Tenet

Tenet is the long-awaited Nolan-esque magnum opus after we last saw the epic space science fiction Interstellar in 2014. It is safe to say that with Tenet, the acclaimed writer-director has made his most ambitious, complex and divisive motion picture yet! The story revolves around a group of terrorists from the future trying to annihilate the current living world by inventing objects with inversed entropy through nuclear fission, and how our protagonist attempts to stop this catastrophe from transpiring is the crux.

Christopher Nolan's aim here is crystal clear, which is to gift us a jaw-dropping cinematic event with a kickass novel concept revolving his favorite subject of all, again - Time. We've seen various forms and applications that came attached with it in many of his past endeavors. But during those times, be it Memento, Inception or even Interstellar, the high notion served the story. It had characters we cared about or at the very least, able to empathize with. In Tenet, Nolan has taken the idea of inversion and conformed the content to it. By no means it is bad or anything. It's just that much of the screenplay and heart has been compromised to ensure the story serves the high notion at any expense. Let's elaborate on this.

The script has been written with surgical precision and zero fat! In an ideal world as far as screenwriting's concerned, that's the gold standard, right? Unfortunately, for Tenet; a film that deals with one of the most complex concepts baked into an intricate plot, this isn't the case. In fact, it's the stringent writing that ends up being the primary issue here. There is absolutely no breathing room in the screenplay. Every single line and word matters, and it's mostly only uttered once. If you miss it, the train is gone, leave you wondering why or how the next scene is happening. On top of that, the lack of emphasis for crucial information, be it in terms of word punctuation in delivery or closeups didn't aid at all. Thus, Tenet resulted rushed, except for audience members who could grab and process the data onscreen as fast as a high-end Solid State Drive in every scene plus digest it before the next important detail arrives… in the very next minute! This is especially true when you are required to quickly change perspectives of the scene's protagonist between Neil (Robert Pattison) and John David Washington's character in the climactic infiltration mission. That's a doozy one, ladies and gentlemen! It's often mentioned that we should just enjoy it instead of understand it, however, those two are related. If you can't understand it, how will you be able to enjoy it? Granted, a second viewing or a third definitely does help alleviate more doubts and render the proceedings clearer, and maybe this is part of the goal, one can argue.

In terms of designing principle, it's outright fantastic! To go back in time at the midpoint into a world moving in the opposite direction and reexperience the ROTAS occurrence with the revelation of who the masked attacker was is brilliant! Holding breath in a halide-filled chamber to carry out a robbery, inversed threatening with reversed speech and ship-gliding to exchange particulars are cool as well! Although most of the early runtime is filled with exposition, Nolan skillfully managed to massage it in a way that's organic, especially after viewing it the second time.

One of the major drawbacks of Tenet is we as the audiences are given nothing much to care about these characters since everything is busy moving at lightning speed! The twist about Neil wasn't emotionally effective due to this. The same can be said about Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), but over the course of the runtime, we do share her emotions by the end. It's shocking to see how generic of a villain Andrei (Kenneth Branagh) is, albeit the flashback explaining how it all started by him receiving contract from the future to gather the Algorithm parts being informationally satisfying. The Arepo subplot is needless as it risked grazing the border of convolution, but the encounters between Andrei and Kat are interesting, nevertheless. Pertaining to the main character, it's disappointing to witness him executing everything perfectly with little to no training shown in regards to inversion! Dealing with inverted entities is not only dangerous, but alien. One has to follow instincts by looking at the effect and responding to it with guesstimated cause. And John's character just does it… flawlessly. We don't see him suffering as no threat or danger upon him is present or consequential.

There is probably no other filmmakers out there who does pictures that require tremendous visual effects work… with bare minimum visual effects work! The amount of things Nolan was able to capture on camera, especially concerning stunts and action, is the kind of rare accomplishment that pushes the boundaries of filmmaking! Hamming a target vehicle between 4 trucks while performing a heist, ramming an actual flight plane through a building as it drags all the 4-wheelers beneath it, backwards bungee-jumping as per the concept and theme to trespass Priya's (Dimple Kapadia) house, reversed car chase as protagonist tries to rescue Kat, kitchen utensil brawl, hand-to-hand combat in ROTAS that's rehearsed entirely backwards plus the whole finale squad operation at Stalsk-12 are some of the most impossible and impressive sequences in this medium your eyes will thank you for allowing it to live through!

Other technicalities in a Nolan's project is of course going to be stellar! It's easily a feature one should watch on the biggest screen available! The sceneries and locales are breathtaking! Ludwig Göransson's score is magnanimous here - it's pulsating and successful in providing viewers the feeling of watching a summer blockbuster in theatres, after a long time! Sound design too is amazing! Acting by everyone in the cast is good, really. John David Washington's witty lines keep him likable. Kenneth Branagh was trying a little too hard to be threatening though.