Tenet is finally here!
Well, not over here, in the United States. Mar over here, in the wider world – a world that treats the coronavirus pandemic much more responsibly than we have and therefore deserves fun things as a reward.
But this is new Christopher Nolan spy thriller good enough to be considered a reward? Or, after months of building up and an exhaustive meta-narrative about this being the only film that can possibly save movie theaters from oblivion, does the whole thing fall under the weight of unrealistic expectations? Here is a roundup of Tenet reviews (including us!) to give you a sense of what critics are saying.
/ Film critic Jason Gorber praised the film’s beautiful locations and “show-stop-glasses”, and although he ultimately respected and even enjoyed many aspects of the film, it feels like Nolan is a little too heavy on display:
Apart from the spectacle, there is intense interest in making a film of deep complexity that is still understandable to the general public. To help with that, the film provides almost as many lines of exposition as it does flirting with bullets, with even the film’s concluding remarks providing an open explanation for the events that just happened. It can be a little frustrating when you have paid close attention during the ride, but perhaps it is difficult to blame the need. The end result, unfortunately, is a film that presents itself as closer than it really is, offset for some, but repetitive and predictable for those who set the magic trick that Nolan’s is trying to pull off.
The New York Times seemed to rate the film the most among the reviews I have read so far, and the editing appeared to be particularly worthy of compliments:
We’re a few minutes away from the 2½-hour movie time and it’s already delivered: the sequence ends with interior and exterior photos of an explosion, which transforms editor Jennifer Lame into such a perfect action cut as ever. In that microsecond, we are reminded of something that has come together over the last few months to make us forget: cinematic scale. “Tenet” works on a physiological level, in the belly-pit rumble of Ludwig Goransson’s score, and the dilated pupil’s responses to Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which delivers the same splendor, as observing a narratively redundant catamaran race, as the dovetail and fabric of Jeffrey Kurland’s implicit creaseless costumes. Seriously, the toughest aspect of “Tenet” might be the ironing budget.
But the BBC says “the whole plot is rather predictable, which I think makes room for all thinking physics stuff,” and talks about Nolan’s exploration of time in the film:
Nolan challenges our biases over time and suggests that there may be an alternative way of looking at it beyond a limited idea of linear progression. It’s confusing to begin with, but about halfway through the film begins to take on narrative meaning, to such an extent that plot twists at the end are rather predictable (or, perhaps, that one super clever meta-narrative device that validates the film conceptually argument).
Yet the action of the film is at least equal to what we expected from this filmmaker. As Variety says:
It plays best when it stops showing our work and morphs in the hottest James Bond hull you’ve ever seen, complete with these worldwide location-hopping, car chases that glide and pull like spaghetti, and custom made that you actually want to achieve in the screen and stroke.
Unfortunately, the characters are demonstrably under almost the praise of the film’s scope and scale. IndieWire had little positive to say about their fate:
It is a certain disappointment to observe [John David] Washington began to laugh impatiently, as if he saw the accidental disrespect when he was asked to play a character his writer-director was not afraid to name. (It is possible that he grew the facial hair while Nolan explained the plot.)
[Robert] Pattinson gives great fringe, but his absurd cutting-glass accent sounds like a wise attempt to distance himself from Nolan’s ever-diminishing dialogue (“It’s just an expression of confidence in the mechanics of the world”). As [Kenneth] Branagh’s mole, Elizabeth Debicki is here to look good in coveralls and has guns held to her head; only most capable supporting players (Martin Donovan, Dimple Kapadia, [Michael] Caine) offer goblets of exposure before they are packed for payment traffic. “Tenet” suggests that Nolan is no longer interested in people outside of assets on a poster or dots on a chart.
The Guardian is particularly harsh, saying that Pattinson’s character “just looks like some bloke drunk in Banana Republic’s scarf department”, and that they are “not even sure” in five years’ time. , [the movie would] be worthy to stay up to catch on telly ”:
You leave the cinema a little less energy than you went into. There’s something grinning about a movie that insists on detailing its pseudo-science, while also admitting that you probably did not follow a thing. We are clothed with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what happened happened.
The world is more than ready for a fantastic blockbuster, especially one that happens to have face masks and talks about going back in time to prevent disaster. It’s a real shame Tenet is not.
Dat… ja. Not exactly what you want to hear from a movie set up as a savior of the cinemas. I look forward to seeing it for myself (when a safe way to do that becomes available), but no matter how anyone feels about it, this heightened, bizarre moment we find ourselves in will probably mean that we all otherwise can feel about this movie several years after the pandemic is over than we might at first glance.
Tenet hits international theaters August 26th, 2020, and appears in some American theaters September 3rd, 2020.
Cool posts from around the web:
