TENET by Christopher Nolan
2020 Box Office: “Numbers are down, we’re going broke 😫”
Chris Nolan: Makes a movie you have to watch twice to understand 😎
But is it worth watching twice?
I just want to make this super clear. Nolan’s Tenet is not hard to understand because it’s super-deep or super-smart. It’s hard to understand because the movie is extremely loud at times and people are murmuring rather than talking (if you watch this in translation — you’ll get a better experience as they explain pretty much everything from A to Z). Netflix’s DARK is much, much more complicated and twisted.
I adore Chris Nolan’s craft. Not for his twisted scripts but for his passion for the CINEMA. He has it. You know it. You can feel it in every detail. Dunkirk was boring but as far as cinema experiences go — it was phenomenal. At places, he gets your heart pumping out of your chest. Exciting. They use practical effects (almost no CGI, no green screens). They buy real planes and crash them 😱. That’s just plain impossible not to respect. He’s one of the last remaining craftsmen that haven’t sold their soul to Netflix. Scorsese did. Sorkin did. A lot of others did. I also did.
To me, Tenet’s a spy movie. More that than anything else. It’s not Inception’s sequel. It’s not a poetic, artsy, pseudo-deep, existential, spiritual whatever. It’s just a spy movie. Bad guys trying to do bad things — good guys trying to reverse or prevent it. Don’t overcomplicate just because you want it to be smth else.
Someone: shouts 🔈 “time travel”
Nolan: gets a hard-on 😄
This 👆🏻 pretty much summarizes Nolan’s feelings towards TIME. He’s explored every possible aspect of it. Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and even some parts of Prestige and Memento. All explore time as an entity of its own. Tenet’s just one of them. This time, we explore not discrete (magically travel from point in time to another point in time) but the continuous aspect of time. And honestly, this wasn’t explored in the cinema ever before. At least not that I know of.
It was discussed a lot that Tenet lacks a lot of emotional depth, that characters are not important. This was true for Dunkirk. But I have to disagree here. Except for Kenneth Branagh’s character, I think everyone had a human feel to them. Kenneth’s character is the most “explored” but it’s an illusion. Yes, he’s the only one that had a surname here, childhood backstory and etc. but he was a horrible villain. Maybe this is because Kenneth’s just an awful actor. The scene where he shouts at Kat is just laughable. Acting = 0. Totally unbelievable. Another annoying thing was the movie’s obsession with Kat’s son. I mean c’mon. Why the fuck should we care? Everybody’s obsession with saving the kid was a turn-off for me. I didn’t buy it.
Neil: “When this and this happens, everyone that ever lived will die. All of the history of humankind will be erased. We will stop existing.”
Kat: “And my son?” 🙄🙄🙄 (yes bitch)
I just have 2 major problems with this film. Kenneth Branagh and Volume. Otherwise, Tenet’s a spectacular movie-going experience. Yes, experience. That’s what Nolan’s selling. And you know... I’m buying 😃🤷🏻♀️.
So is it worth watching the second time around? If I think logically — then yes, because when you digest all of the twists, it’s a pretty good film. But if I think emotionally — then probably no, because I hate it when they deliberately make it hard so you watch it again. I don’t like feeling manipulated, even by Nolan.
P.S. I think Tenet will make more than $500M worldwide. Every other movie opening is being canceled. Again. Cinemas will have no choice but to show Tenet for months and months, non-stop. It will be up until January I think 😂