NotEvenBad

It’s that dream that made OEMs what they are today: Naturally aspirated engines, mechanical purity, raw engineering, and emotion BEFORE oil shocks, climate anxiety, digital dashboards, and touch-sensitive everything changed the game. And as if that weren’t enough, it also captures probably the last gasp of great Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking: ambitious, sincere, star-driven cinema made for the biggest screen possible.

Put this to a double-blind test, and 99% of people would call it a generic Netflix movie, not a Spielberg film.

We love Harry Potter because his weakness and underwhelming presence leave room for the world around him to feel vast and magical. Dune is what happens when you take that same kind of lead and strip away the wonderful world that’s supposed to carry him.

The physics don't work, the sound is off, and yet, Nolan forces it be on point nonetheless. Tenet also manages to capture that fringe intensity of late-2010s Eastern European politics better than almost any film: deferred causality, professionalised dread and a history unwinding itself through the present with unstoppable force. All in reverse.

Like a lot of Marxist arthouse cinema, this film is designed to frustrate. It tells a nihilistic, world-hating story in an intentionally broken format. However, not everyone is looking for order, meaning, or beauty. Some people’s lives are so bad that uplift is not comforting. It is insulting.There should be movies for that state of mind too, movies that do not encourage you, but serve no purpose other than to reflect your bleak outlook back at you. If you want the rational to collapse and the beautiful to become haunted, this delivers.