Admittedly I miss a lot of things in books and movies (and I'm not much of a re-read/watch-er), but even I thought Barbie was much too unsubtle. I think they were trying to split the pot between making a point and a fun movie when leaning harder into "fun movie" would've made the point just as well.
I had exactly your Inverse Mike Ford problem with Tenet. Time travel (and especially any sort of time travel where we visit the same moment more than once, either in a loop or from another perspective) is one of my favorite storytelling elements, especially in movies. So I've watched a LOT of time travel movies. And I was so excited through the first 3/4 of Tenet, I kept telling myself "wow, he's playing all the time travel tropes REALLY straight, it's going to be SO COOL when he subverts them." And then he didn't. It has one novel conceit, and you get that from the trailer, and then when you watch the movie you get to explore a few weird side effects of the novel conceit, and if you think about them too hard you start bumping into how nonsensical the conceit is, but beyond that it's an extremely by-the-book time travel movie, and every twist and turn is the most obvious way of handling things. I had basically your Barbie reaction to Tenet - it was like Nolan was constantly elbowing me, saying, "isn't this time travel BLOWING your MIND" and I was like "can we just watch Primer again? I'm still trying to figure out where the third Aaron comes from."
The biggest struggle I had with understanding the movie was that almost all the dialogue was mixed so low, but I solved that by watching with captions.
Admittedly I miss a lot of things in books and movies (and I'm not much of a re-read/watch-er), but even I thought Barbie was much too unsubtle. I think they were trying to split the pot between making a point and a fun movie when leaning harder into "fun movie" would've made the point just as well.
I had exactly your Inverse Mike Ford problem with Tenet. Time travel (and especially any sort of time travel where we visit the same moment more than once, either in a loop or from another perspective) is one of my favorite storytelling elements, especially in movies. So I've watched a LOT of time travel movies. And I was so excited through the first 3/4 of Tenet, I kept telling myself "wow, he's playing all the time travel tropes REALLY straight, it's going to be SO COOL when he subverts them." And then he didn't. It has one novel conceit, and you get that from the trailer, and then when you watch the movie you get to explore a few weird side effects of the novel conceit, and if you think about them too hard you start bumping into how nonsensical the conceit is, but beyond that it's an extremely by-the-book time travel movie, and every twist and turn is the most obvious way of handling things. I had basically your Barbie reaction to Tenet - it was like Nolan was constantly elbowing me, saying, "isn't this time travel BLOWING your MIND" and I was like "can we just watch Primer again? I'm still trying to figure out where the third Aaron comes from."
The biggest struggle I had with understanding the movie was that almost all the dialogue was mixed so low, but I solved that by watching with captions.