Christopher Nolan is even more formula-heavy and pretentious than ever in Tenet
Setting aside the abysmal ‘Suraj pe Mangal Bhari’, that we struggled to get through in a near-abandoned Inox theatre, ‘Tenet‘, would count as our first post-COVID movie theatre experience.
PVR Phoenix maintains a pleasant and secure ambience and by good fortune there were as many as ten people in the audience!
None of us would have regretted it. Tenet is made for the big screen. I didn’t reach out for my small screen even once during the 150-minute-long film.
That was for both good and not-so-good reasons. The action was good and quite a bit of Mumbai and Dimple helped retain attention. The less than impressive reason… you need to keep your eyes glued to the screen to make sense of the mess.
Deeply empty
The visual spectacle is unfortunately an intrinsic part of Christopher Nolan’s TIRED and TESTY formula that we have seen through Inception and Interstellar. Think of him as a bad mix of filmmakers Rohit Shetty, Gene Roddenberry, Mani Ratnam, and classic surprise-ending storyteller O’Henry.
Cars crash and fists fly with a frequency that would make Shetty extremely insecure. Then Nolan picks up an emotional thread through abundant violence much as Mani Ratnam would love too (think Roja or Ravan). Finally, Roddenberry’s Star Trek- variety science fiction spirit is invoked – be it dream travel, deep space travel, or time travel.
Tenet’s underlying plot is as simple as hell. Let’s just assume that sometimes effect can precede cause. But Nolan puts this simple idea through a wringer of deliberately convoluted scenes – he overexplains where he doesn’t need to and vice-versa. These are vain attempts to project ‘coolness’. These scenes are populated by gratuitous special effects, hammy acting, clunky dialogue, and then an O Henry-style big ‘reveal’ which was predictable all along.
In a nutshell, Nolan’s films are vacuous displays of showmanship which pretend to have depth.
Sadly, Tenet was the best among the limited movie choices in this, the age of the virus.
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