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Reviews
Foundation: The Mathematician's Ghost (2021)
Excellent episode
This episode is great, despite not following the book.
The first 20 minutes are excellent, the music, the photography and the script. Rarely will shows develop on the subject of death and this one did it with mastery. When we think of empires like Rome, people rarely distinguish the different 15+ emperors, it's all caesars. The clones idea in this show is very clever and communicates that lineage very well.
Salvor Hardin is a completely different character here than in the books. However easy it is to criticize what we're watching, it'd be extremely hard to create something appealing to the masses if they were following the book to the letter. Asimov's books sound more like history material than a novel at points, and it isn't until we get closer to the mule that things start getting really exciting.
I read the books and understand the necessity to change material to fit it on 1h-length episodes. I have to be ok with that if I want to enjoy the show. I let go of the idea that anything on TV will be an exact match to what's in books.
I think the low rating is due to diehard fans wishing to see on the screen the exact depiction of how they imagine each character on the book. That's just impossible.
I was really let down when they revealed Demerzel was a robot on epi 2, given we only learn tha in the fourth book, but now I understand why, and it was a necessity for the TV: without it how would they have shown them (he? Her?) accompanying the emperors for centuries? The entire thing would fall flat.
Tenet (2020)
A treat for whom loves physics
This movie is extremely complex, and I would probably not have understood it or cared about it if I didn't know physics, time vector and so on. My brain wouldn't have had the neural patterns to grasp the ideas as soon as they're shown. Thanks Brian Greene.
Watching this move is like listening to an intricate symphony. If you're expecting something out of the ordinary, it won't touch you. Perhaps action scenes are just enough for you, and this movie is masterful at that. But then you're missing a whole hidden dimension of entertainment.
Or like a painting that can mean just lines and colors to some, but deep, meaningful stories and emotions to others, depending on how you perceive the world.
The movie is an excellent expression of an extremely complicated and counterintuitive physics concept, and understanding it as you watch it is absolutely delicious. It's like Inception for adults.
Around 2005 Nolan explained in an interview the passage of time in Memento, drawing a curved line to explain that that movie presented intercalated scenes showing past and future events only to culminate at the point where both past and future collide, the present (search on YouTube, it's interesting to see his drawing and perception of time). Watching this movie feels like he wanted to have that same dynamic but without intercalated scenes, past and present shown simultaneously, and then he just needed a script to fill in for that. I think he managed it masterfully.
This film is not a 10 because the audio was as uncompressed as it can get, with low volume in some parts, to which you then increase the volume, just to be followed by a very high explosion. I guess that would work better in the cinema, but it was not good on my TV.
One of the best movies I've ever watched.