Tenet Review: 4 Ups & 6 Downs

1. Treating The Audience Like Idiots

As I've mentioned a few times now, Christopher Nolan seemed to be one of the only big-budget Hollywood directors who could prove that a casual audience can and will tangle with more "high-brow" concepts. It's why Inception is arguably his finest overall work, and why the "love tunnel" script rewrite that became Interstellar's ending felt so off.

Audiences don't want to be spoken down to, or told not to care. We want characters to ask questions, the world to spark our imagination and have parts of answers that are enjoyable to parse out as more information is made available.

Scenes starting with rapid-fire terminology, characters asking "Is your head hurting yet?", others repeatedly stating that we shouldn't try to figure anything out - it creates a smarmy feeling of Nolan being above his audience. Of that person at a party reeling off information in a specific field for attention, only to bat away followup questions with, "Oh, you wouldn't understand".

In the past, Nolan was happy to take us along for the ride rather than dangle shiny keys in five directions at once as compensation. It's a notable gear change; into territory that verges on overly complex for the sake of it, and that was a fine line this auteur used to walk with ease.

Tenet is Christopher Nolan's most ambitious project on a conceptual level, but somewhere along the way he forgot who he was making it for.