Review by J@ck : TENET

 

"Tenet is Christopher Nolan's latest most mind-bending film exactly the kind of palindromic timeline puzzle to take your mind off."

                     Tenet uses a timeline structure, that means that all the events of the story including the act of time travel itself are all fixed and predestined on a loop. They always happened the time travel is what sets the events of the story in motion usually, it features a character suddenly realizing whoa this always happened , however. Unlike other predestined loop time travel stories like the terminator the time travel often and is not an instantaneous jump to the past. It is time inversion you have to continue to live and age in real-time while the world reverses around you until you get back to your return point. You can also just invert objects and then invert them back in time so that those objects continue to exist further and further into the past for others or for your younger self to find bullets.

                     Let's give an overview of this story, in the future a scientist creates an algorithm to invert all of the time but like J Robert Oppenheimer who lived with guilt over his work in the manhattan project this scientist encoded this algorithm into nine physical artifacts scattering each artifact around the world inverting them buried in radioactive hotspots hoping that no one would ever go near those spots and she took her own life to keep this secret. But when the soviet union collapsed a man named Andre Sater took a job digging up plutonium from a test site. And he dug up a container with gold and instructions to a mass his resources and track down all pieces of this algorithm seder works on behalf of others in the distant future who want this man in the past to compile the algorithm artifacts and bury them in a tunnel caved in by an underground detonation in the soviet secret city of stalsk12 where that algorithm would stay buried and undisturbed for 200 years so that future bad guys could dig it up use that algorithm to continue that scientist's work.  In the worst possible way inverting all of time to counteract the effects of things like global warming saving their future by destroying our present.

                         A majority of Christopher Nolan’s films are about his protagonists trying to grapple with a reality that’s out of their control. In inception, Cobb lost his wife and cannot return to his children; Interstellar has Cooper trying to find an alternative to Earth, and in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Bruce Wayne fights, both his inner and real demons. The common thread is that they are all men hackled to an indeterminate universe. Fundamentally, Tenet is a retread of those ideas. The only difference here, however, is that this one is soulless. Tenet is clearly Christopher Nolan’smost self-indulgent film. It is what Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood was to Tarantino and The Irishman to Scorsese. There is a lot to say about filmmakers who are fascinated by their own style of work. Without revealing too many details, here, we have an unnamed protagonist played by John David Washington navigating this obtuse realm of time in order to prevent the world from experiencing a war that already took place in the future. It’s essentially an Asimovian spin to the Bond and Bourne genre of espionage. Nolan alternates between exposition and let-me-riddle-your-brain moments far too often. His obsession with time exists beyond the confines of the story. Everything moves extremely swiftly — if you blink your eyes even for a second, you may miss an entire conversation. In all fairness, however, Tenet is one of Nolan’s most impressive ideas. Ignoring the pseudo-scientific babble, this film massively deals with time looping and inversion, like the Escher-esque Möbius strip that you may remember from Endgame. The problem, though, arises when you realize that Nolan is a tad too delighted by this idea. He sacrifices effective and structured storytelling on the altar of the scientific exhibitions. After a point, it only comes off as intellectual grandstanding — basically, all sizzle no steak. At the core of every film he has made, there has been a strong emotional layer attached to it. He’s been able to surgically graft every over-the-top saga of his with primal human desires and emotions. But here, even the ingeniousness of Tenet is not enough to salvage the debilitating lack of it.

                   The emotions in the film are ice cold, and for Nolan, this can only be classified as pure narrative neglect — one that you cannot overlook despite all of Tenet’s cinematic panache. His attempt to fill that emotional void, though, is at best unremarkable and at worst, phony. This is where Elizabeth Debicki’s character, Kat comes in — the aristocratic, money-clad damsel in distress whom you’re supposed to feel sad for. I’d much rather have Nolan own up to his lack of zest here than have him conceal it with wishy-washy feminism. This, sadly, is not the end of Tenet’s drabness. After its high-octane opening sequence and a masterfully choreographed fight scene. Were we are officially introduced to time inversion, the film falls flat for over an hour. This also has to do with the fact that Nolan did not even bother to develop his gratuitously violent, ammunition-savvy antagonist— Andrei Sator, played by Kenneth Branagh. Sator, who always has a scowl on his face, terrorizes his wife Kat and with her, the rest of the world with his nuclear wheeling and dealing. Nolan doesn’t get to Sator’s “bad guy” motives until the climax, leaving us high and dry throughout the film. However, Washington and Robert Pattinson, who plays Neil, another secret agent, galvanize their suave, debonair character with absolute ease, carrying parts of the film that they’re not even supposed to. In one scene, as he strode across a covert facility holding a cup of espresso in one hand and a suitcase in another, Washington perfected the ideal masculine image —not too macho, not too smug. And even Pattinson, with his seductively slicked hair and attenuated gestures, easily goes down as one of Hollywood’s most charismatic actors. Together, they make a snappy and dazzling team. I wouldn’t even mind seeing a mini-series just on their homoerotic chemistry either. Even Dimple Kapadia, as the silent industrialist, plays her role with great poise and elegance.

               Tenet’s cinematic glamour would make you believe that Nolan was just warming up with Inception and Dunkirk. The cinematography, coupled with a formidable production design, makes this for a delirious and wild ride. The film’s twin visual components —the architecture and its shots — portrayed a futuristic yet grim look of this world. What did throw me off, however, was its unsparingly loud sound mixing. You will leave the film in the immediate search for cochlear implants. The extent to which you enjoy Tenet will largely depend on your priorities. While his story lacks the heft to carry an overwrought narrative, the film does deserve a watch solely for Christopher Nolan’s audacity and ambition. You can watch Tenet in the theatr's if you feel comfortable doing so. I personally request not to loose opportunity to watch movie on theaters. Please like, share, subscribe if you like the post. Thank you so much.

Verdict : Paid review / Five Star.