Tenet – Movie review

TENET

By: Brian Sun

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Summary (SPOILERS)

The movie revolves pretty much around time. Temporal travel, inverse time distortion, you can call it something else, but it pretty much rounds up to the same thing. So, the main character, is just called the protagonist, his real name undisclosed. He works with an agent called Neil, and their job is to stop a nuclear holocaust that hasn’t even happened yet. All they have is their guns, fighting skills, a gesture of locked hands, and a word: Tenet.

So, this movie is probably the hardest to understand of other Nolan films, like Inception, and Interstellar, because of how the time bends and warps. At the very start, we already see hints of time travel: Inverted bullets from the future, and that immediately tells us someone in the future wants to stop the nuclear holocaust. Afterwards is where Niel and the Protagonist team up, and they have to destroy the algorithm for nuclear bombs implanted by a Russian who first discovered the inverse time travel idea. The Russian is almost unstoppable because he can go to the past from the future to predict every next move of the protagonist. In the end, when Niel’s assist team uses time travel themselves, to send teams of soldiers inverted, they finally are able to stop the Russian’s ploy. Were they able to prevent the algorithm of a nuclear holocaust? Watch the movie yourself to find out.

So, as for most movies, this one I think has the best concept for a movie, because the normal stance on time travel, is you go back in time, and change the future, and this movie does not do that at all. It utilizes negative and positive. Past and future, to create a new theory of time travel: Inverted time manipulation. Other movies have variations of the basic idea, but don’t have a base theory that works. X-man: Days of Future Past shows the course of time running in both future and past, and as wolverine changes the past, time is still running in the future. Harry Potters time travel is that you can go back in time to change an event, but that event will already have changed for you, and changing it is just the cause of how it changes. In the third installment of Harry Potter, they don’t actually see Buckbeak be killed and that’s because Hermione and Harry from the future stopped it. All in all, this is one of the most original movies I have ever seen.

I will say, as far as Nolan’s movies go, this one doesn’t beat Inception, made a whole decade ago. There are only two reasons why I think this: first, the characters are less relatable. You don’t know their backstory, you don’t know where they are from, you don’t even know what their NAMES are. The other movies, Interstellar, Inception, Memento, and The Prestige, the characters, all have a personality at least. But in this movie, main character is just “the protagonist”, which LITERALLY just means main character.

there were too many action scenes. I didn’t even understand when I finished the movie, because there wasn’t enough context to the characters actions. There needs to be time also, for the viewer to think through what they just saw, like the scene in inception, where Cobb is gathering his forces, and explaining his plan. And in interstellar, where Professor Brand explains to Cooper his plan on how supposedly they are going to save earth. There is not enough breathing room like that in this movie at all. Also, Christopher Nolan said that he despises using guns too often in his movies, but he ended up filling this one up with pistols, snipers, and rifles, which is top notch irony.

All in all, not a bad movie. Actually, it’s a 4/5 star in my book, but it’s not at its peak. Just as a side note, there are a lot of small nitpicks and marginal details that are probably only relevant to my point of view. So this movie review isn’t supposed to account for how you feel about this movie at all.