I wrote an entire review of the flick and TL;DR SPOILER ALERT!!! I didn’t like it all that much. I gave it a NOLAN/10 so you can see where I stand on the NOLAN scale. For reference, I gave INTERSTELLAR (2014) a MCCONAUGHEY’S TEARS/10. A movie should not be this hard to understand. Like what you want to like but I’d rather watch CUTTHROAT ISLAND. You probably don’t even know what that is! Neither do I but I’m sure I won’t be frustrated about not understanding what I saw after sitting through that. The movie is cool and sleek and look cool and you should only have sex with it once because it has problems and you need to walk away. Once is fine. But I digress…..
I saw this image on reddit (of all places, gee wiz) and thought seriously?
It actually reminds me of RUN LOLA RUN (1999)
I am not going to make the claim that RUN LOLA RUN is a confusing movie. It is not, it perfectly easy to understand, it just doesn’t confirm to nearly any film narrative conventions. That’s why it stands out, it breaks the rules in a good way, can easily be absorbed and you are enriched for having gone through the experience. Here is a VIDEO I made about it. TENET is not that at all. The movie almost fails in every way that RUN LOLA RUN succeeds. I argue that the film takes a few of the conventions found in video games and integrates them to make the film unique. A game like CONTROL (2019) takes a lot of film and TV tropes and uses them to its advantage. The MAX PAYNE series uses time in an interesting way as well. Slowing it down to make your character have the ability to dodge bullets. I wonder where that came from? The point is that this concept is awesome but does not pan out in a movie format. A television series or a video game may have taken this amazing concept and fond a way to integrate it so it felt right. Feels like a missed opportunity.
The act of being complex does not make a movie plot good. Sure, we are along for the ride in KNIVES OUT, but it reveals all of itself by the end and you were figuring out the mystery with the detective. I’m not finding myself asking questions like; What the hell is going on? What did he just say? Why is this happening? Nolan made a film called INTERSTELLAR and the science was complex but the story at least made sense and could be followed. Here is a handy chart made by the person who made the one above to help. It shows the complexity of the “time travel” in the movie. I do think this movie is pretty great until the very end.
I did enjoy the experience of watching TENET the first time. I was with friends and we were all lost together and it was fun. We all feel similarly about Nolan’s film’s and agree that he has a character development issue. If Simon Pegg was writing scripts that Nolan directed, well then folk we may have ourselves a great pairing. This is the kind of movie that has created a subreddit with 25 thousand plus people talking about just this movie (Not sure if this is an anomaly, only looked it up for this) and many of the discussions are about the procedures of the film. Not the themes or what the film means or if it fits into culture in anyway. I feel like it’s just a thing. The Dark Knight did make it into the National Film Registry, which is an honor, but that film is overrated too, just not anywhere near this and the rest of where the Nolan films line up. This film is going to get talked about forever and I guess I’m still talking about so YOU WIN CHRIS!
Thank you to everyone that supports the blog through the links!
Movie Blind Spot 
Leave a Reply