Garbage

I'm no Nolan fan, but I do consider Memento a competent film and easily his best work, with everything else ranking between passable (Insomnia) and subpar (Dunkirk). Tenet is the only truly bad film in Nolan's filmography. While I consider it refreshing that Nolan doesn't even bother with trying to make the viewer understand the very premise of the film, as the exposition delivered in Inception or Interstellar was heavy-handed to where it could be considered fourth-wall breaking, Nolan's disinterest in the actual concepts presented in his film isn't compensated by great action. A lot of the fights and set pieces are surprisingly mundane, the inversion gimmick is rarely used to particularly great effect, and the final fight is almost comical in that Nolan doesn't even show whom the "good guys" are fighting in the first place. On a technical level, the editing is remarkably poor throughout, and several scenes appear hastily pasted together, resulting in a weirdly disjointed viewing experience.

The 'don't care' attitude towards explaining things clashes heavily with how seriously the film takes itself. Washington has a single facial expression throughout the entirety of Tenet, and even the most ridiculous lines of dialogue are uttered with total conviction. No matter what happens, Washington appears entirely unfazed, there's not even a speck of dust on his beard, and merely hinting at a smile is forbidden. To a lesser degree, this applies to all the people depicted in Tenet, and if I didn't know any better, I would assume that some sort of parallel universe earth inhabited by robots is shown, instead of current-year earth. Do these people have actual emotions? Clearly, Nolan thought that saving the world wouldn't be sufficiently climatic, so instead, the protagonist (very clever, very meta) is tasked with saving *reality* itself. How's that for high stakes?

Speaking of, it's not entirely clear who tasked him with that. Apparently, Washington's character has unlimited access to all kinds of resources, and can conjure up armed soldiers out of thin air, yet none of this is ever really touched upon. Apparently, it is his future self who sets all these things into motion, but why he would do that, don't know. Likewise, the motivation for Branagh's character to destroy everything is meager at best. With everyone's motivations being a mystery, and everyone acting like caricatures or robots, empathizing with anyone is virtually impossible. Accordingly, I find it very difficult to care about anything happening in this film. With Washington being a charisma void and the reasoning provided for any given action being fuzzy at best, it's no wonder Nolan felt the need to up the stakes further and further, and even then he doesn't trust his own plot and writing, and instead resorts to an overly loud and thoroughly obnoxious score to keep the viewer engaged. All fanfare, no substance. This basically felt like a parody of Nolan movies, delivered by the man himself. A waste of two and a half hours.