forward. Each dialogue scene is setting up what is going to happen in the very next scene AND what is going to happen 20 minutes later, as well as laying very subtle hints for the second watch, character building as well as being just genuinely fun dialog. Patrick's comments about the plot being mindless nonsense makes me question not only his understanding of movies but his very grasp of the English language.

Thank you. I think the whole film if full of details like this, where you think it's breaking all the rules, but it's just following them in ways we don't expect. Like, at the beginning of the Essay, after Patrick points out that there's no cat being saved, he also points out that the villain never confronts the hero, while showing the villain being defeated by Kat. The whole point of the film is that the Protagonist is a misdirect. It's his film, but it's Kat's story. She's the one who has an ultimate personal stake, she's the one who defeats the villain. All the other stuff is as secondary as the garbled, exposition-heavy dialog.

@@rottensquid Thank you for noticing that, beyond angry that her basically being the main character got overlooked in favour of “She just talks about her son all the time!” (Which is objectively untrue)

​@kylemanning444 I find The Protagonist so fascinating and subtle. It's such a common thing to hear about how he doesn't have a personality and depth when he very much does. You just have to pay attention, same as the emotional points you talk about.

I can't believe I never heard of that film, or saw it, until this year. It's like Mission Impossible with fewer blockbuster stunts.

Ronin is a masterpiece

Can't upvote this enough! "Ronin" may be the perfect example of what Patrick describes as a "Vibes" movie: What's the mission? Get the thing. What is that thing? Why do they want it? Irrelevant - as is the backstories or motivations of the characters. And yet even with those elements missing you get a movie full of international intrigue, twisted betrayals, a heady mix of clashing personalities and skills, and two of the best car chases ever put on a movie screen. Nolan could somehow film a car crashing sideways through time, and it'll never be as astounding as that chase through the narrow Paris streets. (It also doesn't have the detriment "Tenet" possesses in chickening out by going back to the "Inception" well of having a character pining for their kids being kept from them (Nolan's most formative life moment was apparently a child custody dispute). The moment where Neil describes the threat as destroying both timelines and everything in them and Kat responds with, "What about my kid?" is part of what makes "Tenet" Christopher Nolan's funniest movie).

A fellow Ronin enjoyer! A movie not talked about nearly enough at the time or in the decades since its release since it really holds up.

Yes!

Yesss FLCL rocks. i didn't give a single fuck about what it was trying to say on my first watch but it never really bored me. i think the same goes for Paprika as well, for me at least.

The Pillows definitely helped make FLCL super amazing. [Solo]

This is me but with Gurren Lagann

@@lankyGigantic don't think that Gurren Lagan was "tough to understand" for anyone......

I see you're a man of culture

Vibe adjacent

They have plots though. So does Tenet.

That's James Bond.

Sounds like a you problem. Everyone was very charismatic and cool in the movie

@@billelliott3507 Maybe they were, but I still didn't feel much connection to the characters. I never cared about the protagonist. However, I personally don't think that's a problem at all. To me the movie wasn't about that sort of a character connection, so it's sort of like saying I didn't feel like the cashier at burger king engaged enough with me about the politics of the universe of My Little Pony; that's not what I would expect or necessarily want in that relationship.

I am so glad I was able to see this movie freely and multiple times when it released since I'm in NZ and we were covid free. There was nothing else much to show at the time so I was able to watch Tenet 15 times over 3.5 months in Laser IMAX and it was glorious. The experience to seeing it there can't come close to being matched.

Most definitely. And I'd add Manhunter to that list too, total vibes, aesthetic viscerality there also!

THANK YOU.

Yeah... my main issue with people putting Tenet alongside the likes of Miami Vice is that Miami Vice makes me FEEL something. The movie has a consistent emotional core to it (despair and longing mostly haha) that keeps you engaged. Tenet has nothing to anchor me on an emotional level.

I mean, I always found Elizabeth debicky's character and her struggle very compelling

I think you're really overstating how much exposition there is to a mandela effect degree, there are long long stretches of action with no exposition, not to mention that there's an argument for the exposition being part of the vibe, given as it's almost impossible to understand the time inversion stuff without taking a break to think about it, because you're not supposed to think about it, you're not supposed to understand the science of it, you trust that it works and you "feel it"

My main problem with Tenet is not trying to understand how the time effect works, but how dated and cliché is the villain portrayed by Kenneth Brannagh. His villain was insufferable to me.

Oh man, my thoughts went to Neuromancer too.

I actually described zack Snyder’s sucker punch as a vibes movie years ago in an essay. It doesn’t make too much sense, but the music is dope and you’re constantly going in different locales. You’re just supposed to vibe with it

I find that literary fiction (which I don't care for) is exactly this. Very powerful and emotive, inundating you with words, words, words, emotions, feelings, but in the end it's often a story that only needed about three pages to adequately tell. Sometimes not even that, depending on what the author is really trying to do.

Thank you so much!!

The plot in that film is actually pretty straightforward, but there are a few dead ends. That film is very good.

Cool dialogue, cars, settings and action make me fall asleep if I don't care about anyone or anything in the movie.

Comments like these make me fear that I am right in thinking this video might serve as a gateway drug for "turn off your brain" movie viewing.

@@esotericVideos Analysis like this should be paired with criticism of it. It's not like brain dead movies are a good thing.

​@@esotericVideosI think the better word is mind Your brain is just tissue I'll take heart felt any day

Tell me why I thought you meant you watched this video drunk and not the movie. 😂

@@joselopezjr.7864 Don't worry, i watched the video drunk. So you wouldn't have to. (its very good either way)

It's better when you just go with the flow.....stop trying to out-think the director and run with it

@@michaelotis223 I thought the film was doing the classic misdirection trick by inviting you to try and out-think the director, while the real plot as happening somewhere else.

Yeah, a 10 second close up of a character delivering dialogue - but having it be impossible to hear him .. It makes me think that Nolan changed his mind about what he wanted the movie to be in post.

Agreed

Idk why I never had a problem hearing the movie. I haven’t met anyone in person who had that complaint. My friends and I saw it and understood it enough to make some theories

​@DrVonJay I have a theory thst because what the characters were actually saying was difficult to say that that's why people overblown the sound. Because I agree, on rewatch it's easy to hear them and maybe that's because I understand the movie overall? It's an interesting thing to ponder.

@@natf7942 that’s probably what people meant. Because I heard absolutely everything. Plus I love science, entropy is something that has kept me thinking at night, even entropy thought puzzles like Maxwell’s demon. So maybe I didn’t need to pay too much attention because everything flowed? Whereas in inception, it’s easier to follow i guess because people understand dreams Way better than they do entropy. So yeah you could be right.

2001 is an excellent example

I think this is much more common in comedy.

David Lynch definitely has a vibe

Here's how I remember Mulholland Drive, and bear in mind it's been years: Lady goes to Hollywood, it eats her up as she falls to the depths of murder, and while she fantasizes about how it should be, in the end guilt tears at her until she kills herself.

One difference is that Bourne had a plot, unlike Tenet

Thumbs up for Man from Uncle. I was also thinking of that one.

@@DC5Brandon heck yeah

Would make sense, except that the plot is very explicit, clasic revenge then runaway story....but if u feel the vibes, its really what matters

Well said. This is more or less how I feel about his work (especially after watching Twin Peaks: The Return and reading many interpretations)