Tenet 2020
Christopher Nolan has made some interesting movies that touch on some crazy sci-fi stuff. This includes Inception and Interstellar. Tenet feels a little more like Inception in that it fully immerses you in the weirdness of what is going on, but dabbles more in physics and time travel like Interstellar. Time travel movies are always a little dicey since they set up so many paradoxes and generally crazy ideas, which, can sort of make absolutely anything possible. Because of this, much of Tenet will make your head hurt as you try to understand what is going on and are thinking about whether any of this is even true to its own precepts, plus you have to follow a convoluted caper sort of plot. My feeling is that if you could actually understand what is going on, it wouldn’t hold up, but what do I know?
The movie is quite long and is pretty action packed, but I will admit that the last 40 minutes seemed like they flew by. People will probably love it or hate it depending on how much they enjoy a mental challenge and/or how much they enjoy being baffled by a plot. Nolan doesn’t make it easy, with an incredibly loud and booming soundtrack while dialogue is frustratingly fast and quiet, making it that much harder to understand. While I liked the ideas and some of the originality, I also don’t like being confused for such a long time during a movie and I also feel like it is kind of sleight of hand where you pay so much attention to the weird sci-fi stuff that you don’t notice the plot isn’t that strong.
John David Washington is good as the main character, an agent with a conscience, trying to save the world from nuclear annihilation or worse. He gets help from Robert Pattinson. The bad guy is kind of a stereotypical Russian played by Kenneth Branagh, with a smoldering waif of a British wife played by Elizabeth Debicki who is so tall and thin she looks like a breeze could blow her away. The performances are good. Washington has a ridiculous amount of confidence for somebody who is constantly about to be killed, getting to wear some very expensive clothes as part of his cover as a rich bad guy. So the movie is fun to look at and a spectacle of crazy ideas, but too confusing for me to give it an A, unlike Interstellar which probably didn’t hold up any better but still had great ideas and wasn’t as confusing. Still, it is a neat movie to watch once and might work better on repeated viewings.Written: 19 Jan 2021
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital