Monday, December 7, 2020

Two-Paragraph Review: Tenet (2020)

Pop culture is more and more saturated with all manner of influences from the video game industry. The main takeaway I have after watching Tenet, after a range of other negative impressions, is that even Christopher Nolan cannot escape that influence. I won’t reflect on the convoluted story, the whole sadly misguided and underdeveloped science fiction element, bland characters that are neither fully-formed nor interesting, or anything else from the failed narrative segment of the movie. Instead, I will only focus on the scenery and the setting of each part of the film.

If you took out the fact that this is a creation of one of the otherwise best big-budget filmmakers of the 21st century and simply said that this is the new Call of Duty game, the scenes wouldn’t change. First, you have a Slavic city opera siege level, followed by a training level which shows you how guns work, and a few short cinematic sequences. Then, the plot moves to an exciting Indian city skyscraper level, followed by a heist scene at a Norwegian airport. That is then intersected by several more small cinematic scenes, a car chase level, and a revisit of the airport level, now from a slightly different perspective, only to culminate in a massive battle at an abandoned construction site and a tense personal sequence on a yacht in Thailand. For me, besides this showcase of theoretically exciting but actually completely desolate generic scenes, the film offers absolutely nothing more. I think that even as a game, the Metacritic score for something like this would be 6.5.