Tenet

I’ve decided to do the unthinkable and write about Tenet. Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors and there’s no movie he directs that I wouldn’t watch. He has a reputation for putting out complex and mind-boggling movies like Inception and Interstellar and honestly, understanding his movies kind of makes me feel smart.

That being said, I have seen Tenet 3 times and I can say that I did not understand shit. I’m not even angry because it’s okay. Robert Pattison apparently did not understand what was going on while filming so that’s quite comforting to me. There’s a reason I failed Physics in school.

Hold up, it’s not that deep yo! Hi Everyone, Yimika here (an intelligent friend who knows more about Physics even though this knowledge is not really useful for this review) who's decided to help Aby with this movie. I should say first that Christopher Nolan, who I’ve only recently been able to identify in a solo picture, did an AMAZING job with this movie in that it really grabs your attention and you wouldn’t want to miss a thing. However, being glued is the exact thing that could confuse you as some of the detail is quite unnecessary in the grand scheme of the movie.

On a high-level, this is every apocalyptic movie (somewhere here, Aby and I argued about whether this is really an apocalyptic movie but if she knew so much, I wouldn’t be here) which has the added complexity of your typical time-travel movie, like Avengers: Endgame where Thanos was trying to reduce the population of earth because earthlings (you and I) are a nuisance and our actions now will create chaos in the future — seriously, let’s be smart about how we use this planet.

So all that’s happened in Tenet is, the future has sent people back in time to come save impending doom in the present, doom that was also initiated in the future. As for all the moving backward? It’s simply showing what happens as people are travelling back. In most other time-travel movies, all you see is someone go into a machine and come out in their desired moment. However, in Tenet, you get to see the person literally move backward, experiencing the things that already happened but in reverse, until they can find a machine that inverts them to move forward again. Being that this is a review, there’s no need to go over the intricacies but you can read this very detailed explanation or watch the movie again with this new knowledge (I recommend this option). Anyway, back to Aby now…

I’ll talk about the actors now, thank you very much oh intelligent one. I think Robert Pattinson is underrated as an actor. His roles are so diverse and he amazes me every time I watch him on screen. For someone who practically had no idea what was going on while filming, he did a great job.

This was the first movie I saw John David Washington and I was really impressed with his acting, considering the nature of his role and the lack of precedence. I thought he was too uptight at some point but to be fair, he was facing the end of the world.

Kenneth Branagh is one person who’s had huge success both as an actor and a director. His role as the villain/antagonist is so captivating especially with the Russian accent. I think by now we can all agree that the Russian accent is the villain accent. Side note — I didn’t realize how short he was until I saw him here. He’s really very close to the ground.

This is actually a brilliant movie when you think about the production and special effects. It won the award for Best Visual effects at the 2021 Oscars and I assure you it was well deserved. Christopher Nolan can do no wrong in my eyes and I’m always looking forward to his next project.

I’ll rate this movie 7.5 out of 10.