'Don't try to understand it. Feel it.'

Nolan's obsession with elaborate cerebral concepts centred around time and physics has reached the point of self-parody with Tenet, a film that is nothing but empty spectacle, utterly incomprehensible to the average moviegoer and lacking the emotional core that made Inception and Interstellar so powerfully moving, these earlier works having found the ideal balance between head and heart.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but if you're a bit of a Nolan fanboy like me then it'll honesty take a lot to not actually enjoy one of his films at least a little bit. This is 2 1⁄2 hours of pure escapism, a relentlessly paced and mercilessly edited piece of blockbuster event cinema (well perhaps not during a pandemic) that really doesn't care if you're following along or not, or whether you can even hear the muffled dialogue underneath the booming soundtrack of gunshots, broken glass and blaring music—it doesn't matter, because look at all this cool shit that's happening... or hasn't happened yet, or is happening simultaneously, whatever.

There's definitely a futuristic Bond-vibe here, Kenneth Branagh filling the role of super-villain with his dodgy Russian accent, whilst John David Washington plays the suave, stoic hero and Robert Pattinson is the mysterious sidekick. It's the sort of film, which typical of its director, has enormous ambition, is bursting with creativity and reaches for greatness even if doesn't quite get there and you can admire it just for that, along with the jaw-dropping visuals and technical ingenuity. It's confusing, bloated, self-indulgent, humourless and frankly a mess, but I kinda loved it.