Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debick, Kenneth Branagh& Dimple Kapadia

Director: Christopher Nolan

Rating: ***1/2

Christopher Nolan's films are often grounded in existential and epistemological themes, exploring the concepts of time, memory, and identity. Whether it is Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises, Memento and his other exceptional films, where we have seen his film's characters inspired by some social challenge, his stories with unconventional narrative structures, materialistic perspectives along with his vision of evocative use of music and sound. Christopher Nolan has acquired a distinctive place for himself and earned a special place in the film entertainment industry.

But watching Christopher Nolan's film without getting aware of physics rules wouldn't do justice with your time as after watching Tenet at one point in time your head will start getting hurt if you don't know anything about Entropy, classical thermodynamics, statistical physics. So before you read our review, let's give you some knowledge about the concept of Entropy. In Tenet, the ability to reverse entropy is what causes time inversion. When you are inverted, you move backward in time. From your perception, you are moving as normal, while the rest of the world is moving in reverse.

Well, moving forward to the storyline, 'Tenet' film starts with an unnamed protagonist (John David Washington) who worked for the CIA, is on a mission to seize a unique artifact but unfortunately gets captured by some hireling. They ask him about his mission but rather than answering them he chooses to consume a cyanide pill instead. But when he wakes up, he finds himself in the middle of the sea, employed by a secret organization named Tenet. An official tells him that his friends are dead and the artifact is lost and asks him to go ahead with a confidential mission. With this, he meets a scientist who shows him some bullets with inverted entropy which allows them to move backward in time and she also awares him that bullets are made in the future and also tells about a weapon which has the ability to change the past. Afterward, he decides to meet Sanjay Singh the bullet cartridges and leaves for Mumbai where he gets the company of Neil, another secret agent of Tenet. But after reaching Sanjay's mansion, they get to know that the real person behind the cartridges is Priya (Dimple Kapadia). Priya tells him about bullets and also informs him that they only manufactured the weapons but Russian oligarch Andrei Sator purchased and time-inverted them.

To get near Andrei Sator, he meets Sator's estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debick) who now lives far from Sator along with her son. Being an art appraiser, Kat mistakenly sold forged Goya drawing to Sator. She also informed him Sator knew about the forged drawing and blackmailed her so she wouldn't leave him or separate his son from him. Unnamed CIA agent decides to steal the drawing from Sator's Oslo airport where Sator kept the drawing. But reaching there, they find a machine, turnstile (a machine that can invert the entropy of objects and people), and fights with two men who came out from the machine.

After that, the Unnamed CIA agent wants to meet Sator and he asks Kat to introduce him to Sator as her boyfriend. But while in a boating session, Kat drowns Sator and the CIA agent saves him from drowning as he wants to know the secret behind the inverted bullets. Will CIA agent with no name will know the reason behind strange bullets, turnstile and what are those secrets which are disclosed by Andrei Sator. Well, you need to watch this brilliant film to get the answers.

Through Tenet, yet again Christopher Nolan has offered a mind-boggling film for the audience. Nolan took more than five years to write the screenplay after a two-decade-long discussion on the film's central idea. In 2014, the director started working on film production. Nolan has beautifully captured the beauty of seven countries, Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Talking about the Tenet VFX effects, each shot has been realistic and Nolan himself admitted that the visual side of the film is huge in scale, but the film's VFX shot count is probably lower than most romantic comedies. Whether it is an airplane blast or car chasing scene or the reverse action sequence, each shot has been perfectly by Nolan and Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema.

More about the performance, John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki have performed brilliantly in the film and leaves a considerable impression on the audience. Dimple Kapadia's role as Priya was an important strength of Tenet and whose character led the story. Nolan did justice with her character and the antagonist or we can say the star of Tenet is Kenneth Branagh who looks badass in the film. Apart from them, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clemence Poesy has also fitted perfectly in their role and goes along with the brilliant storyline.

! All-embracing, Christopher Nolan always brings amazing cinema for his fans and Tenet is beyond the time. In India at the time of COVID-19 pandemic where cinema halls were opened with 50% occupancy, they needed such films which can bring the audience to cinema halls. With Tenet, the cinema owners are pleased with the film performance which is earning the hearts of Indians. All in all, Tenet is a perfect film to watch on weekends but with top-notch precaution measures. So watch this mad cinema by great Christopher Nolan and watch out Tenet for Dimple Kapadia. The movie may move backward in time but you will surely move forward with this ingenious piece of cinema.