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'Tenet' Review With Casey

Two men standing back to back with guns in front of a cityscape on a movie poster.
Courtesy of "Tenet" movie

Oscar-nominated director Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, 2017) is evidently still enjoying his obsessions with complicated action sequences and non-linear storytelling. 

Tenet is a cerebral action film about a spy (John David Washington from BlacKkKlansman, 2018) exploring the shady underworld of international espionage trying to prevent the end of the world. This exploration is swift and disorienting as the spy discovers the future technology of inverted objects that move through time in reverse (from bullets to cars to people). Tenet is like one half James Bond adventure and one half M.C. Escher drawing. 

 

Like his previous films Memento (2000), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017), Christopher Nolan is still great at telling exciting, inventive, complex stories that twist our concepts of linear time. Tenet's particular dissection of time offered many surprises that kept the film entertaining. With so many noisy car crashes, explosions, and gun shots, there were numerous times when the spoken dialogue was difficult to hear or understand, and the theoretical physics establishing the film's premise were explained far too quickly. (Can't the dialogue and acting appear just as important as the visual effects and fighting?)

Although the film's running time is 2.5 hours, everything moved incredibly fast as if the screenplay tried to shove as many ideas as possible into a strict word count/timeframe (like me arriving at a buffet restaurant that's closing in 30 minutes). Maybe the constant speed of the story is the main reason Tenet ended up feeling far too convoluted, busy, and puzzling. The film's visual vocabulary was dazzling, and it's still fun to see something far from a garden variety action film. But Tenet just wasn't orchestrated as smoothly as the director's previous films. This lack of smoothness doesn't mean Tenet is bad. But it's not a masterpiece either.

Casey T. Allen is a native of Utah who graduated from Utah State University with a Bachelor's degree in English in 2007. He has worked in many capacities throughout USU campus and enjoys his time at UPR to continually exercise his writing.