Review of Tenet (2020)
Christopher Nolan (director).
Seen in 2023.
Seen on an airplane’s in-flight entertainment system, with barely audible dialogue and the image a bit cropped.
Heat-like heist action beneath a layer of science fiction. The SF is superficially simple and mechanistic like Primer (2004) but actually represents mere mind-over-matter fantasy: The stupid kind of worldbuilding where you can be really human only if you operate on blind faith.
The stakes involve future environmental degradation, but only on paper. That is to say, the villain of the movie claims that future people will have invented time travel to save the world. If that’s true, and we ignore that the technology was predictably weaponized, then the motives of the apparent future villains would be pure, while the protagonist (Protagonist) would be an asshole, heedlessly flying around the world in fancy suits, killing people and exacerbating environmental problems instead of dealing constructively with them.
As usual in this sort of movie, the villain’s attempt to justify his faction’s actions is not a sincere attempt by the writers to do the same. The hero’s Bond-like globetrotting exists for glamour, just like the hot statuesque blonde and the commercial “Freeport” setting. In this framework, any characterization of the hero’s work as counterproductive must be rejected. The villain’s claim to moral superiority is only a ploy to add the illusion of depth, while in truth, the villain is clearly just as evil as the bad guy in an old Bond movie. The other complexities of the plot, including a superweapon stupidly called “the Algorithm” and stupidly divided into nine MacGuffins, are also nonsense. The script isn’t good, but the movie does work as a high-concept blockbuster by the book.
References here: 2023-06-21/22.