Tenet (2020) So Warner Brothers and movie theatre chains thought we'd all risk death by COVID to rush into the multiplexes to watch this pretentious, overpraised, overhyped and overstuffed gibberish.......
Screw them. And screw this movie too, now that we've finally had a look at it.
What a colossal waste of time, money, resources and anyone's time spent watching it.
Oh and speaking of time, that's what the movie seems to be all about. We think.
In a nutshell (and oh how we'd like to stuff this stinker in an actual nutshell and then step on it).......folks from the future want to wipe out the present (in other words, all of us), so we'll stop messing the world up for the folks in the future. We think.
You may well ask, as does someone in the film, isn't the future folks' plan to destroy the present inherently self-defeating, since it would be their world that would ultimately get destroyed too?
Ah. A paradox. (Feel free to start singing the 'Paradox' song from "Pirates Of Penzance"....a paradox, a paradox, ha ha ha ha, a paradox....it's far more entertaining than anything you'll experience in "Tenet")
And now we come to the movie itself, in which the dastardly plot from the future is overseen by a vile Bond-ish villain, the snarling mad Russian oligarch Sator. (Kenneth Branagh). The only thing this guy's missing is a fluffy white kitten to stroke while he's scheming to end the world as we know it.
With no pussy to pet, Sator works out his aggressions by punching and kicking his estranged wife (Elizabeth Debicki).
Lucky for us, we have not one but two imitation Bonds, 'the Protagonist' (John David Washington) and a Brit named Neil (Robert Pattinson).
The boys have their hands full, since all the guns. cars, goons and assorted stuff Sator imports from the the future all move backwards......in reverse. Cause....ya know, they're from the future.....uh, so.....they'd...uh....move the opposite way in the present. We think.
Don't ask us for a rational explanation for any of this. Just writing about it is giving us a blinding headache all over again.
And since we're talking multiple overlapping timelines here, everybody gets to meet each other coming and going........we think.
The main reason, Warner Brothers hoped, that audiences would subject themselves to this impenetrable rubbish, was writer-director Christopher Nolan's talent for creating spectacular action sequences that rival and surpass anything you might see in a Daniel Craig Bond film.
Nolan, a lifelong Bond fanboy, does not disappoint in this regard. The firefights, hand to hand combats and furious vehicle demolition derbies are all jawdroppers.
But to what purpose? If we can't possibly figure out what's at stake here, then what difference does it make how many bullets fly, cars crash or bones crunch?
We should point out that we began this film by immediately circumventing Nolan's ruinous sound design......which in theatres, rendered most of the dialogue unintelligible.
Yes, we watched the film with the hard-of-hearing subtitles turned on, so that contrary to Nolan's self-destructive sound mixing, we could hear what the actors were saying.
It didn't help. Even if you could hear the cast snapping out the script's rapid fire exposition, you'd still be scratching your head for 2 and a half hours.
Bottom line......we don't care how many reviewers fell over themselves for the action wham-bams and the unsolvable Rubik's cube plot mechanics. 'Tenet's an self-indulgent, self satisfied mess. It's a higher-tech version of Michael Cimino's infamous "Heaven's Gate", in that you could pluck out individual brilliant sequences to enjoy while rolling your eyes upward as you suffer through the rest of it.
1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2) And contrary to what you've heard, watching it multiple times won't make it any clearer. Forget the popcorn. Load up on aspirin.
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