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)

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)

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)

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? :) (08/26/2020)

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)