The drama about Tenet’s release at theaters and now, finally, on streaming is greater, and more comprehensible, than the movie itself. Well, it finally did come to streaming and I finally did buy it (instead *gasp* of waiting 20 days for it to hit streaming rental). Was it worth it? I doubt it – happy to have finally seen it, but I don’t have any expectation of seeing it again.

So Tenet is about… well… it’s about a super spy working for a vaguely defined organization fighting a sci-fi concept that’s equally vaguely defined over the fate of the future… or possibly the past…. or possibly even the present… Look, saying much would pile spoilers so high the review wouldn’t make any sense unless it went five times the length any reasonable person would spend reading it. So I’ll just leave it that the flick is one great big sci-fi concept on the hunt for drama and interesting characters. Isn’t doesn’t really make it.

I will say Tenet is certainly a big expensive looking movie… well produced and well acted. And it’s sci-fi concept, while hard to grapple with to the point the characters tell you not to think too hard about it, is well handled and has a lot of “Well, I may be confused but I sure see what they did there and it was kind of cool” moments. But it IS all in service of an idea someone had who then wrote a script around it, starring the idea, but not really making a good movie out of it. I’d argue that Nolan’s own Inception operated the same way but they found a better story under all the heavy sci-fi concepts.

And this movie’s big idea sci-fi concept which involves temporal mechanics is complicated and I’d like to think the writer and director had a firm understanding and that it all makes sense. And it might… it might all make sense if watched a couple times… I’d like to think Nolan and his team tightened all the screws. This is the guy who made Inception and The Dark Knight, after all.

But also the guy who dropped all the screws and belched out the Dark Knight Rises which had so many head-scratching “hey, but wait a minute” moments that they took me completely out of the movie. So I don’t know if this concept works throughout and, indeed, there were various moments where people were and weren’t wearing masks or speaking lucidly that seemed to break rules established for the big idea. Maybe I missed something… but it took me out of the movie going “hey, but wait”.

So that’s the way it is. I’m pretty torn about the movie. I think it works as a spy flick… as a kind of B+ tier Bond movie. And I think the big idea sci-fi gimmick is interesting in a way I’ve never seen a movie quite do (Dr. Who has come close). But I also don’t think any of this gels into a cohesive movie that I really care about. More of an exercise in thinking temporally on a topic full of timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly stuff. And that isn’t, in this case, enough to love the movie. But it’s ok… I wasn’t bored, just distracted by the murky ideas.

Score: 78