Tenet is a 2020 sci-fi/action/spy movie written a directed by Christopher Nolan and the best way to give a summary of the plot would be to just to copy the synopsis from google, so it goes as follows “A secret agent embarks on a dangerous, time-bending mission to prevent the start of World War III.”
The movie stars John David Washington as our titular secret agent “The Protagonist” with supporting roles from Robert Patinson and Elizabeth Debicki as well as Kenneth Branagh as the villain character.
Now i was super excited for this movie, one reason because it was a Nolan movie and i don’t think i’m in the minority when i say Nolan is one of the best film makers out their today, and of course it was the first time i have entered a movie theater since March due to the Covid-19 pandemic. So it’s fair to say i was really excited for more than one reason.
And i got to say i was let down, i’ll delve more into why i didn’t particularly love this movie but first i’ll say what i liked about this movie. First of all straight out the gate you can tell this is a Nolan movie. Nolan has a unique style of filmmaking that makes his work instantly recognisable usually it’s because he loves to set scenes in big beautiful open architecture, and/or uses a lot of the same colours a few examples of this below.
Just from singular frames you can tell that it’s something Nolan has done and I have to praise this as it’s not something every director can do. Tenet is no exception this is a beautiful looking movie and some of the scenes that were playing out on screen were a spectacle to watch especially since Nolan is Infamous for using little to no visual effects, and what he and his team were able to accomplish in camera was phenomenal a few examples without major spoilers for if you have seen the trailers you have seen everything i am going to talk about, there are scenes where people are moving forward in a timeline and there are people moving backwards and these are incorporated in the action and fight scenes too where one assailant is moving forward and the other backwards and i have no idea how they managed to pull this off it’s actually quite mind blowing. Nolan is no doubt a genius and has pioneered different ways of film making that evidently set the bar higher visually with every film he makes.There is no doubt that Tenet is a spectacle to look at its just let down by other aspects of the movie that are average to plain awful.
First of all , Nolan definitely seems to have an obsession with how time works, evident in some of his other movies. However though i love how he crafts these sort of works to intricate details that you must notice in order to understand what is happening Tenet feels a little bogged down a bit predictable, let me explain; so there is a scene that plays out about halfway through which involves a car that was destroyed but its reverses and plays out backward to the main cast’s timeline. Both Kenneth Branagh and John David Washington both look at this car in a very ominous way and that alone was enough to tell me how the rest of the film was going to play out, and surprise i was right, thats doesnt mean to say i didn’t enjoy the last act of the movie, infact its probably the best part, it’s just i would have enjoyed it better if it wasnt so damn obvious.
Another thing I have a problem with is the first two acts. They are slow and boring with a few good action scenes in there, but I found myself feeling like I was going to fall asleep and it was only 1 oclock in the afternoon. I know that films need a little bit of a slow start to get things ready, but this film jumps into a action scene straight away with this Protagonist character, which is a cool scene, but then everything just stops and it has this sort of up and down feel to it that when something cool happens it’s just hit with an abrupt stop. Which led to some pacing issues.which took me out of the movie massively.
For some reason as well the dialogue isn’t all that great, well that’s a little bit of an exaggeration on my part, it might have been excellent except i couldn’t hear a thing.
Let me explain it like this. If you had 3 tracks of audio with the top one being sound effects the second is musical score and the third is dialogue and from top to bottom is which is louder then you have Tenet. There were scenes in this movie where people were talking and i couldn’t hear a word because of the musical score (although phenomenal work) would just overpower everything else. Even classic Nolan-type ‘two people walking side by side in a calm environment giving expositional dialogue’ scenes it was really hard to understand to the point where I was burying my face into my hands with frustration
The Acting and characters, i cannot remember a single characters name not because i wasn’t paying attention; one reason that if they did address themselves, it was washed out by other sounds in the scene and the other is that Nolan doesn’t really flesh out these characters enough for me to care about them. As far as the movie goes these characters are just there to serve the plot and nothing else. (Also Micheal Caine is credited on the poster of this movie and he is in the movie for a full 30 seconds). Other than Elizabeth Debicki who is by far the most fleshed out character no one else has any sort of backstory, then she totally ruins her character by doing one of the stupidest things i have ever seen a character do in a movie toward the climax, No spoilers of course but it actually made me groan out loud. one aspect of no backstories that did in fact work in Nolan’s Dark Knight is with the Joker, but the reason that works is that The Joker gives himself multiple backstories with the “Wanna know how i got these scars” stories which give the character a sense of mystery but in Tenet it doesn’t give you any sort of inkling or clue to who these characters are other than a little scene with Robert Pattinson at the end but this comes a little too late to save it. I cannot watch a movie about the stakes of a mission with apocalyptic results if I do not care for the characters trying to prevent it. I have to say though everyone except Kenneth Branagh does a great job acting his villain is laughably bad and over the top where it doesn’t quite seem like he belongs in this movie i found myself laughing at most of his screen time.
Last couple of things they are a little nitpicky but there was a scene in which two teams are split, where one team is backwards and the other forward and they are given patches of red and blue so you know which team you are on. Except in the movie the teams will know who is one their team as they will all be moving the right direction whilst the other team is moving backwards. The reason the patches were implemented were just so the audience knew who they were watching at the time. It was a really lazy way of showing this and sort of insults the audience saying that they are too stupid to comprend what is actually happening on screen.
Final Score.
Title:Average.
Tenet raises the bar for Nolans visual filmmaking style but it is let down by predictable plot,sub-par characters and a laughably bad villain. A great third act doesn’t stop Tenant from taking the interesting concept and adding too many flaws that ultimately drags this visual Nolan masterpiece into disappointingly mediocre to average territory.
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