Watched it last night on Sky - genuinely didn’t have a clue what was going on.
No need to thank me.
In an opera house in foreign land the CIA are sent, with the help of some local assets, to find another CIA who has been compromised. This CIA guy has part of the deus ex machina that somehow destroys the planet, but it's best not to ask questions. The whole thing goes wrong when the local assets turn out to be bad guys and are looking for the deus ex machina, which is now missing because it's best not to ask questions.
Denzel Washington's son, who seems to have had a lobotomy since Blackkklansman, wakes up on a boat because his death pill wasn't real and now he works for a group called Tenet. He gets shown a hand signal and code word that gets used twice in the upcoming ten minutes and then never used again because it's best not to ask questions. He meets a sparkly vampire who surprises everyone who only knows him as the sparkly vampire from the sparkly vampire movies because it turns out that he's not actually, as we were led to believe since the sparkly vampire days, a massive whiny cnut. They find an arm's dealer who tells Lobotomy Washington to find some nuclear material and give it to the guy who is the boss of the folk who betrayed him in foreign land. They decide to get to him by using the very tall blonde woman who, based on every role I've ever seen her in and because Nolan has never understood what woman are, will now be called Denzel in Distress because it's a pun and I'm fecking amazing at puns. She also has nice pins which also autcorrects as puns on my phone but I'm not sure why I'm telling you that.
So they go to a place where the picture that is being used to blackmail
Denzel in Distress is and Denzel's son - feck it this will be too confusing I need another name for her tall blonde woman who always needs saving from a man. They don't get the photo even though that was why they went there and instead find a machine that you go in one side and come out of the other, even though it's made patently clear later on that the process to do this is different than what transcribes in the fight scene, but it's best not to ask questions.
They finally meet the bad guy, who turns out to be that actor that is in lots of stuff but you never remember because he has the appearance and acting ability of a shoe with a speech bubble beside that says "I'm very angry raaarrrr". They then mess up a driving lesson and end up giving the bad guy the final piece of his Deus ex machina and now he's going to destroy the world and the woman who needs to be saved all the time gets shot so they have to go backwards in time so she can be healed which will take about a week and then they need to bring her back to forward time so they decide to go back to the place where the picture is and use the machine again but this is when we discover that Lobotomy Man is fighting himself, which we already knew because Nolan as a writer has all the subtetly of a foil wrapper in a microwave, and then they fight and escape and then get back into the forward universe it's very badly filmed and difficult to keep track of its best not to ask questions.
Then they have to stop Evil Werthers Originals Man From destroying the world using the same pincer movement he used against them, where half his team to through an event backwards and relay intel to the ones going forwards, and so they land in his hometown where they fight......nothing as far as I saw. But they fire their guns and blow up a building twice for no reason other than because it looked cool as feck. Then sparkly vampire sacrifices himself so Washington can save the world and they all leave happily ever after. Oh, and the woman who always needs saving gets her redemption arc in the only way Nolan thinks woman can which is by fecking up the entire plan and almost destroying the world because she gets emotional and kills her husband.
Then Neil says "I'm going to go back in time and get shot in the head now, bye bye" and Washington doesn't say anything that a human would remotely respond with as their parting words because Nolan was raised in a test tube and his only interaction with humans is his brother who is equally weird.
The film finishes off with some thing about how the events in the movie happened without anyone knowing about it which is exactly how I wish this film had been in general. Then you realise that Neil must have somehow saved Washington at the opera House as well which means he must have gone back and forth in those entropy machines for ages and I keep asking why they didn't just end the film with a set piece in the opera House to go full circle but it's best not to ask questions fecking hell this film was shite.
