The Oscar-Contenders 2021, Film #2
minor spoilers ahead. nothing big, don’t worry.
Well, well. Never before has there been any film I was so excited for as Tenet. In India, where I am travelling since over one year, the film was
released the 4th december, many weeks later than in the rest of the world. Everyday I was checking the news about the film‘s release date every single day.
First, you need to understand that I am a die-hard Nolan fan. In my eyes, he’s the best director of all time and also made the best film of all
time, Interstellar. So you can figure out how painful it was for me to watch Tenet in cinemas. I obviously expected this to be a masterpiece, easily a 10/10 rating.
But unfortunately, Tenet’s Nolan’s weakest film since The Prestige.
And that’s not because of the lack of character depth, the film’s complexity or anything else which many reviews criticized.
In my eyes, two persons make this film very different from what Nolan has done before: Ludwig Görannson and Jennifer Lame.
First, the score by Görannson: Tenet is Nolan’s first collaboration without Hans Zimmer. And unlike many thought, this isn’t something bad at all.
On the contrary, the film’s score is one of the best Original Scores of all time and I would love seeing it win an Oscar.
And then, there is the editing- not by the extraordinary Lee Smith this time, but by Jennifer Lame, a rather unknown editor, famous for cutting Ari
Aster’s Hereditary. Lame clearly doesn’t know what to do with all this footage of huge dimensions and inversed time. The editing feels often unprofessional , way too fast-paced and
makes the whole film feel incredibly messy.
After the great outstanding opening scene in Kyiv’s opera, the next scene is set on some train tracks. And not later then in that scene, I knew
that Tenet is by far not the masterpiece I expected. Let’s take the scene in the train tracks: my god, what a disaster. The editing makes no sense, the pacing is terrible, and
Lame combines wildly shots in which the camera is pushing in and others in which the camera zooms out. The time jumps feel completely wrong, as if someone tries his luck in film editing for the
first time. Thanks God the other scenes work a bit better, but still, the messy style and the poor pacing remain. Mike McCahill wrote for Indiewire that the film suffers from a “visibly ruthless
edit” to cut it down to 150 minutes. Tenet would have worked much better if it was longer, not so rushed. Unfortunately, it takes away a huge amount of the joy you would normally
have watching a clever film like this.
Most of the time, it remains absolutely unclear why the characters do something, what is their motivation- for sure, Nolan wants us to wonder about Neil, but why in
the world is this painting so important? why do they go here, why there? the weirdest is the Protagonist’s second visit to Mumbai— a scene of literally a few minutes. WHY??
I absolutely love Nolan for his international mindset. Exactly this makes him a great contemporary director: he understands that nowadays, a film can’t be set
anymore in just one country with only white characters. Indians, Japanese, Russians, etc all play a role in this film (also in Inception) and I love the fact this film is set in so many
countries. But if that means just walking through a city for a few minutes, then I don’t see the point.
But after all that criticism, let’s not forget that Nolan lets us visit once again something we’ve never seen before in a film. Once again, he made his vision
reality and offered us a work of outstanding intelligence and complexity. One review in a trailer I’ve watched said that Tenet is “like Bond in Acid”, I liked
that. Tenet might be Nolan’s weakest film since over a decade, but that isn’t as bad as it sounds: the thing is just that he has made only masterpieces since 10
years. Tenet is still fantastic, in its own way. The film still looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, the performances are fantastic, the complexity and the timeline are
fantastic.
I gonna try to rewatch it in a few days- now knowing what to expect, prepared for what is actually going to come.
watched in DRC Cinemas, Mysore, Karnataka, India
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