October 26, 2020
A CIA agent, who later called himself the Protagonist (John David Washington), was part of a team on a mission to recover an important gadget. He was told that he was working in an underground organization called Tenet, which aimed to avert World War III by studying futuristic technology. Together with another agent Neil (Robert Pattinson), he encountered arms dealer Priya (Dimple Kapadia) and art dealer Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), whose husband was the ruthless Russian Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who can somehow operate his destructive plans from the future.
A Christopher Nolan film is always a challenge to get through the first time around. Like it was for "Memento" (2000), "The Prestige" (2006), "Inception" (2010) and "Interstellar" (2014), you know you are watching a film of complexity and substance, even if you do not get it right away. Once you think you are following the plot, there comes another layer to throw you off completely. It was considerably more difficult for this one because for several key scenes, the characters voices are muffled by their gas masks or drowned by background music or sound effects.
This was very technically-polished film in terms of its cinematography and film editing. There was a visually-astounding scenes of an airplane crashing through an airport, but this big scene was actually just a major diversion for a more intimate operation elsewhere in the vicinity. Then there were those mind-boggling overlapping scenes of characters and objects going forwards and backwards in time within the same time frame, be it hand-to-hand fight scene in a cramped corridor, or a car chase on a busy highway. I really need to watch this film one more time, but the next time has to be with subtitles. 6/10.
Bill Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) had to write an awesome song to unite the world by a certain specified time as it had been foretold. Since they were not coming up with anything, they use their time-travelling phone booth to go into the future in order to steal this song from themselves, but they discover that they had become even bigger losers by then, even losing their wives to divorce.
Meanwhile, Bill's daughter Thea (Samara Weaving) and Ted's daughter Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) in an effort to help their fathers, also took their own time machine back into the past to recruit the greatest musicians in history from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix to help Bill and Ted to compose the song that would save the world. However, the Great Leader sent a robot Dennis (Anthony Carrigan) to kill the two guys, in an effort to restore world balance.
We first met Bill and Ted in their "Excellent Adventure" (1989), which was quickly followed by their "Bogus Journey" (1991). 29 years passed before we get this third episode of their series, Winter and especially Reeves had matured significantly. It was not easy to see Reeves playing the slacker Ted after all the iconic film roles he had played since then, from Neo to John Wick. This new film was as shallow and silly as the other two films, reviving the collection of historical figures from the first film. There was good-natured fun and likable characters to root for all around. 7/10.
Laura (Rashida Jones) and Dean (Marlon Wayans) live in New York with their two young daughters Maya (Liyanna Muscat) and Theo (Alexandra and Anna Reime). As Dean spent more and more time at work with his attractive co-worker Fiona (Jessica Henwick), Laura got more and more insecure about their marriage. When she told her father Felix (Bill Murray) about her worries, he flew in to help her get to the bottom of her suspicions.
Like in most of his previous movies, Bill Murray was just being his wry self as Felix. When Felix was being flirtatious with those young women, you would think Murray was just being his charming self. Rashida Jones' character came across as very dull, as maybe how the Laura character was really supposed to be. It was not easy to sympathize with Laura since she was not doing herself any favors by being so boring.
There was not much really going on in this film, even the comedy is barely there at best. The conversations felt like they were all ad-libbed and so trivial. The words all sounded so carefree or careless, there were no memorable quotes. For me, the only thing that was felt interesting was that part when father and daughter impetuously decided to fly all the way to a Mexican resort to tail Dean who was there on a business trip. That was as exciting as this reunion of Bill Murray with writer-director Sofia Coppola got. 5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment