Review of Tenet (2020) by Robomartion — 28 Sep 2020

Pros:

Visual spectacle and music/audio combine for an aesthetically pleasing and captivating experience.

Technical achievement in the reverse scenes and fitting them all together in the timeline especially with the same actors.

Kenneth Brannagh is convincing as a Russian mafia boss but his small stature somewhat diminishes his presence.

The music is very catchy and when it begins you can't help but get excited for what comes next.

John David Washington plays his role well.

Cons:

The writing - dialogue comes off somewhat as if reading off the script.

Characters are flat and one dimensional.

Story is fairly bog-standard nothing Some misgivings with the reversal concept such as why cars are reversed if they exist in the non-reversed world but there is nothing to break suspension of disbelief if you don't think about it too much (like is said in the movie). Overall the effect is visually interesting and exciting when you revisit earlier scenes but reversed but as a plot device it is in the end unsatisfying.

The twists are fairly obvious especially for someone used to seeing Christopher Nolans films and others with cues like Shutter Island.

Elizabeth Debecki is unconvincing as a lover, and hard to sympathize with.

The guy out of the Beatles movie was comically miscast.

Robert Pattinson's character is inconsistent. He starts off as a character who is slightly loose and eccentric with a strange past, which was exciting to see him playing a brand new character but he loses this by the next scene and by the end becomes a heroic Cedric Diggory or Edward Cullen. I would have liked to see more development for him and or more homogeneity in the role on his part.

The final battle lets the movie down. Something involving the water such as submarines or the nuclear vessels would have been more in-line with the rest of the movie. All of the scenes with the hardened officer and military vehicles looked like they ended up in Afghanistan.

In the end it is a visual and audio sensation but not very appealing in the story or character department.

As is standard with Christopher Nolan films writing and acting falls down but visual and audio make it a spectacle worth seeing.

I think with better casting and some more character development perhaps with more twists and a plot to be more emotionally invested in it could be improved. Overall perhaps it needed another writer on board or more time in the cooking pot to come up with a more in depth plot. Christpoher Nolan shows his strengths in visual and technical direction but it requires the human element to really make a film that hits home.

I feel it deserves a high score because it is just simply leaps and bounds better than most of the movies that have come out in recent memory but it also by no means a perfect movie or even close to it for that matter. That said the visual and audio appeal as well as the mysterious nature of the reversal concept along with Kenneth Branaghs character, his background and the whole tie in to that ominous atmosphere around all things nuclear make it definitely worth watching.