Tenet

Listen we all know Nolan swings for the fences of what's possible and pushes the realms of normality. This film for whatever reason just doesn't mesh together the way most of his films do even with complex suspension of disbelief aspects. It's often scattered and juxtaposed to a near outrageous level. The visuals are spectacular at times but also seem way too extravagant to take seriously other times. Robert Pattinson is flawless and probably the standout of the film with his vigorous performance. The same cannot be said about John David Washington's barren and emotionless lack of effort. I can't believe he was given the starring role. He brings the interest level down to almost unwatchable levels. Overall this is one of Nolan's rare misfires which he is capable of once in awhile.

I'm not gonna lie, first viewing was a big letdown. As a Nolan fan myself, I was shocked to see what I considered "annoying bad" writing and sound design. The sound design still is a problem as of writing this, but upon second viewing, it was like a little switch flicked on every time I saw something I didn't understand from the last viewing. The little details that I considered bad writing suddenly seemed like an obvious answer. The cheesy parts I thought were, well cheesy, had so much more depth. I'm not going to spoil it, but thinking about The Protagonist and Neil makes me feel so many emotions that upon second viewing never made me feel the way I did, truly beautiful. No movie is perfect, this one definitely isn't perfect. This is no Dunkirk or Inception, but I guarantee this movie will make you use your brain.

I have a huge amount of respect for director Christopher Nolan. His recent films Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk are three of the best things I've ever seen on film and I automatically want to see whatever new production he comes out with. So, I'm just back from the theater having seen Tenet for the first time (I'm pretty sure there will be a second and third time) and in one sense I have no idea what rating to give. At a minimum it would be worth at least 6/10 for its technical quality alone. But it might be 10/10 for the quality of its fiendishly intricate storyline, which leaves your head spinning by the end. But it' s not without a few problems (see below). So, OK -- 8/10 it is.

Among Nolan's previous works I'd say 'Tenet' owes the most to 'Inception' for its complex, ever-shifting, multilayered plot. For Inception it was the Russian-doll dreamworlds within dreamworlds. For Tenet, it's playing with time and time reversal (as you see from any trailer or synopsis out there). We've had any number of time-travel movies before, and one sure thing they're good for is setting up paradoxes, but the way Nolan deploys this on screen is at times genuinely and startlingly new (as just one example, there's a car chase on a busy freeway where one car is speeding backwards but time-reversed, so from its POV it's racing forward, which is why it can travel that fast driving backward ... and there are many more scenes that I won't spoil.) There are things here we've never seen on screen before.

In the barest of bare-bones summary, the plot is all about a hunt for The Algorithm, something that enables this messing with the timeline The uber-evil Andrei (Kenneth Branagh) aims to use it to start WW III, or even (in a total burst of nihilism) ring down the curtain on all of reality. The shadowy team called Tenet aims to stop this. Keep up with it if you can. On the surface, it's an excellent James Bond imitation. Exposition scenes are followed by thunderous action, rinse, repeat -- pretty much from start to finish. How confused you are at any given moment depends (like Inception) on how many questions are running through your mind: why are we in THIS location now, who's doing what to whom, and what precisely are the characters after? The overall impression, though (again, like Inception) is that there IS substance underneath the high-octane surface and that repeated viewings and study will bring it out. We'll see.

So the production quality is, as usual for Nolan, first-rate. There are big, bravura scenes (wait till you see the big opener in a concert hall) but plenty of close, person-to-person ones to balance. One thing that might be a little jarring is that the scene-to-scene transitions are extremely abrupt and extremely frequent, and I assume that's deliberate -- there's no time for viewers to think even if we want to. But I'll accept that as a feature rather than a bug. The overall flow isn't necessarily helped by the music score (by Ludwig Goransson), which is epic but also insistent and omnipresent. Too much of a good thing. Lots of the personal scenes would just have worked better for me with no background score stepping on the dialog.

For the acting: I thought John David Washington (as The Protagonist) was OK but rather wooden, and he's on screen most of the time. I kept visualizing Will Smith in the part instead -- but maybe he'd have taken over the movie too much and that's not the result Nolan wanted? I don't know. But I liked Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki quite a lot. They both have substantial, essential roles and they have more nuance and humanity than anything they've done before. Kenneth Branagh still can't do a good Russian accent (though to be fair, not many native-English actors can) and although he's fine, I think as an actor he's much better suited to Shakespeare or Hercule Poirot. There's a big cast of smaller roles (among which is the always-welcome Michael Caine), adding to the difficulty of keeping up with what's developing.

So there it is. I'm looking forward to figuring out more of what's under the hood of this thing.

I'd suggest people read the synopsis on Wikipedia before watching the time. Otherwise it would be too hard to follow. If you're the type of person who enjoys watching a movie multiple times and dissecting it then you'll enjoy Tenet

I've seen a lot of hate for Tenet, but I honestly believe the movie will age very well, and a lot of the people who hate it now will come to realize just how ahead of its time it is. I will admit that it prioritizes concept over plot and character, and hard-to-hear dialogue has become a recurring problem for Nolan. But the movie is great, and I like it more the more I think about it. You don't need to be super smart to understand it, as some diehard Nolan fans claim, but I believe you do need to be fascinated enough by the philosophy of time to make it a pleasant experience. Without that, I think the movie will bore you and that boredom will probably lead you to miss some key points needed to fill in the puzzle. Filling in the puzzle doesn't mean you'll like it though, because this movie is an experimental thriller disguised as a blockbuster, which is not what people expected.

Hey, maybe I'm wrong, but I expect the love for this movie will grow over the years.