A short review of the Nolan film Tenet.

In Nolan's first film Following, a bearded, straggly, conceited actor decides to follow people at random. One of those people is a killer who plays to the actor's vanity to take a walk on the wild side. Everywhere the killer takes the actor, implicates the actor in a murder.

The time line of the story is chopped into tiny bits, so it takes a significant amount of time to even figure out what is happening.

The film is a brilliant puzzle. Unfortunately, there's zero reason to care what happens to the vain actor, so there's resolution of the plot, but no fulfillment of a story.

In Tenet, which involves an inversion of time (sequences running backward), the main character is named The Protagonist. There's just about zero effort made to care what happens to him. There is a small reason developed to care what happens to the wife of the villain near the end of the film. The threat in the film is the ending of all life on Earth.

The clever action sequences that run backwards are clever. They create a sense of something at stake about as much as any bog budget action scenes in Hollywood films.

There is one exchange of dialogue that is unintentionally funny. In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is destroyed to make way for a kind of galactic freeway off ramp. Since there are an infinite number of alternative dimensions and Earths, killing a few billion people is played for a laugh in Hitchhikers. That people in the future would support the annihilation of Earth because there are more copies is meant to be taken seriously in Tenet, but it still makes no sense. The people in the future will die with the rest of us if the villain in Tenet gets his way.

No amount of time inversion can save the ending of Tenet from the promise of a sequel if this film is a blockbuster. You'd think someone in the future would have sent back reviews of Tenet that suggest a sequel is not in the cards.