Review of Tenet (2020) by Goiky — 05 Sep 2020

The thing about Tenet is if you’re obsessive about understanding it, you’re not going to have a good time. Tenet is a good time. It’s an exhilarating watch full of masterly crafted action sequences and beautiful bouts of cinematography.

The characters are great and entertaining— except for the women characters, but what more can we expect from Nolan— and the acting is stellar. However, it doesn’t make sense. It constantly just doesn’t make sense.

The sound mixing in some places makes the dialogue impossible to hear or understand. However, you must get this principal fact: the only way to build suspense in your audience when you’re making a time travel movie where the events you see unfold you’ve already seen happen is to completely and utterly confuse your audience.

And Tenet does that! I do not enjoy it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the movie. Ray Bradbury basically revolutionized the science fiction genre by saying that realism isn’t a prerequisite for good science fiction.

Before that, everyone wanted to know how fantastical futuristic machines would work down to the exact descriptions of everything and anything. Literally, before Ray Bradbury came into the scene half of science fiction wasn’t even fiction— there was no story.

It was mostly just people describing cool things that could be a thing in the future. You have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy the movie. It’s like when you go to a magic show— you know its not real, but it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

Tenet does make sense enough for you to be amazed by the twists and turns of the plot unfolding as you’ve seen it fold before, but enough to be dissatisfying to critics. Nolan does a great job at making a horribly confusing and out there concept— like time travel, and this theory that has been thought of in quantum mechanics for a while— as real as you can.

But there’s just a principal problem in all time travel stories is that they’re walking paradoxes. If you think too hard, your brain will start to hurt. It’s one of those movies that you have to watch a video on afterwards to understand.

But it doesn’t make it less enjoyable— take Primer for example, a science fiction movie about time travel that is regarded as possibly the best time travel plot of all time. This is Primer but if Primer had a Hollywood budget and wasn’t a Sundance film.

Like a character says at the beginning of the movie, “don’t try to understand it”. You shouldn’t understand it. You should enjoy it! That’s what movies are there to do. Finally, Robert Pattinson is in it, so you know it’s going to be a great movie nonetheless.

Did I mention some stellar acting? Because its there. I wish Nolan knew how to write female characters, though. The only girl in the entire movie is a damsel in distress type with the biggest “I’ll do anything for my children” cliche in the entire movie.

Yet, it still fits into the movie thematically— one of the biggest pulls of the movie that show up time and time again is the individual vs the group. What’s one person’s life if you want to save the world? This movie does a wonderful job at exploring that, especially with Neil and the Protagonists relationship.

Man, C. Nolan can’t write women, but where he can’t write woman unintentionally gay subtext always follows. Every scene in this movie is entertaining, and a deliriously confusing ride. It’s not on the same level as The Dark Knight or Memento, but that in no way shape or form makes it a bad movie.

It’s kind of on the same level as Interstellar or Inception in my eyes. I went into the movie hyped, and left the movie hyped. I wasn’t disappointed, but it didn’t exceed my expectations either.

But my expectations were high, and they were definitely fulfilled. I wanted good things and I got them. This is just all to say that Tenet is a good enjoyable film but not without its faults that comes with Nolan’s filmmaking time and time again.