TENET - Film Review

This photo is not a still from the movie TENET, it's the film's stars trying to explain the script to one another. I, of course, am just kidding about the photo, but this movie was just a "whoa." 

I was SO excited to finally get my butt in the theaters again. It was all totally safe and other guests are really far out and spread around, nowhere near me. Plus we all had masks on when we did not have popcorn going in out mouths. But I wish my first movie in over six months was a little better than this. 

It starts out as a decent action flick, but immediately you see the issues with this movie will lie in the writing and editing. The pacing is so fast you'll break your neck and then get lost while you're at it. What seems to be Inception 2 turns out to be even more disjointed than Inception. There was very little time taken to develop any sort of relationships with the characters. Writer and Director Christopher Nolan has his unique touch of cinema, which is sleek and stylish, but here he wanted to cram so much into an already crammed movie. This one movie needed to be a trilogy, and perhaps he's burnt out on trilogies. 

Some of the ideas and concepts put into the film were great, but were delivered at lightning speed. All it takes is a blink and you missed it moment and you're lost totally. You have to remind yourself in the theater you can't pause, rewind and listen again to what you missed. This is the movies, people. Put your game face on! But other parts of the story began to be telegraphed and very predictable. 

But really, the three acts of this movie were three totally different movies. The first was so grounded in reality that you're on the edge of your seat trying to keep up with high stakes art dealer talk, over tea with a splash of MI-6 thrown in for good measure. Then it's a mobster type movie with our villain, which was actually the highlight of the movie, played by Kenneth Branagh. And finally it's an all out time war with mind splitting open action that you're trying to comprehend before you're smashed out with a new shiny plot device altogether. 

All in all, it had its cool moments, but way too much cinema packed into a two and a half hour movie. We need to be eased back into movies after quarantine, and this didn't really do the trick. So if you were to ask me "how was the first blockbuster of 2020?" I'd say, "It was very 2020."

2/5