“In any case, giants like Karkus — overload em with information an’ they’ll kill yeh jus’ to simplify things” Rubeus Hagrid
I hypothesize that everyone’s favourite film is one that they fully understand.
I posit that if the materials soars over your head then you’re unlikely to love it, in fact you’re more likely to be confused and hate it.
For example screenwriters will deliberately include a character who is slow on the uptake so they can ask the question:
What’s going on?
Thereby teeing up an explanation to get the audience all caught up.
A movie that doubles down and excels at this tactic is The Big Short.
The Big Short is a tale about the financial crash of 2007/08 and deals with complex financial terms and concepts.
In order to tell the story with depth and hold the audience’s attention the movie is littered with asides such as Ryan Gosling breaking the fourth wall or celebrities like Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez making cameo appearances to explain the jargon used by the characters in simple terms.
The filmmakers knew that the more the audience understood the intricacies of the plot the better chance they have of feeling the full impact of the story.
We can contrast the Big Short with Christopher Nolan’s Tenet which makes minimal, if any attempts, to keep the audience up to speed with its extremely cognitively taxing subject matter.
I’ve seen the movie three times and I still couldn’t tell you in detail what happens.
From what I saw it looked like the good guys won and the footage of people simultaneously moving backwards and forwards in time was cool but that’s all I got.
I imagine there were more layers to the film then that but I didn’t get them and by the sounds of it no one else who saw the film did either.
So would I recommend Tenet?
Probably not, unless you enjoy being confused for a few hours.
Thomas Duggan 