TENET- MOVIE REVIEW BY BANGALORE PREM

 

I had the privilege of watching the Christopher Nolan directed TENET yesterday in the cinemas, a movie which is aimed to bring the audience back to the cinemas. The movie revolves around the Protagonist (John David Washington) who is on a mission to prevent World War 3, fighting an organization from the future. As the title and trailer suggested, the screenplay of Tenet is structured as a Palindrome, involves a concept called Reversal of Entropy. The trailer shows a shot where John David aims at a shooting target, where he’s actually catching the bullets instead of shooting them.

 

People in the future have discovered a way to invert object and people and send it back in time. Climate change have destroyed most of the Earth in the future and they believe that reversing the entropy of the Earth in the present is the only way to save the future. They send an inversed weapon to Kenneth Branagh, who plays a Russian republic, which has the algorithm to inverse the entropy of the earth and destroy it in the process.  Now the grandfather paradox we always assumed about time travel is thrown out of the window, meaning people in the future can save themselves by destroying the present Earth. Also one cannot breath naturally in the inversed state as air cannot go back into human lungs, another example of brilliance.

The concept of reversal of Entropy is explained to the audience in simple terms possibly by Physicist Kip Thorne who has associated with Nolan after Interstellar. However, let’s say one totally does not grasp what entropy is and how it can possibly be reversed, and considers it to be just a magic event, that still does not take away the movie experience that Tenet had to offer unlike Nolan’s previous complex movies such as Inception or Interstellar, which were difficult to understand in the first viewing. Another concept called Temporal Pincer too is literally spoon fed to the audience, where one half of an army attacks in forward time, another half of the army is inversed, where they have an advantage of knowing how the attack would have taken place. This is shown multiple times in the movie. 

I was initially surprised by the casting of John David Washington; however, he did excel in the role. Robert Pattinson. Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh all play important roles in the movie. The movie also stars Hindi language actress Dimple Kapadia, the movie too has some prominent scenes shot in Mumbai, during the shooting of which Christopher Nolan and Kamal Hassan shared a meeting, the ace director even said he had watched the actor’s movie Paapanasam. Maybe Nolan and Warner Bro’s would have promoted the movie in India, had there not been a pandemic.

 

 

On the visual front, the film had brilliant cinematography, all of the vfx and shots involving the inversed objects or people were brilliantly choreographed. Nolan this time was without his regular composer Hans Zimmer, However Ludwig Goransson’s score was definitely impressive.

Overall, Tenet is mind bending, where you have a Protagonist in the past present moving forward, aided by his colleague (Robert Pattinson in the present from the future), fighting an enemy from the future. I wonder if this movie can actually be watched backwards.

 

Rating: Nolan padatha rate panra alavuku namakku avlo scene illa.