A few reviews

[Moe_Syzlak]

Tenet. Ugh, where to begin. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but I still don’t recommend reading this if you haven’t seen it. First, I’ll say I wasn’t bored. It’s a perfectly fine action flick with the traditional two dimensional characters and plot contrivances (a character literally says “don’t think about it too much” at one point). But... this felt like every criticism I’ve ever heard of Nolan amped up to eleven. Characters we don’t care about doing things that seem to lack proper motivation. I just asked my wife, “can you tell me a single character’s name in that movie last night?” She said, “I feel like Richard [sic] Pattinson had a name.” I cared not a lick for anyone and the stakes never felt real. I didn’t find it particularly difficult to understand; once you understand the central conceit, it’s pretty straightforward. But I think much of the confusion stems from the fact that whole scenes and set pieces don’t feel relevant to the story. Most of the action of the first half seems shoehorned in order to allow the audience and the main character to connect the dots at the end. It’s as if Nolan started with an idea “wouldn’t it be cool to shoot an action scene where half of it is moving forward in time and half is moving backwards in time” and then feebly constructed a plot to allow him to shoot those scenes. None of the action really matters to the story and the plot and the explanations of what is going on in the central conceit are conveyed through lengthy dialogue. Finally, if you do take it as just a fun action romp—a rollercoaster of sorts—I feel it needs to have more charisma. John David Washington, while fine, just couldn’t carry the movie in my opinion. This needed a very charismatic leading man. I guess they thought Denzel in his prime would’ve been perfect—and he would’ve been—but his son ain’t that. The action is fun but I didn’t think it was the sort of thing that you’ll regret not seeing on the big screen. For me, it’s a “rent it.”