REVIEW: ‘Tenet’ will infiltrate your time, if you let it
John David Washington stars in Tenet, written and directed by Christopher Nolan.
You know that feeling you get when you watch a documentary about space? The crushing sense of being an insignificant speck, in a universe bigger than anyone’s comprehension? It’s at once terrifyingly lonely and delightfully freeing; a double-edged realization that nothing really matters.
As a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan is hooked on capturing this feeling again and again. Five of his movies - Memento, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and now Tenet - have explored our unknowable relationship with time, how it stretches, overlaps, and distorts. It can be an uncomfortable ride for some people. Nolan’s stories often reject warm, interpersonal moments for cold, analytical processes. Very often, complex concepts are either over-explained in dialogue or left just outside our grasp, and as stunning as Nolan’s visuals always are, they don’t always help us feel any more at ease.
If you prefer tidy, charming tales, you should probably know by now to look elsewhere. These mechanical sci-fi journeys are the movies that Nolan likes to make, and even Nolan’s routinely strong casts don’t elevate the material per se - the actors are likely (and understandably) as much in the dark as we are.
With Tenet, Nolan presents his most brain-liquefying examination of time yet, “inversion”. In his earlier movies, Nolan’s playing around with time was wild but still largely comprehensible on first viewing. In the nested dream worlds of Inception, it’s easy to grasp how time slows down the deeper in the dream you travel. But in Tenet, the physics are so surreal we might as well be sipping coffee in the Black Lodge on Twin Peaks. Characters become inverted in time, moving backwards through events and using that power to influence the future.
Robert Pattinson as Neil.
In this world, the idea of a protagonist is more fraught than you would expect, something the script examines in its closing scenes. After all, to what extent is any character we meet aware of how their actions are being influenced by an inverted person they can’t perceive? But Tenet does have a main character, called - ahem - The Protagonist (John David Washington). He’s a spy/special operator, who is assigned to investigate the appearance of inverted weapons and artifacts, coming from a mysterious source. Bullets that fly in reverse, into the gun that fires them, suggest the existence of similarly frightening weapons of mass destruction, and The Protagonist is tasked with tracking down and stopping the threat before humanity is destroyed.
Along the way, The Protagonist meets others caught up in the inverted world. He recruits another agent named Neil (Robert Pattinson) to help him, and crosses paths with Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), the oppressed wife of a violent Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) who may be supplying the inverted materials. With these pieces in place, Tenet follows the structure of a classic espionage or heist movie, except with a metaphysical framing that turns an already twisty genre into a nearly intractable puzzle.
It’s almost unfair to review Tenet after just one screening, as the shifting sands of the premise scream for repeated viewings. The general thrust of the plot is never in doubt - you know the heroes have to stop the bad guy from abusing the inversion technology and blowing everything up - but it’s the finer details of inversion that make your grey matter hurt. In numerous action scenes, like an inverted visit to an earlier operation at an airport, the rules of Nolan’s universe seem to change too conveniently. Similarly, in a big climactic battle scene, characters we’d expect to be moving backwards are not. Most comically, the existence of inverted characters and vehicles (even ones as large as container ships) doesn’t seem to prompt reactions from background characters.
Elizabeth Debicki as Kat and Kenneth Branagh as Andrei.
It suggests that either the rest of the movie world is oblivious to the events around them (à la John Wick) or Nolan just doesn’t care to depict their shock. There’s an unfortunate magical, hand-waving quality to it, like we’re supposed to be wowed by the inverted visuals without thinking through what the implications would be for the people beyond the frame.
Now, maybe the logical answers to these questions are present in the movie somewhere, and it’s up to you to decode them via subsequent screenings. Are you the sort of viewer willing to give a movie that much time? Or do you believe that a movie should “work” the first time through? I happen to be in the former camp, but I completely understand why someone would find only frustration and needless obfuscation in Tenet.
There may be a lot of fancy flourishes and exquisitely planned sequences in Tenet, but the most compelling idea has nothing to do with buildings putting themselves back together after an explosion. It’s the premise suggested by Washington’s character’s name: understanding whether he’s the protagonist of his own story, and who’s writing that story for him. We get just a taste of what this means for his relationships, and once again, in true Nolan form, the story swivels away before going very far down that road. It’s a sci-fi dynamic that’s been more fully explored on shows like Doctor Who, whereas Nolan is more interested in its effect on action set pieces instead of drama.
Nevertheless, my inner Nolan fanboy comes out on top. As impenetrable and detached as his films may be, there’s simply very few filmmakers exploring heady concepts at this scale. I don’t venture into Nolan’s work for the warm and fuzzies, and there’s something ineffably fun about trying to poke and prod at his films and try to make sense of them. If the dire warnings about the future of big-screen cinema are to be believed, we may not get many more movies like Tenet, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Tenet gets three and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
If Robert Pattinson doesn’t win back mainstream audiences with his role in Tenet, he never will.
Can someone who knows accents evaluate Kenneth Branagh’s Russian one? It’s the second time I’ve seen him play a Russian and I’m in the dark on whether it works or not.
Regardless of how you feel about the movie as a whole, the opening sequence is 100% genius.