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TENET is a delirious, exhilarating ride with some of the best action I've ever seen. Every minute is a sensory assault, with mad scientist plotting that flies too close to the sun in a way only Chris Nolan can. As a film it falters, but as a"CINEMA!" experience it is magnificent.
TENET is an art-blockbuster on the chassis of Nolan's least accessible, most oppressively icy film. What it reveals in Nolan's strength with concept, style and action, it exposes in his weakness with character, plot and dialogue. It is a bizarre medley of mastery and misstep.
TENET is the first Christopher Nolan film without a soul. The biggest disappointment isn't that its quantum maze is confusing--I loved feeling lost in its web--it's that the ambiguities you're left with are technical rather than philosophical. It's a dazzling, alienating puzzle.
Script aside, TENET has some of the best filmmaking of Nolan's career. He wields the exquisite visual control of DUNKIRK and applies it to heists and car chases, with a time-inverted fist fight that's the best brawl since the bathroom in FALLOUT. A visual and somatic thrill.
ALSO: John David Washington oozes effortless charisma, Elizabeth Debicki brings nuance and heart to a retrograde role that was written with neither, Branagh revels his scenery-chewing menace and Pattinson steals every minute he's in. Ludwig Göransson's pulsating score rules.
Throughout TENET, I kept thinking Dicaprio worked with Nolan for *months* to ensure INCEPTION had real emotional heft to Cobb's arc reuniting with his children. Whether it was Washington, Pattinson or his brother, TENET needed help finding the emotional stakes in its cerebral web
There's an unrelenting emotional vacancy to TENET that's both a blessing and a curse, and while I gladly engaged with that despairing chilliness, it's another door the general audience may not walk through, which is another reason TENET was the wrong movie to reopen cinemas.
