Tenet (2020)
dir. Christopher Nolan
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2020 Warner Bros. Pictures
Christopher Nolan has made an absolutely thrilling James Bond-style spy movie filled with breathtaking action set pieces. Too bad it’s in the middle of a mind-bending sci-fi plot that’s ludicrous and nearly incomprehensible. Tenet frustrates the mind as much as it dazzles the eye. It reportedly took Nolan five years to write the screenplay for Tenet, after puzzling over the movie’s main ideas for a decade. I don’t know if he spent too long on the project or not long enough, but either way, Tenet presents audacious ideas with unforgettable imagery, but the nuts-and-bolts of the plot make zero sense after any amount of scrutiny. The antagonist’s motivation is banal; his ultimate plan is laughably grandiose. And of course, as with most Christopher Nolan movies, the sole purpose of the main female character is to give the male characters their motivation.
The picture begins in Kiev, with a sweeping action sequence, as our hero – known throughout the movie and in the credits simply as “The Protagonist” – participates in an undercover CIA operation that goes wrong. He sees something strange; a bullet seemingly “unfires” when it comes out of a criminal gunman’s body and returns to the gun of a masked, unknown member of the undercover team. The Protagonist recovers the item that the team was sent in to get, but he is captured by Russian mercenaries. They threaten to torture The Protagonist unless he gives up intel on his undercover team. The Protagonist takes a cyanide pill, which doesn’t actually kill him, but makes him pass out until he can be rescued. The fake pill was a test, The Protagonist learns. He passed; he was willing to die for the mission, and that’s just the quality that a super-secretive organization called “Tenet” wants in its members.
Nolan’s characters spend the next 135 minutes spewing gobbledygook sci-fi exposition at us in an attempt to clarify how the movie’s admittedly novel take on time travel works. Someone in the future has figured out how to reverse the entropy of objects (and later, we learn, people) so that they can move backward in time. The Tenet group calls these items “inverted.” We see The Protagonist place his hand over an inverted bullet and the bullet jumps up into his hand, the reverse of him dropping it. The questions you might be forming about how the bullet came to be on the table if it’s moving from the future are addressed with vague references to effect preceding cause, and the phrase “whatever happens, happened” – Nolan was clearly a fan of Lost.
Really, I suspect that Nolan spent that decade-and-a-half or so on the idea for Tenet so he could have a reason to shoot action sequences in reverse. If that’s all you care about, then mission gloriously accomplished. Every set piece – one involving a jumbo jet crashing into a building, others showcasing meticulous hand-to-hand fight choreography – is thrillingly staged and executed. Nolan had to shoot each of them both forward and in reverse, since characters moving both forward and backward in time are participating in the mayhem.
Nolan revels in making larger-than-life cinema spectacles that demand to be seen on as big a screen as possible. With Tenet, he’s done just that. He’s also indulged in his pet obsessions like using the story to comment on how the language of cinema – particularly editing – can distort time, and the art of storytelling itself. Nolan’s orchestration of three different timeframes in his WWII film Dunkirk felt innovative. His use of dream logic and slow motion in Inception to comment on how movies manipulate time for dramatic effect was exhilarating. Tenet, however, feels like well-worn territory for Nolan by now.
The director doesn’t even bother to slyly avoid his characters using our hero’s name, only to have us realize, as we see it in the credits, that he never actually had a name. No, the character refers to himself repeatedly throughout the movie as The Protagonist, solidifying Nolan’s obsession with putting a meta-critique about storytelling right on the surface of his movies. At one point, our hero actually says the words, “I’m the protagonist of this story.” It’s too clever by half.
The other tired trope that Nolan leans on here is that women characters serve only as catalysts for men’s actions. The central character in Memento is driven by the memory of his dead wife. The same is true of the hero in Inception. The protagonist in Interstellar is driven by the love for his daughter, who isn’t really given much to do outside of being an inspiration.
