Tenet

“All I have for you is a word: Tenet. It'll open the right doors, some of the wrong ones too.”

Filmology Rating: 2.33 out of 4

TENET is the latest film from Christopher Nolan as he continues his vendetta of saving movie theaters by releasing the most nonsensical and confusing mess of the last few years.

There's a heist to steal a thing, but then there's three other heists to steal other things, but you don't know how that connects to that or why who is doing what in that scene because he was already him over there an hour ago because machine then Kenneth Branagh screams and expository dialogue: a film by Christopher Nolan.

I just want to start this review off by saying that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack while watching this film because the level of confusion and anxiety I felt was immeasurable to any other cinematic experience I've ever had to the point where I felt like I needed to leave the theater for medical reasons. I also had a headache from the utterly annoying BWAAAAAAA that wouldn't go away.

To say the least, I think I hated this film and I don't hate any Christopher Nolan film, but I think I do now. Reading some reviews of this film, I was shocked at how many people were defending Nolan's black void of humanity in his characters in this film to the point where he literally names his main character "the Protagonist."

Here's the absolute bottom line, film is made and broke over characters and story. If your story is confusing, then have interesting characters for the audience to stay attached to, like 'Inception.' If you have no characters, make up for that with a solid story. 'TENET' has absolutely no characters and the story is possibly the most incoherent thing ever.

Every scene in 'TENET' feels like a non sequitur. The scene starts and two people you don't really know are in a random location talking in movie code about something you have no prior knowledge of and then the scene ends and a heist scene starts.

Here's the other big problem, if this is a heist movie, then we need to know what the hell is going on so that there is something called "stakes." So if the audience knows the plan to the heist and something goes wrong in the heist, then we feel concerned for the characters involved.

However, you have no idea what the hell is ever happening and you don't care about the characters at all, which leads to such a huge disconnect from what's in Nolan's head and to what we're seeing.

So I just want to reiterate that for the entire runtime, I felt like I was having a mental breakdown because of how frustrated and anxious I was.

At the beginning of the film, there is also no through line or main objective. Things just happen for the first hour and Nolan leaves you in the dark for so long that you give up on the film before Nolan even begins to reveal answers to your questions. I think Tarantino said this once, but you never want your audience completely and utterly confused. If I was lost, I can't imagine how normal movie goers felt after seeing this.

This just feels like a four hour film that was cut down to two and a half hours because every scene is confusing and it feels like every scene is sprinting to the next scene just to get to overly loud action scenes where BWAAAAAAA won't go away.

This film feels like a usual heist film, but with that utterly confusing "reverse" concept Nolan made up. It's "Compensating: The Movie" because there is such a lack of character that Nolan is trying to make up for that with a "grand" concept. It's like a car that has chrome wheels, a cool hood ornament and a sweet paint job to make up for the fact that it doesn't have a working engine.

I said this with 'The New Mutants,' but a film must work on the surface level first before you can dissect the subtextual gobbledygook, especially when nobody in the movie has clear motivations.

I really thought this film would come back around like 'The Prestige,' but it doesn't. It's just a huge mess that Nolan ends with by saying, "Put the pieces together," but the pieces are from eight different puzzles and the image when you put the puzzle together is a white square.

Rating: Skip It

-Nolan