Tenet (2020)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
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70 films that influenced Tenet
What critics say influenced Tenet
(When you experience time inversion, you have to wear a special mask because your system is so screwed up, “normal” air will do you in.) “Tenet” is a movie filled with nods to other movies, from a certain color-coded element reminiscent of “The Matrix” to a late scene with an obvious nod to “Casablanca.”
I would be forsaken if I weren’t to reference Casablanca , “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Washington does make an impressively rugged hero, but on this outing he’s surprisingly lacking in charisma, and he strikes fewer sparks with Debicki’s heroine than he does with Pattinson’s cooly ironic sidekick – their rapport echoing Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains’ beautiful friendship in Casablanca .
And he gets to paraphrase Casablanca , telling the Protangist that this is “the end of a beautiful friendship.”
Sí, se trata de creer, y Nolan transfiere ese mandato de fe al espectador, que debe confiar en Tenet a ciegas, en sus GESTOS deslumbrantes, en sus “mentiras”, en sus criaturas sin fondo, hechas de celuloide (de 70mm): personajes que citan como autómatas, a la manera de Godard, palabras de Walt Withman, de T.S. Eliot, de los protagonistas de Casablanca .
Of the Bonds, it riffs (and lifts) most from Thunderball, especially in the central relationship between Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh; he’s a world-class Russian (or something) villain, she’s the trophy wife he won’t let go, and at one point, just like in Thunderball, it looks like he’s going to torture her in her cabin on his gorgeous motor yacht.
If Inception’s climax was an ode to the iconic ending to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (one of the best Bonds), Tenet is tribute to Thunderball , Sean Connery’s worst outing as the character that was bogged down by a production team who discovered underwater cameras and decided to shoot half the movie using them regardless of whether the whole story suffered.
In terms of Nolan’s body of work, Tenet ’s closest relation is probably Inception , though its themes touch on some of the same territory as Interstellar and Memento , without matching either their brilliance or their intimacy.
Tenet has already been rightfully compared to Inception in this department due to its time-centric plot and mind-altering visuals.
For the record, I acknowledge that Nolan’s intentionally borrowing elements from the secret agent subgenre (components of which were also present in his classic “Inception”).
When Washington’s super spy tussles with a masked opponent who moves, like those inverted bullets, in spooky reverse, it’s a faint echo of the zero-gravity hallway showdowns of Inception , with the laws of time instead of the laws of physics subverted.
He certainly has a flair for creating hugely successful event films on a scale that make even the usually overstuffed Bond extravaganzas seem puny by comparison and he has often spoken of being a fan of the franchise—the ski attack sequence in “Inception” alone struck many as an overt homage to the climax of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
While interesting and at times quite exciting in a definite Bond meets The Time Machine sort of way, the overall concept isn't quite as cool as the multiple dream layer plot of "Inception," and Nolan obviously cut his teeth with the backward time stuff way back when with "Memento."
(When you experience time inversion, you have to wear a special mask because your system is so screwed up, “normal” air will do you in.) “Tenet” is a movie filled with nods to other movies, from a certain color-coded element reminiscent of “The Matrix” to a late scene with an obvious nod to “Casablanca.”
It’s a high concept thriller which never fails to take itself with deadly seriousness but Tenet fails to live up to the intriguing set-up in the first act and doesn’t quite convince the viewer of its internal logic as much as, say, The Matrix, Interstellar or Inception.
It’s not as pioneering as, say, The Matrix ’s “bullet time,” but it’s a new flavour of action eye-candy.
It asks us to see the possibilities of cinema in a new way, and I haven’t been as excited about the technicality of a fight scene since the Wachowski Sisters gave us ‘bullet time’ in The Matrix .
Here, Nolan has crafted some of the most thrilling, inventive, jaw-dropping action scenes since The Matrix .
Studios are inherently risk averse, so even when they dare to challenge the audience even a mite, what you end up with is the existentialism-for-beginners of The Matrix, the clodhopping satire of Starship Troopers, or the spoonfed causality of Edge of Tomorrow.
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The movie borrows bits and pieces from three of Nolan’s previous efforts (Memento, Inception, and Interstellar) while also at times recalling the likes of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (a.k.a.
In terms of Nolan’s body of work, Tenet ’s closest relation is probably Inception , though its themes touch on some of the same territory as Interstellar and Memento , without matching either their brilliance or their intimacy.
Feel it,” it’s like he’s evoking Nolan’s Interstellar , a film also governed by a highly conceptual scientific understanding of time.
It's a trippy concept, but it's one based in actual science as Nolan again worked with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who consulted on Interstellar .
The response is reminiscent of Interstellar – it’s either a film that is underrated and harshly criticised or ranked on the same level as The Dark Knight Rises as one of his worst.
It’s a high concept thriller which never fails to take itself with deadly seriousness but Tenet fails to live up to the intriguing set-up in the first act and doesn’t quite convince the viewer of its internal logic as much as, say, The Matrix, Interstellar or Inception.
That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld.
The movie borrows bits and pieces from three of Nolan’s previous efforts (Memento, Inception, and Interstellar) while also at times recalling the likes of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (a.k.a.
Studios are inherently risk averse, so even when they dare to challenge the audience even a mite, what you end up with is the existentialism-for-beginners of The Matrix, the clodhopping satire of Starship Troopers, or the spoonfed causality of Edge of Tomorrow.
If you like this, try: “Edge of Tomorrow”…
The final act is a full-on ground invasion by troops that’s composed of looped explosions, reverse-sprinting soldiers, and buildings toppling yet reanimating at once—recalling the immersive spectacles of Edge of Tomorrow .
The movie borrows bits and pieces from three of Nolan’s previous efforts (Memento, Inception, and Interstellar) while also at times recalling the likes of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (a.k.a.
In terms of Nolan’s body of work, Tenet ’s closest relation is probably Inception , though its themes touch on some of the same territory as Interstellar and Memento , without matching either their brilliance or their intimacy.
The film distorts time and space in ways reminiscent of Nolan’s earlier mind-benders “Inception,” “Interstellar” and “Memento.”
While interesting and at times quite exciting in a definite Bond meets The Time Machine sort of way, the overall concept isn't quite as cool as the multiple dream layer plot of "Inception," and Nolan obviously cut his teeth with the backward time stuff way back when with "Memento."
When Nolan’s amnesia thriller Memento opened in 2000, Kaufman considered abandoning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , the similarly themed screenplay he was working on.
And while there are no dead wives à la Nolan’s Following, Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception and Interstellar, there is an abused wife.
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And as if to highlight the nature of our globalized world, Nolan has his characters teleport across the planet between scenes, with almost every action set piece involving a vehicle of some kind: from yachts to high-speed BMWs to a cargo plane that, as it leaves its hanger, suggests the spaceship from Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon .
That dryness reaches into the smallest nooks of the narrative; gold bars, for instance, tumble from the belly of the 747, clinking on the asphalt, but when you think of the comparable moment at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing” (1956), in which stolen banknotes are strewn beside a plane, what you recall is the robber’s agonized expression, as his ill-gotten gains swirl away like moths in the night.