Tenet

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)

Christopher Nolan at his most challenging, ambitious and exhaustive. It's good to finally watch a big, expensive film in the cinema after a long time. Tenet is really great to look at, it has excellent technical aspects, beautiful cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, an ear-splitting soundtrack (quite possibly the loudest film I've ever seen in the cinema), great actors, where both John David Washington and Robert Pattinson get a proper carrier boost, and also nice and spectacular action (the fight in the kitchen, the car chase and the finale are a blast), and the concept itself is presented in an original and engaging, albeit complicated way. Even the dialogues are pretty hard to understand, they talk about things I don't care that much about, but fortunately Tenet has a good pace and when it looks like the film is getting boring Nolan pulls an ace out of his sleeve. Story*****, Action****, Humor>No, Violence>No, Entertainment****, Music****, Visual*****, Atmosphere****, Suspense****. 8/10. (08/30/2020)

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)

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)

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)