Tenet (2020) Review

 "Don't try to understand it.  Feel it."

-Barbara

Spoiler Alert for Tenet.  I didn't know anything about this movie going in and I don't think you're supposed to.  It's good, but definitely one of Nolan's weaker films.  I would still recommend it.  Spoilers!

After a mission goes wrong, the Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, takes a cyanide pill, but wakes up still alive.  He is brought into a secret organization called Tenet, which is trying to stop a war with the future of humanity.

What Works:

Tenet is a trippy movie and certainly original.  I'm never seen a movie quite like it before.  It's very ambitious, too much so at times, but I have to give Christopher Nolan props for attempting this film.

The visuals are incredible.  All of the stuff traveling backwards is mind-blowing and hard to comprehend at times.  It's the best part of the movie for sure and a lot of it I have no idea how they managed to pull off.  The action sequences and the visual effects are definitely a huge accomplishment.

Robert Pattinson plays the best character in the film, Neil, another CIA agent who gets brought in by the Protagonist.  Pattinson is an incredible actor and he has a very unusual demeanor.  At first I wasn't even sure it was him because he really brings his character to life.

Finally, John David Washington also does a great job.  I loved him in BlacKkKlansman and I am pumped to see him get more lead roles.  He plays the role mostly serious, but he has a few funny moments as well.  He's likable, charismatic, and easy to root for.  

What Sucks:

I remember when Inception came out, some people said it was trying too hard to be complex and trippy.  I didn't agree with that, but it's definitely true about Tenet.  It's trying really hard to be overly complex to the point where it's pretentious.  Not since The Tree of Life have I seen a film with its head so far up its own ass.  It's actually impressive.  It's one thing to want to make a cerebral thriller, but it's another thing to make one that doesn't require dozens of rewatches to piece together.     

The sound mixing was not very good as there were times I couldn't understand the dialogue.  It doesn't help that most of the characters have accents, plus the dialogue is very fast at parts.  I definitely need to watch this with subtitles.  Other times characters are having a conversation in a loud environment.  I get that it's probably realistic for us not to hear everything, but I don't care about that.  I want to be able to understand what is going on.

Finally, I couldn't stand the character of Kat (Elizabeth Debicki).  Her character wants to escape from her evil husband along with her son.  That's fine, but that's her entire character.  We don't see much of her son, so we can't even start to care about them.  It doesn't help that multiple times throughout the film, the Protagonist risks the entire world to save her.  Why?!  If you don't finish the mission, she's dead anyway.  Tenet simply doesn't do enough to make me care about Kat or her son, so whenever she was involved, I was annoyed.

Verdict:

Tenet is probably Nolan's weakest film besides Interstellar, but I still liked it.  Washington and Pattinson do a good job, the story is original, and the effects and action sequences are incredible, but the story is overly complex and comes off as pretentious, the dialogue is hard to understand, and Kat is not well developed.  It's worth seeing in theaters though.

 7/10: Good