Tenet

I don’t want to be mean to Tenet. Yes, I enjoyed it as a solution to a quadratic equation, as an endless conversation with an android in whom someone implanted the EgoBooster 3000 chip. Yes, I understand who the protagonist is here and I will not haggle with a person who understands entropy and is not afraid to use it. But no one can expect that this ostentatiously conducted puppet show full of flatly-spoken phrases and motivations subject to narrative mechanics will evoke in me anything that is even remotely close to fascination, and even further away from emotional investment. In short, I cared even less about Tenet than Inception and Interstellar combined, and my degree of indifference was far greater regarding the film about people waiting on the beach, with a few other approaching them whose watches move at different speeds. For me, Nolan has changed from a magician who could draw me into his intricate magic into a puppeteer morbidly obsessed with wires and switches. I understand that it doesn't matter that McGuffin was pulled out of someone’s ass – it only matters that he functions in an entropic bidirectional. Ok, if this is a Bond film for future generations, I'm glad I grew up with the past one, which discovered insight and later the basics of psychology. (08/31/2020)

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. (11/01/2021)

It’s a great feeling when you emerge from the cinema mystified by a film and you have a sense of returning from another reality or perhaps only back to the past, when the impression of having come into contact with something fascinating and absorbing was fresh and relatively frequent. Nolan is the last great fantasist of our age, a director who can still get inside our heads with his spectacular roller coaster. His films are truly creations meant to be seen in the cinema, not only with mammoth sound design and opulent visuals, but also with enchantment of the viewers, who have to give up the control over the film that is given to them by the remote and let themselves be carried away by the pre-set time that the director-protagonist carefully constructed. It is possible that the illusion will dissipate upon repeated viewing or absorption of all of the explanatory analyses and video essays. But it is perfect right now and, just like the characters in the film, I want to enjoy the blissful ignorance, to again be a teenage fan emerging enchanted from the cinema or at least to gaze enviously across the flow of time at the naïve youths from the perspective of a hardened veteran and wish them this genuine feeling of enthusiasm. (10/02/2020)

What happened (didn't happen). The opening plays with the idea of Lipsky´s Happy End, Moffat´s saga about River Song, the third Harry Potter movie and the The Sensational Reverse Brothers. Yes, it is undeniably closest to “the palindromic Inception", but with a differently conceived disruption of reality and time. From filmmaking perspective, it is again an extremely well-worked-out blockbuster “with people in suits in the same way as in a Bond movie", which at the same time does not let the brain idle. And it's purely Nolan: cold, reserved, depersonalized, sophisticated, precise and almost procedural. Which, although not many see it, is not a disadvantage this time, but an advantage. Compared to Inception, the biggest difference, apart from the surprisingly frequent and scaled-up ideas of breathtaking action based on practical effects and stunts, is that it does not give the viewer any explanation. Where Inception gradually went over the rules and clarified them, Tenet recklessly jumps right into them (especially in the final third). However, the source of “mindfucking" is not so much in the incomprehensibility/abstraction of that concept, but rather in keeping track of all of the events. And that at the end, at such a furious pace (the sophisticated audiovisual excuses helping the viewer slowly disappear), there are so many levels and storylines that it overwhelms all senses and does not change the overall level of comprehensibility at all. PS: Nolan simply has to adapt Sweterlitsch's “The Gone World" and no one can change my mind about that. (08/26/2020)

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. (08/24/2020)