Cinemavenger
The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.
Tenet
Was Tenet the unfortunate result of a stupid-ass, booze-fueled bar bet? Seems like the only explanation for why the usually impressive Christopher "Memento" Nolan made an entire, ginormous budget movie based on the way Yoda talks. Wish he hadn't taken the bet, I do.
And you will, too, if you subject yourself to this two-and-a-half-hour subparpairing of a Bond flick and grade school level sci-fi. Despite the movie explaining it ad nauseum, the "science" behind objects and people being able to move backward in time makes zero fucking sense and, much worse, isn't consistent at all. Time-messery is literally the only thing Tenet hangs its hat on, so the movie is fucked from the get.
A CIA agent called only the Protagonist (John David "Denzel's Kid" Washington), gets recruited by Tenet, the palindromically named secret organization trying to stave off the end of the world, which it believes will be caused by someone in the future setting off a future weapon some time in the past, which is the characters' present or near future, depending on how you look at it.
The Protagonist spends 90% of the movie going from one person to the next in scene after scene of exposition dumping. Each of those people winds up sending him to someone else so that person can dump some more exposition on the Protag. Even with all that 'splainin', you'll still need to watch this shit show at least three times to have any hope of figuring out what the bollocks is going on.
If I wanted a homework assignment I would have stayed in school. And when that assignment is to accept that 2+2=7, Nolan and everyone else involved with Tenet can go fuck themselves.
If Nolan hadn't been the director, Tenet would've been a direct to Netflix pic that was forgotten a week after its release . . . except for a few, fringe, basement dwellers who would obsess over its Gordian Knot story instead of being gainfully employed or getting laid. It's basically Primer with better production values and less internal logic.
The only thing worse than Tenet's plot is its sound design, which ping-pongs between dialogue so low volume you can't hear it and music so loud it'll blow your speakers.
Sucks Tenet does.
January 15, 2021