Tenet – 4/5 stars

I’ve only got one word for you: Tenet

After testing his loyalty, the Protagonist (John David Washington) is recruited to the secret espionage organization, Tenet, who has harnessed time inversion. This allows them to reverse the flow of time and travel backwards through it using technology from the future. Their mission is to prevent a Ukrainian arms deal, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), from bringing about World War III and erasing the entire world from existence.

I’ve been excited to see Tenet for so long, although, from seeing the trailer, I still had no idea what this movie was about. Even so, Nolan’s movies never disappoint. The story was definitely confusing. I left the theater more confused than I was with either Inception or Interstellar, and went home and immediately watched YouTube videos to help explain the ending.

Something that may have contributed to this was that I found the story quick and hard to follow. The Protagonist would be talking to someone or travel somewhere and I was never totally sure why, I just kind of went with it. I also think Tenet is one of those movies where the second viewing makes much more sense and instead of being introduced to the world, you can focus more on the little details you may have missed the first time.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the sound mixing and have to agree. Not to the extent that some people are saying – that they missed 50% of the dialogue – but there was definitely a good portion that I missed myself between the booming soundtrack and everyone having a different accent. But then I think, how much did I really miss without that dialogue? 

Something I was very impressed with was the Inversion and seeing everything move in reverse. This was done with the actors filming the scenes and then also filming them backwards, which must have been an extraordinary amount of work to achieve. Tenet also had less than 300 visual effects shots in the entire movie. Nolan usually prefers practical effects over special effects, such as crashing and blowing up an actual plane, and it was pretty amazing seeing what he achieved here. Nolan is, in my opinion, one of the greatest filmmakers of this generation.

One of my gripes with the Inversion was that it wasn’t always consistent. There was some picking and choosing of what all went in reverse, not everything. Other than that, I thought this was a super interesting original concept that was executed exceptionally well.

Overall, I liked Tenet and would rate it 4/5 stars. Having some time to digest it, it wasn’t my favorite film from Nolan, but then again, the bar is set pretty high for him. If you enjoy Nolan’s work, I’d highly recommend checking this one out. If you’re not quite ready to see it in the theater, then just wait to watch it at home. It might be better with subtitles and being able to pause it anyway.