Tenet

I have a huge amount of respect for director Christopher Nolan. His recent films Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk are three of the best things I've ever seen on film and I automatically want to see whatever new production he comes out with. So, I'm just back from the theater having seen Tenet for the first time (I'm pretty sure there will be a second and third time) and in one sense I have no idea what rating to give. At a minimum it would be worth at least 6/10 for its technical quality alone. But it might be 10/10 for the quality of its fiendishly intricate storyline, which leaves your head spinning by the end. But it' s not without a few problems (see below). So, OK -- 8/10 it is.

Among Nolan's previous works I'd say 'Tenet' owes the most to 'Inception' for its complex, ever-shifting, multilayered plot. For Inception it was the Russian-doll dreamworlds within dreamworlds. For Tenet, it's playing with time and time reversal (as you see from any trailer or synopsis out there). We've had any number of time-travel movies before, and one sure thing they're good for is setting up paradoxes, but the way Nolan deploys this on screen is at times genuinely and startlingly new (as just one example, there's a car chase on a busy freeway where one car is speeding backwards but time-reversed, so from its POV it's racing forward, which is why it can travel that fast driving backward ... and there are many more scenes that I won't spoil.) There are things here we've never seen on screen before.

In the barest of bare-bones summary, the plot is all about a hunt for The Algorithm, something that enables this messing with the timeline The uber-evil Andrei (Kenneth Branagh) aims to use it to start WW III, or even (in a total burst of nihilism) ring down the curtain on all of reality. The shadowy team called Tenet aims to stop this. Keep up with it if you can. On the surface, it's an excellent James Bond imitation. Exposition scenes are followed by thunderous action, rinse, repeat -- pretty much from start to finish. How confused you are at any given moment depends (like Inception) on how many questions are running through your mind: why are we in THIS location now, who's doing what to whom, and what precisely are the characters after? The overall impression, though (again, like Inception) is that there IS substance underneath the high-octane surface and that repeated viewings and study will bring it out. We'll see.

So the production quality is, as usual for Nolan, first-rate. There are big, bravura scenes (wait till you see the big opener in a concert hall) but plenty of close, person-to-person ones to balance. One thing that might be a little jarring is that the scene-to-scene transitions are extremely abrupt and extremely frequent, and I assume that's deliberate -- there's no time for viewers to think even if we want to. But I'll accept that as a feature rather than a bug. The overall flow isn't necessarily helped by the music score (by Ludwig Goransson), which is epic but also insistent and omnipresent. Too much of a good thing. Lots of the personal scenes would just have worked better for me with no background score stepping on the dialog.

For the acting: I thought John David Washington (as The Protagonist) was OK but rather wooden, and he's on screen most of the time. I kept visualizing Will Smith in the part instead -- but maybe he'd have taken over the movie too much and that's not the result Nolan wanted? I don't know. But I liked Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki quite a lot. They both have substantial, essential roles and they have more nuance and humanity than anything they've done before. Kenneth Branagh still can't do a good Russian accent (though to be fair, not many native-English actors can) and although he's fine, I think as an actor he's much better suited to Shakespeare or Hercule Poirot. There's a big cast of smaller roles (among which is the always-welcome Michael Caine), adding to the difficulty of keeping up with what's developing.

So there it is. I'm looking forward to figuring out more of what's under the hood of this thing.

A lot of the audience members of Tenet have complained that Tenet is too confusing to enjoy, and that's what unfortunately makes Tenet so unenjoyable at times for me. I already knew that Tenet was supposed to be confusing when going into the movie, so I tried my best to focus and listen, and yet I still got confused. There's a lot of different timelines going on with mashing sub plots, and the film didn't do a great job at explaining everything. Maybe it's just me, but the film was just really hard to follow. I even watched an explanation video, and that was even confusing. The plot is just really complex, and even though I couldn't really follow it the whole time, I still appreciated it because of how smart and deep it is.

Aside from the plot, everything is near perfect. The inverted fight scenes were crazy in the best ways possible. There were times where I was just blown away by some of the scenes, and I questioned how Christopher Nolan filmed it Tenet is the first of its kind, and the fact that Christopher Nolan nailed it, I think he deserves some awards for that.

Tenet is a really solid movie. With good performances from the actors, great action scenes, amazing direction, and an extremely complex and mind-blowing plot. Tenet deserves nothing less than a 7/10. And if you're going into this film for the first time, then prepare to awake the sixth sense, because this film will destroy every last brain cell.

I'm a big fan of Nolan and having some complexity to movies but it should not be the whole plot, if you don't take into account the time reverse thing the movie is really empty and it's just a bad action movie. The time thing is not interesting enough to be the whole movie. The scene that are supposed to at suspense don't have your attention because you are trying to understand the plot. The acting isn't great, the character are not putting emotion into it, and I thing the form of the movies where it never stop is not letting them doing anything. Overall it's not that bad of a movie but it's too complicated and the actor are not helping it at all.

On first viewing I will agree with many that the movie is a little difficult to follow . It's a demanding watch on plenty of levels . Where Interstellar and Inception both spent plenty of time throughout the film introducing the science behind it all Tenet ignores it , mostly . They do spell out the concept in a couple of brief scenes but then abandon any science in favour of action .There is plenty of relentless high voltage action if that's your thing and some genuine stunt work was great to see but it all becomes a little pointless if you don't really understand why it's all happening .If you don't like it really loud take some ear plugs . The score is thundering but a little overused for my liking . It is accomplished and brilliant film making but my first impressions were that I just didn't enjoy it as much as some of his previous films . I'll start with a 7 but I believe it has the potential to grow on me . It is a visual treat that's for sure .

Many reviewers say you have to watch this movie multiple times to really get it all. No, I won't do that. I say a good movie is understandable with one viewing where the viewer is paying attention.

This is a relatively simple story, told in a complex manner with lots of special effects and aggressive sound track. Our future civilization has figured a way to interact with the past and now, in our PRESENT they intend to correct a problem we caused them, and if necessary destroy the world as we know it. So the PRESENT day leaders have to prevent that.

My wife and I watched it on a 2-disc DVD set from our public library. Much of the dialog is difficult to understand because the actors often fail to enunciate, so I had to turn on subtitles about half-way through. The second DVD is filled with extras.

It is a pretty good, entertaining movie, but often very confusing. I would not put it in the top tier of favorite movies. Nolan's "Inception" for example is a much better movie.