Tenet Review Thread

It feels wrong to start this thread with a standard review given I can't really discuss the movie with any of you at the moment and I'm also having a hard time sorting my own thoughts out at the moment. So this first post is gonna be more of a general first impressions as I sort out my feelings and wait to be able to discuss Tenet with you guys.


Anyway,

Is Tenet great? I think it is. It's full of inventive action scenes and a creative story which blends tried and true genre beats with something more complex that really asks you keep up as a viewer. The combination of spectacle and intricate plotting makes for an exhilarating experience that I loved watching and the film is also anchored quite well by a solid and charming cast.

Is the movie a top-tier Nolan film rivaling The Dark Knight and Inception? At this point, I'm inclined to say no. People often describe Nolan as a cold filmmaker and while I usually don't find that fair, there is some truth to that with Tenet. Perhaps it's the case of the film's complex sci-fi concept overwhelming the human element but I certainly found myself more invested in simply making sense of the story than I was connecting with the people. That's not to say there isn't a human element here. Again, the cast is very strong and there are plot beats built around the emotions of its characters, but there's nothing that really touches with the same emotional poignancy as some of the character drama in The Dark Knight trilogy or the "disappointed" scene in Inception. Granted, this might be an issue which fades with future viewings. I think it's fair to say Tenet is easily Nolan's most dense and hard to follow movie and now that I have a firm grasp on the plot and the high-concept I might be able to invest more emotionally with rewatches.

Granted, "hard to follow" shouldn't be taken to mean impenetrable. The overarching story similar enough to a James Bond movie that you can always generally understand what's happening, it's in the details where things get more complex. Case in point, there are some fairly obvious twists that I imagine most people here will see coming, but the precise motivations behind these twists are often more interesting and less easy to predict. The film also has some fairly obvious dialogue early on explaining the inversion concept and how you shouldn't worry about trying to understand it and to just "feel it". It's a little on the noise and I can picture Doomsday's eye-roll, but by the end I was grateful the film gave such an obvious description early to ground things.

On a technical level, the film is what you expect from Nolan. In fact he seems to have improved quite a bit when it comes to filming and editing fight scenes since the days of Batman Begins. Even before introducing the more elaborate inversion concept to the action it's all still presented beautifully. The score by Ludwig Göransson is pretty neat too. Definitely resembles the work Zimmer's done for Nolan, but feels a little more ambient and effectively melds science-fiction with an espionage thriller. One thing is that the sound design can make dialogue a bit hard to hear, especially with multiple different accents throughout. Probably didn't help with understanding everything. I should also mention that for as insanely impressive and dazzling as the large scale climax is, making sense of all the pieces does start to distract from the story. Comparison to Inception is useful. People can complain all they want about the excessive exposition, but that film does a remarkable job making everything clear so that by the end you understand each and every detail, which makes it all the more thrilling. Like Hitchcock demonstrated over and over again, suspense is built on what the audience knows. But in the end of Tenet, I was doing mental gymnastics just to follow along which did make the in the moment suspense a bit strained. Again, broad strokes, I understood what the characters were doing and what the stakes were, but the line between victory and defeat starts to blur.

So, what do I make of Tenet? Well, it's probably the best movie I've seen in 2020 and while that's greatly aided by a real lack of competition, I have a feeling the movie would rank quite highly even if the coronavirus had never happened. It's not a perfect movie and I suspect it won't quite resonate with general audiences as strongly as Nolan's Batman movies or Inception (which is certainly Tenet's closest companion piece), but it's another ambitious and highly entertaining piece of cinema from Christopher Nolan. No one else working in Hollywood right now is consistently taking such daring risks in blockbuster filmmaking and it's hard not to appreciate that. For whatever reservations or complaints I may have, the fact is I can't wait to watch Tenet again.