Tenet (2020) was the most talked-about film of 2020 for two reasons: it was the first big-budget movie to get released during the pandemic and second was many viewers had a problem understanding the film, more often than the previous films by the famous Christopher Nolan. This is a science-fiction film involving saving the world from complete annihilation by a bad actor who gets help from the future. I liked the film but it is certainly not as intriguing as Mr Nolan‘s previous films like The Prestige (2006) or Inception (2010) or Interstellar (2014) or Dunkirk (2017). Tenet gets a mangoidiots rating of ‘Raw’ and is available on Amazon Prime Video.

An unnamed CIA agent played by John David Washington is tasked with discovering and stopping the person behind a new kind of weapon, a bullet that exhibits “inverted” entropy, meaning it moves backwards through time. Following the familiar spy genre films, the CIA agent follows one lead to another to finally discovering the villain. Did he succeed in saving the world is the story?

Washington travels to Mumbai, India then to Oslo, to Amalfi Coast, Italy, and to Northern Siberia. A lot of action happens in the freeport storage facility at the Oslo Airport. Freeport aka free economic zones (FEZ) which are mostly set up inside airport or harbour premises where import and export of items can be done without any restrictions – they are kind of like International Waters. These freeports have become popular to store high-value artefacts that are owned by super-rich collectors around the world.

The action sequences were brilliantly choreographed, very difficult to animate the inverted movements, and I enjoyed watching them. The story starts with the intriguing idea of inverted entropy but as it progresses, especially near the climax it turns to become a familiar time-travel film – before you start pointing out that the inverted entropy does play a significant portion in the climax – I want to say the story I felt pivots around time travel more than effects of objects with inverted entropy. Seeing the climax as a time travel sequences helps you to understand it with ease.

Tenet (2020)

Tenet (2020) starring John David Washington

If you enjoy Nolan’s films or the Sci-Fi genre, check out this film, you won’t be disappointed but not thrilled either.

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