When I listed the movies I had watched and reviewed in 2020 for the Best Of The Year series.. I got a couple of references to the movie Tenet and then as if that was a cue I started noticing mentions of the movie everywhere, some hated it, others loved it but everyone agreed that it was serious mind games… So I watched it.
Tenet
Tenet is a 2020 scifi action thriller written and directed by Christopher Nolan (the man behind Inception so you know its bound to get warped) Nolan apparently took a decade deliberating on the central idea of Tenet and the screenplay took five years to finish.
The movie packs stunning choreography and a stellar ensemble of John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh.
Upon trying to explain the laws of phyics and entropy in the movie, a scientist tells The Protagonist a simple solution which holds true even for the viewer:
Don’t try to understand it just feel it
This one of those movies that makes sense if you don’t think about it, but then you need to think about it for it to make sense… right from the title Tenet it begins with a Ten and ends with a Ten but inverted….
Fun fact the movies borrows its title, character and location names from a Sator Square or Rotas Square a palindrome of letters which can be read top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right and right to left.
In the movie Tenet, Opera is a place in the opening sequence, Arepo is an art forger, Sator the villain, Rotas a security company…
The Good
The choreography is insane with stunning visuals complete with mindboggling action sequences. The movie premise brings an interesting twist to time travel and its paradoxes. But fair warning once a movie starts tinkering around with the concept of time, one will need to suspend disbelief, logic and reason.
The Bad
Trying to keep track of whats happening the first time round can be a bit of headache inducing, you’ll probably have to watch it again, maybe even look up a YouTube Tutorials of The Movie Tenet Explained.
The sound mixing is a bit off with the movie score sometimes overpowering the dialogue you will definitely need to watch this movie with the subtitles turned on.
The Ugly
Either Christopher Nolan is a mad creative genius with a wild imagination or he is taking the audience for a ride, probably both, while the plot is paper thin when you spread it out linearly, in the convoluted storytelling of Nolan’s world it becomes an enigmatic experience that you have to talk about to someone, anyone…..
Here is a diagram I drew up to explain the movie Tenet:
Final Thoughts
While this movie definitely wont be everyone’s cup of tea, having watched it will definitely equip you with interesting conversations to have with others who have watched it, whether you loved it, hated it or it didn’t make sense to you…
Its like Bitcoin nobody really understands that either, come fight me. ^_^
Have you watched Tenet, what are your thoughts ?
~B
PS We live in a twilight world….
Becoming The Muse 
Your thoughts.. if you will?