#Tenet The major problem I had with Tenet was not the complexities of the concepts, but how the characters weren't characters in themselves and merely existed just to serve the purpose of giving the audience an exposition of the ideas and rules of the world.

The very fact of a film, be it Tenet or any, being an espionage, sci-fi thriller subsumes the justification that characters need not be as emotionally deep as they are in art-house films thus rendering any sort of expectation to form an emotional connect with the characters…
…null; but I expect the film to flourish of its capacities and techniques otherwise which is what the previous films of Nolan did, at least until Inception.
Tenet from the very first go feels jarringly cut and leaves no room for the characters to develop and indulges in exposition dump in every other scene.
It makes the film-watching experience a puzzle-solving task that we are left at times wondering whether to watch the present scene or process what has just been seen.
The Airplane crashing sequence, from a different point of view, after using the turnstile was some of the best a blockbuster cinema had offered thus far. What made it great was the room that it gave for the audience to notice it.
But the finale felt like a dump that projected more the interest of Nolan with high-end military equipment than actually being a final piece that was supposed to make the previous missions look pale in comparison.
As said before, the most of the problems I had with Tenet was with basic storytelling, and not with the handling of high-end concepts of physics. Nolan sure does work around archetypal characters to set up his highly-sophisticated sci-fi ideas.
But a stereotypic Russian who wants to blow up the world is outright comic that it makes Civil war, an exceptionally well-made espionage thriller, which it really is by the way.
The rest of the arguments as to how the film becomes better with the second-watch, or how more things look well-rounded, are just a console to our heart which did not get the experience it expected to get. At the end, the whole of Tenet is not better than the sum of its parts.

More from For later read

Excited we finally have a draft of this paper, which attempts to provide a 'unifying theory' of the long economic divergence between the Middle East & Western Europe

As we see it, there are 3 recent theories that hit on important aspects of the divergence...

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One set of theories focus on the legitimating power of Islam (Rubin, @prof_ahmetkuru, Platteau). This gave religious clerics greater power, which pulled political resources away form those encouraging economic development

But these theories leave some questions unanswered...
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Religious legitimacy is only effective if people
care what religious authorities dictate. Given the economic consequences, why do people remain religious, and thereby render religious legitimacy effective? Is religiosity a cause or a consequence of institutional arrangements?

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Another set of theories focus on the religious proscriptions of Islam, particular those associated with Islamic law (@timurkuran). These laws were appropriate for the setting they formed but had unforeseeable consequences and failed to change as economic circumstances changed

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There are unaddressed questions here, too

Muslim rulers must have understood that Islamic law carried proscriptions that hampered economic development. Why, then, did they continue to use Islamic institutions (like courts) that promoted inefficiencies?

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