gdeangel

"We have no skills" says one protagonist to the other about midway through this film. And that about gets to the heart of what the film conveys - that today's young adults are barely adults. They have no sense of permanence in the society they occupy, instead being carried along on a wave of Internet chatter and trendy group-think. At another point in the film, the heroine compares her life at age 2_ to her mother's: she had a job, she was married, she had children. The reality that hits her as any sense of career building she might have had is unceremoniously swept away, along with the vestiges of who passed for a pretty shabby ego propped up Internet lists. And in that we have the thematic parallel to the invasion of Earth that unfolds as the plot catalyst -- it is not the center of the plot, but a mere plot device to illustrate how crummy it is to be coming-of-late-age (if ever) in the 21st century. What makes the film genius is the portrayal of the main characters as perfectly reasonable, likable, and competent individuals who are complete victims of not just the titular circumstance, but the greater circumstance of not really having a role of even moderate importance in the pre-invasion world.

The storytelling is also better than decent, and certainly better than what you will find in nearly any of the garbage passing for film today garnering media attention. There are unforeseeable twists, tension, a novel framework of alien life / occupation that I would describe as Attack the Block meets Killer Clowns from Mars. The only dissatisfying aspect is that the story does such a decent job of slowly building it's invasion scenario one grain of sand at a time, that I really really wanted to see at least the outline of the finished sand castle. Instead, the film ends by following one more grain of sand on it's journey without providing any answers; the result is a feeling that the stakes didn't really matter at all.

My personal assessment is that the ending suffered the effects of the very disease it was poking fun of -- the inability of modern writers to pick one ending over another for fear of being criticized. So just pick an "open" ending and claim that critics are being small minded. Well, I like a story with an ending. I did not care for this ending, as it was merely an ending of the "escape" plot on Earth, but does nothing to address the goings on that are the real story - the arc of the main characters. Have they changed? Sure. Has their relationship to their environment changed? Yes. But we don't get to see how it's changed, only that it's changed.

It is the eve of the indefinite closure of Regal cinemas, and with the looming obliteration of one of the institutions that saw our homefront through the Great Depression, a World War, and countless other crisis... I scrounged around for an excuse to see a film on the big screen. And it was a choice between Tenet and Hocus Pocus (a film that we project on bed sheets in our neighborhood around Haloween... yeah, not gonna face Covid for that).

Anyway, this film is just trash. It's James Bond meets Edge of Tomorrow, only it wasn't born out of a love for cloak-and-dagger international espionage, nor a nerds homage to sci-fi. No, this film was clearly born in the editing room when somebody doing frame by frame reverse playbacks of CGI got the idea of superimposing a reverse reel onto a forward motion reel.

It doesn't work. The initial premise is fine -- some simple machines are flowing through time backward. But then the ante just keeps getting up'ed higher and higher so that the earlier stakes kinda seem pointless. And through it all there is a kind of ridiculous "lets stop saving the world to save the pretty girl", and then the "I am doing this for my son" schlock. Imagine James Bond saying, "I had to kill him so he wouldn't think he'd won." No sir. Not professional.

20 minutes in to this 3-hour pile of trash, it became clear what makes a Bond film exciting... the thing that brings a tear to the forefront of your eye, or makes you feel like you need to run to the little boys room and tinkle. It's the space between the set-pieces. It's not exactly plot transition. Plot transition is when two main characters have to be show hanging out in a storage container talking so that the audience can be let in on the secret of WFT they are doing. The think I'm talking about is visual and auditory transition. We go from M's office to a wide shot of the Alpine ski resort... or Bond in his Jaguar tearing along a winding road. The audience's eye is traveling with the camera, and there is definitely traveling music announcing your pending arrival somewhere cool.

Tenet has none of that. I don't even think there was any music. Just lots of explosions and baritones blasting "WHOOOOMMMMMMMMM". Yeah, putting the same spice on every dish is kinda like hitting the same musical note in every scene.

Here's another tip to the production team -- don't spray darken your leading actor's beard. His beard is the equivalent of Groucho's eyebrows, only pasted over the entire lower half of his face. If James Bond had a beard, it would not look like this.

I sat through this garbage in I-Max. I almost wish I had gone for that tepid looking rom-com, which was the only alternative. So as the curtain falls on my local cinema, all I can do is blame Hollywood. This isn't because people are scared of covid. I see them out at the pickleball courts, not wearing masks -- the senior citizens even. I see them in the restaurants drinking a beer and not social distancing. I see the teachers, afraid to be in a classroom with the kids without plexi-glass cages, milling around in the parking lot running through the daily gossip. But there were exactly 4 people in this movie theater tonight... each space > 10 feet apart. Four delusional individuals who thought an Fx extravaganza this Tenet be a nice way to say goodby to the big screen. It is confirmed. Cinema is now officially dead.

There is a certain expressiveness that is linked to groups of people, ethnicities, community struggles. I would impress this point upon the prospective viewer of the dubbed English version of this film: an undertaking to capture the moment of civil unrest in the black community, only instead of speaking in the authentic manner or the black community, each actor's lines are overdubbed with proper Scottish dialect complete with accent. That's what it was like to watch this film in the English dub, and unfortunately subtitles were not available. As a western, this film is a cheap imitation of "A Fistful of Dollars", itself an imitation of "Yojimbo". But whereas those films have a whimsical undertone engulfing the nobody from nowhere with no cares, this film was undertaken from a more serious perspective of building a heroic narrative around the collapse of the padrone system. Ironic since the lead here would soon gain cult-like status for his slapstick fists and fazouli routines with Bud Spencer. And in the attempt to capitalize on that notoriety, this film would be marketed as an "Trinity" adventure, which it certainly is not. It is a tragedy. The final scene is an attempt to reproduce the poignant final moment of Dr.Zhivago. Why not? The substance of the film is the rise of democratic socialism in Italy as the Padrone was challenged, no less momentous to Italians than the rise of Marxism in Russia would be to students of the ante-bellum Russian writers. But it would take 6 years for the subject of the Italian social upheaval to receive an epic cinematic treatment with none other than Vito Andolini (Robert Dinero) anchoring the cast in "1900". But yet the kernels of an emotional tale of divided loyalties, personal struggles, and the ethics of organized society are evidenced in this film. Too bad they cannot be heard as well due to the crummy English overdubs which put Hong-Kong-Phoey martial arts movies to shame.