Tenet

For me, the best Nolan since Inception, i.e. in ten years, but with some “buts”. The most important of which is that the barrage is so relentless that it’s impossible to absorb. By this I don’t mean the big picture, which is pretty clear and sensible by the end, but the details during the journey. What was the role of several secondary characters in the story as a whole? What was the thought process that led the protagonists to choose the plans they choose in several parts of the story? How did they know where to go, etc. All the dialogues (and there are lots of them!) are simply reduced to the exchange of vital information, and there are so many that most people, myself included, are unable to remember them well enough, let alone connect them to all the other information that was given before and all the other information that is yet to be given, and I don’t think this is our mistake. If Tenet had the same amount of plot but was twice as long, I would have objectively enjoyed it more. As it is, I would have to watch it at least once more and hope to make sense of those smaller bits. Regardless, technically it’s awesome and the concept is brilliant. The scenes that mix events going forward and backward in time are unlike any other film and there where moments I thought my head would explode. This is exactly I want from Nolan, so I am very satisfied, though I understand people who aren’t or won’t be so, if only because Nolan doesn’t know how to work with female characters, that’s an objective fact. PS (Spoiler): If we consider the motivations of the “villains” (the invisible ones, not the Russian guy), shouldn’t we be actually rooting for them? :) (2020-08-26)

This time Christopher Nolan got a little off the rails and became his own enemy. Tenet is of course a great piece, very fast paced and nice to watch, but unfortunately it disappoints in the very things that should elevate it above the classic summer blockbuster. Nolan may have announced that he's pretty much making his own Bond movie, and it looks like it for the first half, but it's more or less a classically conceived spy thriller clashing with his cool direction, where he keeps his distance from everything. And the audience has to go with him. Tenet then becomes a downright Nolan flick somewhere around the halfway point, but unlike Inception, which is the closest the film comes to it, here we don't discover the rules of the new world gradually, and no one explains them in breathtaking scenes. Nolan simply takes the characters and the audience and throws them into deep water, regardless of whether they can swim. What's going on? How does it work? What affects what? And who's to blame for it all? That's more or less dealt with on the fly here, and I reckon I missed half the stuff. I did end up enjoying a lot of the spectacular action, where things were a bit weird, but I didn't really care why. I reckon on a second viewing I would have been clear on it, kept track of everything and got everything in order. But for perhaps the first time ever with Nolan, I'm not sure I want to watch it a second time. (2020-08-24)

Christopher Nolan at his most challenging, ambitious and exhaustive. It's good to finally watch a big, expensive film in the cinema after a long time. Tenet is really great to look at, it has excellent technical aspects, beautiful cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, an ear-splitting soundtrack (quite possibly the loudest film I've ever seen in the cinema), great actors, where both John David Washington and Robert Pattinson get a proper carrier boost, and also nice and spectacular action (the fight in the kitchen, the car chase and the finale are a blast), and the concept itself is presented in an original and engaging, albeit complicated way. Even the dialogues are pretty hard to understand, they talk about things I don't care that much about, but fortunately Tenet has a good pace and when it looks like the film is getting boring Nolan pulls an ace out of his sleeve. Story*****, Action****, Humor>No, Violence>No, Entertainment****, Music****, Visual*****, Atmosphere****, Suspense****. 8/10. (2020-08-30)

A banal plot in which two characters (a man and a woman with chemistry) speak normally and everyone else in such coded language that it could be developed without conspicuous illogic into a seemingly ultra-sophisticated spectacle packed with unexpected situations and unprecedented visual attractions. Or rather, one unprecedented attraction, when in one shot some characters run forward and others backwards and it looks neither ridiculous nor strange, but on the contrary, fresh and spectacular. Nolan clearly and meaningfully declared his fetish for time paradoxes in Inception and now he’s merely changing it up on other theoretical levels and interweaving it with new sub-genre elements (in this case, Bond films). And he increasingly equivocates, pretends and artificially complicates things as much as possible in order to push everything farther and higher than last time, while cleverly hiding the absence of a supporting foundation for the plot (which was dreams in Inception). Winking at the thoughtful viewer with lines like "You have no idea what I'm talking about...” Answer: “No, but it sounds extremely important" can thus be understood as passing the buck, but I see it rather as a plea for leniency towards the deliberate gaps in logic and, conversely, appreciation of his courage and exceptional genre progressiveness. Tenet is a techno-thriller from another dimension. In the context of the viewer’s state of mind induced by the film, the last scene with Pattinson reminded me of Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers, which almost made me laugh in places with its cheesy absurdity. Actually, that was the best thing that could have happened to me with Tenet, if I'm supposed to like it. P.S. Göransson’s music is outstanding, as it gives the film a more energetic and innovative tone than we would expect from Zimmer (whose music, however, would be more enjoyable to listen to on its own). (2020-09-07)

Nolan spins the threads of time, reverses entropy, and becomes definitively his own genre benchmark, no longer needing to prove anything to anyone. He plays a stimulating game with the viewer that is, at its core, justifiably simple because its magic lies in its precise narrative composition, which inevitably demands full attention and multiple viewings. I gave up the first time and the composition of the timelines together with the thunderous music threw me into lethargy. It was only on the second viewing that I enjoyed the elaborately complex structure that makes you think and gives nothing away for free. It’s a fascinating and immersive experience in every way, with such unique production values that it is almost impossible to compare it to anything else. I read the Q&A breakdowns for this film and consider them proof that the viewer is really just a small cog in the great game of one principle. (2021-11-01)