Tenet

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)

Tenet certainly doesn't pose an intellectual challenge and is one of those films that you'll enjoy the most when you think less about time paradoxes, the motives of the film's characters, and their quest to defeat the Bond-like villain. As a popcorn flick deliberately reminiscent of Agent 007 stories in a sci-fi coat, and as an action spectacle, Nolan's film really works. Thanks to John David Washington, we essentially have the first "non-white" Bond in history. I enjoyed the dynamic opening opera heist, where Nolan drew inspiration from a real terrorist act. Kenneth Branagh also pleased me, intentionally building his villain as a monstrous comic book character. Overall impression: 65%. (03/27/2024)

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)

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). (09/07/2020)

After my first viewing of Inception, I wrote about the film as a perfect toy for the enjoyment of its creator, but I was a decade ahead. It is Tenet that is a meticulously crafted construction set that works exactly as the author needs it to, right up to the last frame. This also means that Christopher Nolan himself plays with it the best and the audience can only watch over his shoulder, wondering how each mechanism works, thinking about how they wish they could play with it, too. He will probably allow them to, but only when they come to see it for the second or third time. I can't shake the feeling that with each new film, Nolan goes deeper into his mode of expression, not only in terms of the complexity of the screenplay, but also in relation to the viewer. With Inception, or even earlier with The Prestige, were able to present each twist or trick almost kindly and "narratively", even when it was a nerve-wracking twist. But in Interstellar, it became necessary to go more towards information, and in Tenet, you can only get answers through machine-gun dialogue or quick cuts. Despite the usual drawn-out running time, the film doesn't allow for a breather, and even in situations where the main characters rest or wait for something, more information, branching paths, or theories are thrust upon us, which could easily be a dead end – or conversely, the most crucial clue. This time, everything is subordinate to this approach, including the last vestiges of accommodating the viewer, the personalities of the characters (this time expressible without exception in two sentences) or visible emotions. Still, at the end, my heart jumped to unforeseen heights, and for that I am most grateful. For the fact that even though this latest Nolan film has surprisingly sharply divided the audience spectrum, it was worth every long minute to me, and its dirty and unusually aggressive world will thoroughly mature within me for a long time. (09/01/2020)