Brian’s review published on Letterboxd:
2020 just keeps on coming man.
Leaving the theatre, I kept on trying to convince myself I liked it, but I just couldn’t do it.
This movie is almost entirely exposition, and we can’t even hear it over literally any other sound in the movie.
When you have a movie with a lot of moving pieces and a lot of essential dialogue coming from characters with accents, a really important thing is that we can HEAR what they are saying. Unfortunately, Nolan doesn’t really understand that and gives us another movie with a shitty sound mix.
But even if I didn’t have to strain and lean towards the screen (in IMAX, by the way) to hear the dialogue properly, it doesn’t matter, as the dialogue itself is dry and uninteresting information dumps to the audience, which take up at least 2/3 of the running time.
I also was very unimpressed by the editing work, as scenes seemed as if they were stitched together one after another without any cinematic flow.
The action scenes (what few there were) were fantastic and all actors involved did a good job, standout being Robert Pattinson.
This feels like a half-baked idea that Nolan had, and got funded before actually writing anything other than a treatment because there is very little substance here. The idea itself at its core is very intriguing but underdeveloped.
What an incoherent mess. If Nolan hadn’t directed this, it would be under a lot more criticism.