Ten(et)sion

Today, out of nowhere, Philippa brought up the topic of “A Second Child”.
I don’t want to write about it here, just as I didn’t want to talk about it earlier, so instead I shall give you my reaction to the Christopher Nolan film “TENET” which I watched at the weekend.
Back in the early 2010s, when the thought of a pandemic hitting our country was as distant as the thought of Halley’s Comet returning, I spent an enjoyable afternoon watching “Inception”. I remember thinking at the time – “Wow! Imagine if Mr Nolan ever made a Bond film! Wouldn’t that be incredible??”
Watching TENET as it slowly and painfully unwound itself across my viewing screen, the over-riding realisation was – “Okay. This absolutely IS Christopher Nolan trying to make a Bond film”. Unfortunately, I have to say, in my opinion, he didn’t make it very well.  His previous films have been so absorbing because they’ve been very, very clever. They’re all action films – granted – but they’re not meaningless beat-em-up CGI fests. There’s a good story with enjoyable characters. You get swept up in the action and enjoy it all the more because your brain has been stimulated by the intelligent concepts and writing.
But TENET just tries to be too clever for its own good. It doesn’t establish ground rules and then invite you along for the ride (as both ‘Inception’ and ‘Memento’ did), it baffles you with pseudoscience and twists its own version of reality to fit the direction they want it to go. The plot gets sunk by the confusing nature of the ‘time travel that isn’t really time travel’ stuff and consequently I couldn’t give a shit about the ‘tense’ ending and whether or not everyone survived. I also got shivers at the end when I realised – and I’m not giving anything away by saying this – that it was being set up as a possible series of movies. The last thing my future life needs is a TENET franchise that goes on for a decade or longer. Inception, I think, had scope for some interesting sequels, but this thing seems like it was a struggle to stretch it to ONE film.
Anyway – what do I know? Maybe other people enjoyed it immensely.
Now I must go and apologise to my wife for cutting her off while she was in mid-flow about babies on the excuse of needing a shower…..

RC 13-4-21