10 Recent Movies That Blew Great Concepts

2. Tenet

Perhaps no movie released last year proved more divisive than Christopher Nolan's Tenet, a hugely anticipated, massively ambitious sci-fi action film centered around time travel, espionage, and a potential apocalypse.

Few will argue against Tenet's merits as a piece of technical filmmaking: the logistics and scale of the film's set-pieces, many of them playing out in reverse, are absolutely mind-boggling, and Nolan is one of the few directors bold enough to even try something so outlandish.

But as impressive as it might be visually, Tenet really falls apart hard in the scripting department, over-relying on nauseating volumes of expository dialogue, dramatic conceits that feel a little too cutely clever for their own good, and weirdly uninteresting characters.

As if making sense of the dense story isn't difficult enough, Nolan also drowns much of the dialogue between an "impressionistic" sound mix whereby important information cannot be heard. It's absolutely maddening.

The idea of a movie set in a world where technology exists to reverse the flow of time is undeniably awesome, but Tenet ended up feeling bafflingly hollow, like a half-remembered version of what it was supposed to be.