Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a rewatch of Christopher Nolan’s movies and posting my reviews in the What Was the Last Movie You Saw and so consider this kind of a capper on that project as I ended up checking out the soundtrack to Nolan’s most recent movie, Tenet. I liked this score a lot in the context of the movie and it plays equally well as an album, though the Deluxe Edition adds to extra tracks, bringing the total running time up to over ninety minutes, which is a bit long, especially since the music is pretty frenetic and pretty exhausting. There are a couple of tracks I’d cut, not because they’re bad, but just because they’re not exactly great and the album is, as I say, too long. But at its best, this album is just fantastic. It starts strong with the amazing album opener Rainy Night in Tallinn and segues right into the absolutely brilliant Windmills. Meeting Neil and Priya are nice as slower tracks, about the only chances you’ll get to catch your breath. Sator is a great, menacing track that sounds like it’s out of a horror movie and is a nice change of pace. Trucks in Place, 747 & Retrieving the Case are all great action pieces and The Protagonist is a nice emotional way to kind of bring things to a close after the absolutely epic Posterity, the album’s longest track at nearly thirteen minutes. And then the album ends with Travis Scott’s The Plan, the credits song from the movie, and it’s a perfect, dark way to end the album. Which is another reason I don’t like the Deluxe Edition because, rather than putting the bonus tracks into the album where they fall chronologically in the movie, they tack them on the end, which means The Plan doesn’t end the Deluxe Edition. I’ve liked a lot of Goransson’s stuff prior to this and this is exceptional work. It’s his first collaboration with Nolan and it only happened because Hans Zimmer was committed to score Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and apparently scoring a film version of Dune has been one of Zimmer’s dream projects since the eighties, so even frequent collaborator Nolan couldn’t get him to jump ship on that. However it happened, it produced a great score and that great score has produced a really good soundtrack, with the length being the only thing that I’d quibble with. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – a fantastic high-energy unique score gets a great soundtrack release, though the Deluxe Edition makes the already lengthy album overlong. 3 ½ stars.