Directed by:
Christopher NolanScreenplay:
Christopher NolanCinematography:
Hoyte van HoytemaComposer:
Ludwig GöranssonCast:
John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Caine, Clémence Poésy, Dimple Kapadia (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. (Warner Bros. US)
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Reviews (24)
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? :)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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