ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY AND AWARD NEWS
SEPTEMBER 02, 2020
Is Tenet Worth Your Time-Travel?
Christopher Nolan’s new thriller, like all the filmmaker’s movies, has been the subject of conjecture since it was first announced: What will it be called? Who will be in it? Will even the cast understand what the hell is going on? V.F.’s chief critic, Richard Lawson, answers even more pressing questions today: Is Tenet great or just intellectually, and financially, ambitious? Is it the rousing return to moviegoing that it promises to be? Lawson found a great deal to admire, including a sly, funny turn by Robert Pattinson. Ultimately, though, the screenplay—and an almost comically dreadful performance by Kenneth Branagh as a hammy Russian heavy—spoils the proceedings: “The real problem with the writing is more basic: It’s awfully trite, a lot of boilerplate action-thriller dialogue that clangs leadenly against Nolan’s sleek aesthetic. The luxe cool of the movie is frequently undermined by dumb lines spoken with strained gravitas.” Is Tenet better than The New Mutants? Absolutely. But Nolan, who clearly wants to support the movie industry’s difficult climb back to normalcy, and to remind us all of the kind of spectacles that made us love movies in the first place, has delivered something too overwrought and confounding to deliver much pleasure. “Mostly,” writes Lawson, “Tenet is a straightforward caper movie—maximally staged and very, very loud, but flimsy at its heart.”
Elsewhere in HWD, screenwriter Gesha-Marie Blandannotates a page from her script Selznick’s Folly; D.B. Weissand David Benioff, who brought Game of Thrones to the screen, turn their attention to The Three-Body Problem, based on the beloved sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin; a heartbreaking new documentary explores Robin Williams’s tragic last days; John Boyega says Star Wars let him, and other actors of color, down; and more.
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