I
just saw the second trailer for Star Trek: Picard and I have one question:What’s with the communicator that Cristobal Rios
is wearing?
It
looks like many of the major characters are back from the first season.Picard is shown wearing an admiral’s
uniform.7 of 9 is shown without her
implants.We even see Agnes Jurati, although
it’s not clear what her fate is.And
then, there’s the addition of Q.Of
course, we knew that from the first trailer.
The
one scene that I’m talking about is Rios standing on his ship.He has a Starfleet communicator, but one
thing sticks out for me.It has what
appears to be the hilt of a sword or dagger.We know that there’s supposed to be some aspect of time travel.Q even says something about “the very end of
the road not taken.”
Now,
this might be a callback to Tapestry, in which Picard saw what his life was
like without his artificial heart.Of
course, Picard was only a lieutenant in that episode and here, he would seem to
be in charge of Starfleet.(I count four
pips inside the rectangle.)
However,
the dagger would imply that the second season might be visiting The Mirror
Universe, even if briefly.There’s also
the voiceover saying that time is broken.Maybe elements of several timelines have converged, but I haven’t seen
anyone else comment on the dagger.I
just wanted to put that out there for anyone who might have picked up on it.
There are certain movies that are
difficult to wrap your head around.I
knew Tenet would be like that going into it.It’s 2½ hours, which is intimidating enough.But to know that there are people and objects
that are temporally inverted adds a whole new level of things to keep track of.
The lead character, known simply as The
Protagonist, starts by trying to extract someone from an opera house.He gets caught up in something much more
complicated.The first hint of this is
bullets that can be fired backwards so that they go in to a gun.There are other items that ostensibly come
from the future, which would imply that people can go backwards, as well.Also, what happened to cause this?Was there some sort of war?How was all of this set up?What’s the end game?
I’m not going to go into the details of
the plot, mostly because I can’t remember most of them.It was that complicated.I will say that I found a lot of it
confusing.Yes, people can go backwards
in time.It’s tricky and they have to
bring inverted oxygen with them.To give
you an example of what I mean, one character drives a normal car while
inverted.The car seems to go on once
the character jumps out, but it’s not clear why.I’m not sure if the car was inverted or if
someone was driving the car before (or is it after?) the other character.
This is not a movie for people who don’t
like complicated plots.I like
complicated plots and I think I was able to follow most of it, but I’m not
sure.The movie is heavy on the
technical side without really making a lot of sense.I think part of it is that you have to keep
track of what’s going backwards and what’s not going backwards.
We get to see at least one big fight in
both directions, which is something to watch.The question is, though, what can be changed?Could someone from the future do something different
on the way back?What would that even mean?
Stuff like the fight scene was cool,
only because I grasped what was going on.There were a few scenes that I didn’t understand and I felt like I was
supposed to.If you’re reading this and
you’re confused by the movie, you’re not alone.And this isn’t even something that could be explained in a few
sentences.I’d probably need to watch
the movie again with notes to understand a lot of it.This is one of the few times where I might
have watched the movie again with a commentary track where someone was
explaining it all.(I’m good with
details, but I’m sure there’s a lot that I missed.)
I wouldn’t recommend watching this with
someone else who hasn’t seen it yet.I
was watching it with my parents and they had about as many questions as I
did.I had no answers for them.Yes, it’s a confusing movie.Now that the movie has been out for a while,
I might look around for some explanations.
