movie: Tenet
director: Christopher Nolan
genre: sci-fi
release date: September 3, 2020
star rating: four out of five

review by Kyle Lavin

“I realized we’re both working for me.” Christopher Nolan has done it again, and that would be: blown my mind. Tenet, Nolan’s newest film, met audiences about a month ago in a “less-than-ideal” circumstance. Despite being released during a global pandemic, Tenet still satisfied me.

The mind-bending storyline attempts to build tension between the present flow of time and a futurist ability to reverse the flow of time within one reality. Success is found in the characters and the emotion that they bring to the table in the story, but what falls short is this reverse flowing of time. These beautiful visuals of characters and actions moving forward in time and back within one shot are astonishing and mesmerizing, but they make the film less easy to follow. I’m blown away by what Nolan has accomplished with this film and the dialogue this story can promote afterward. I just wish that the connection between time flow and story left a greater and louder punch for me. When Inception, another Christopher Nolan film, came out, the ending was talked about for forever, but with Tenet, it seems that its ending just flew right over my head.

I’m grateful that I was able to experience Tenet in an IMAX theater. This film is worthy of four out of five stars because it is the kind of movie that is made to attract an audience. The ending’s minor issues cost the film the extra star, but I will not stop advocating for this movie. A must-watch film, but more so a much-watch-twice film.