it's fine. the first half was about as bad as anything he's ever done but the second half / 2/3 of the way through redeemed it. overall it wasn't good but wasn't bad. he's one of the more frustrating filmmakers around. he could be incredible but there are few filmmakers as talented as him that get in their own way as much as he does.
I didn't understand any of this fucking movie but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy the entire thing. I honestly can't explain any more of the plot now having watched the film than what little I knew about it going in - that it's vaguely about stuff / people moving backwards and also forwards through time. As a disclaimer though, I love Christopher Nolan's style of filmmaking from a visual standpoint, and I absolutely fucking love both John David Washington and Robert Pattinson. I'm sure those facts went a long way toward me enjoying this movie as much as I did. I did laugh-out-loud in an awkward way at one point when they crash a jet into an airport terminal but the whole scene just kinda fizzles out like a wet fart. With the music and everything building to this crescendo I really thought something major was gonna happen and instead there's just a super realistic yet-so-tame-by-Hollywood-blockbuster-standards amount of damage to the plane and the terminal. It just looked to me like if the people taxiing a plane at an airport accidentally slammed into a terminal and did a bunch of damage that was going to cost a bunch of money to fix and someone would be in trouble for but otherwise would not be a big deal at all. I am sure this practical stunt sounded incredibly epic on paper and was very ambitious to pull off but what ended up on screen just reinforced to me why they invented special effects in the first place.
I haven't hated a movie quite this much since "mother!". Just unbelievably stupid. I hated Interstellar as well, but at least that had redeeming action moments. The set pieces in this movie are a plane slowly rolling into a building and a laughably awkward fight scene that we have to watch twice. The audio is a fucking disaster, even with headphones I couldn't understand half the shit people said and then I would get my ears blown out by the score.
I’ve rarely been more polarized by a film. Some of the coolest, most innovative, most jaw dropping and audacious high level blockbuster filmmaking I’ve ever seen. Yet! (As I go full Stephen A. Smith) The script is incredibly frustrating and patronizing to the audience. I loved it. I hated it. All at the same time.
fun is about the last word i would use for this. even the parts i did think worked, specifically the last third, it wasn’t necessarily fun
Nolan definitely took the "it doesn't explain its own rules well enough" criticism of Inception to heart with this one because it was pretty clear how everything here worked.
It's hard to compare how much I liked a movie I just watched last night to a movie I've been living with for 10 years now but yeah I'd say that Inception was more enjoyable just from a surface-level perspective but Tenet is a better-constructed movie in more than one way. This definitely felt like a movie he couldn't have made without the lessons he learned making Inception first.
Interstellar is still my least favorite of his movies just because of how weak the final 20-30 minutes are. Tenet is better than Interstellar.
Also what Ludwig did with the score for this was so good, really happy with how that collaboration between him and Nolan turned out.
The Dark Knight The Prestige Dunkirk Memento Batman Begins Inception Tenet The Dark Knight Rises Insomnia Following Interstellar
I genuinely think this is the worst movie of the year, I can’t think of anything I watched that I hated more