Instant InSneider: TENET (Very Minor Spoilers)

Christopher Nolan's Tenet is a frustrating experience, in that there's no denying its ambition and artistry -- or its needlessly confusing and convoluted story. It's like the love child between Inception and Memento, without the emotion of either film. Instead, Tenet just sweeps you along like a fast-moving current, with no time to grab onto a branch and catch your breath. Of course, in the inverted world of this film, time is decidedly not like a river.

Now, all of that might sound exciting to you, and it is exciting, at first. But after two hours of watching a few characters travel backwards and forwards in time, when Nolan magnifies the trick on a grand scale in the last 30 minutes, the idea no longer feels fresh. And without that exciting spark of originality, the way-too-busy last act falters, because the movie has been so focused on playing games and being an unsolvable puzzle that there's no real story to fall back on. Even the characters have basically been instructed to be bland, unknowable ciphers -- John David Washington's name is The Protagonist, really? -- so rather than bring you in, they keep you at a distance. Kenneth Branagh may have been chewing scenery, but his was the only performance I really liked, because he plays the villain like he's in a Mission: Impossible movie. I loved the score, and the scope, but the sound mix is terrible and no explanation from Nolan or his sound team will suffice.

Tenet features some really cool ideas, but they never quite coalesce, and for Nolan's next trick, I'd like to see him move away from the high-concept movies he's known for, or at least apply that big brain of his to a genre that isn't "action movie." Imagine Nolan reinventing the biopic, and turning that formula on its head! Or a horror movie! He keeps trying to top himself, and that's a fool's errand. There's a way to apply his skills to a smaller story that has more personal stakes than "the whole world could end!" And I know Tenet is about something worse than that. Instead of the world ending, it's possible the world may not have ever existed, which is an interesting idea, but one the film fails to properly explore. In the end, it's a spectacle I'm glad I caught on the big screen, but one I'm not terribly eager to watch again... even though I'll have to if I have any hope of understanding its labyrinth logic and many mysteries.