My Review of "Tenet"

Tenet was one of the most anticipated movies of 2020. It came out with a bunch of mixed reviews that discouraged me from watching the movie. I heard it was over bloated and pretentious. By now I should know not to take movie critic reviews so seriously since it's all a matter of perspective. The root thing about a movie is if it can entertain me. I can gladly tell you that I was able to enjoy my time watching this movie.

The movie starts off with a bang. Much like a lot of Christopher Nolan movies do. There is this huge scene of what looks like some sort of terrorist act. This is where we meet our main protagonist.

I already found it hilarious that he doesn't have a name and references himself as protagonist. Everything's pretty hush hush about his origins or what organization he's from. I won't ruin it for you but I just found it hilarious that he's fighting along and he's just known as protagonist.

Anyways, the protagonist is out to stop this terrorist act. That's when things don't go exactly the way he planned. Things start to happen where you start to question what's going on with this movie. Things seem to be going backwards and we soon realize why.

By now you probably know this movie plays with the concept of time. There's evil boss named Sator that plans to destroy the earth with a special device. This device allows anyone to go back into time but as they visit the past everything goes backwards. The whole thing can be quite confusing to comprehend but the way that they executed it on film makes some sense.

I use the word "makes sense" loosely because as the viewer you can understand what's going on but only if you shut off some of the logic in your brain. If you worry too much about how to logistically make sense with this physics of this movie world you will be thrown off course. You won't be able to enjoy this because there are a lot of weird continuity issues with this movie that may trigger sticklers of details. If you see the movie fight scenes and time travel scenes you'll understand what I'm talking about.

Still there a lot of the scenes are very trippy and dazzling. You'll see people fighting forwards and backwards at the same time. This must have been a technical nightmare to work on because of the fact you can have two of the same characters in a scene at the same time. While one is going forwards the other one will be going backwards. Again don't pick this movie apart trying to figure out how someone should see things going backwards and vice versa.

They also have an issue of how they return back to normal after they go back in time. A lot of those little details aren't really explained and funny enough they even mention this in the beginning of the movie. There's this funny scene trying to explain the rules of the movie's physics. One of the characters mentions that it's weird and try not to think too much about it.

A lot of those little explanation scenes were fairly comical and I don't know if they were meant to be comical. The whole movie has a serious tone but some of those scenes just felt a little too self aware of what it is as a movie not to think it was funny.

Overall, I thought it was a fun movie to watch. A lot of the scenarios that they get themselves into are admittingly very imaginative and creative. It's definitely not for everyone but if you have seen movies like Inception or Interstellar you'll probably know what you're getting yourself into. Compared to those two movies this movie sort of feels formulaic as it fits many of the same time sensitive and exploration tropes that we saw in those old movies. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. It is a fun watch but I don't know if I could watch it over and over again.