Tenet (2020) - Not At A Right Time Maybe!

★★☆☆☆

To survive 'Tenet', you'd better first, have enough sleep the night before; second, have been a fan of Christopher Nolan's films and got the hang of his style and pattern of filmmaking; third, be quite into stuff like time, time travel, or sci-fi stories of challenging puzzles; fourth, have a little bit of knowledge of physics like 'entropy'. But you know what, it doesn't really matter! 'Tenet' is still going to intrigue at first, then ridicule and confuse, and at last, inevitably, turn you off! If you're too embarrassed to say you don't get it, I'm not at all. I wished to enjoy it, not to survive it. I wished to be uplifted, not to be given a real headache just trying to figure out what the hell is going on here, and what the point is!

'Try not to understand it. Feel it'. Okay, but feel what? We're told in the very beginning that there're inverted objects travelling backwards from the future. That you don't have to drop the bullet first before it can bounce back in your hand when you reach out. Meaning there's no need to be a past to relive it. Okay, but how? Do those inverted objects have free will? Unknown though, but if they do, what's the point of 'what's happened happened' that is addressed throughout the film? If they don't, what's the point of going backwards then? There're paradoxes and contradictions left unexplained. But I wonder how many of you would even bother to try to understand it when there's after all nothing to feel!

The storytelling is... well, I don't know if there's actually a story to tell that we would really care. 'Tenet' is nothing visually stunning as 'Inception', though you may consider some of its action scenes eyeball-catching where normal and inverted objects are moving on simultaneously. And if you look for something emotionally engaging, I guess 'Dunkirk' or 'Interstellar' is even better than this. 'Tenet' feels like a mix of '007' and 'Mission Impossible' but it's nothing extraordinary except, well, its sound effects! It's indeed a simple, corny cliche told in an unnecessarily complicated way. It'd either turn you on as you think you outwit it, or piss you off as you think it outwits you! Either way, it's pointless!

At a crazy, difficult time like now, I'd rather spend time checking out some heartwarming, encouraging, understandable story that would make me feel than something seemingly sophisticated and smart but in fact meaningless and stupid!