In Tenet, the woman is named Kat, and she serves as The Protagonist’s emotional focus and the villain’s violent obsession. Kat is an art appraiser, and her estranged husband, Andrei Sator, is a Russian oligarch who holds a secret about her career – and the threat of taking their son away from her – to keep her from leaving him. We also learn he is somehow communicating with someone in the future, and he is intent on using the technology of the future to destroy the present. Laughably, Sator’s motivation both for holding his wife hostage and his desire to end the world comes down to “if I can’t have you, nobody can.”
During one admittedly breathtaking action sequence in the middle of the film, The Protagonist must try to save Kat’s life when she is shot by an inverted bullet. He takes her through a mysterious device called a “turnstile” that allows humans to walk through and come out in an inverted state. Through yet more indecipherable mumbo-jumbo exposition, the movie explains to us how her wound from an inverted object can be healed by putting her into an inverted state herself – don’t think about it too long, or you’ll get an ice cream headache.
What’s most frustrating about Tenet is that everything surrounding this nonsensical head-scratcher of a plot is first-rate Nolan. Hoyte van Hoytema, the supremely talented cinematographer who has worked with Nolan on Dunkirk and Interstellar, in addition to shooting Ad Astra, Spectre, and Her, gives Tenet a lush, gorgeous look. Hoytema and Nolan collaborated to create some truly awe-inspiring widescreen compositions. The action sequences – especially the fight scenes – are innovative and endlessly thrilling to watch, blending forward and backward motion to spectacular effect.
The ensemble cast are also a delight to watch. John David Washington is magnetic as The Protagonist. Sign me up for any movie that features Washington as the leading man. Robert Pattinson, in the wake of his revelatory performance in Good Time – continues to impress with his portrayal of Neil, The Protagonist’s handler who might know more than he lets on about the Tenet organization. Pattinson’s British accent is impeccable – at least to these American ears.
Elizabeth Debicki is also compelling as Kat, although she’s not given much to do besides wringing her hands about possibly losing her son and being a gun-shot victim. Kenneth Branagh is just this side of over-the-top as the menacing Andrei Sator. His Russian accent (again, to my Texas drawl-adapted ears) is impressive. And as this is a Christopher Nolan movie, Michael Caine makes his obligatory appearance. Here Caine shows up for one scene as Sir Crosby, an intelligence officer who sets The Protagonist on his way to unraveling the mystery.
Tenet is the biggest, most audacious project yet for Christopher Nolan – and that’s saying something. His (mostly laudable) ambition makes the movie a bit of a mess. I would be excited to see Nolan strip his next movie down to bare essentials. As much as I love his big ideas and his swing-for-the-fences approach – especially when it comes to emphasizing the larger-than-life magic of cinema on a big screen – I want him to challenge himself with a less-is-more strategy on the next one. Some reasonable constraints might make for an invigorating change of pace.
Why it got 3 stars:
- I’ve given a lot of thought (more than is reasonable, probably) to my star rating for Tenet. The thirteen hundred-odd words I’ve written above that star rating are much more important to me, and allow me to get into much more nuance, than a simple 1-5 rating ever could. Still, people put value in a quick glance at the rating; that’s why I include it. Anything three stars or above, I consider a recommend. So, Tenet just squeaks by as a movie I am recommending. I was on the fence for many days between the three stars I ended up giving it, and two-and-a-half stars. The reason I went with three is because, even though Tenet was too much of a mess story-wise, Christopher Nolan is still a hell of a filmmaker, and there was enough of his stamp on it for me to appreciate it in some ways. The action is incredible. Ditto Nolan’s passion for making thrilling, big-screen spectacle.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- What you’ve heard about the muddiness of the dialog in Tenet is true. There are scenes where I was struggling to understand what the characters were saying. The Guardian published a piece about this issue with Tenet specifically, and why it’s becoming a problem with many current releases. It’s available here.
- I loved Nolan’s (seeming) nod to The Matrix. When The Protagonist realizes the full scope of inversion, all he can say is, “Whoa.”
- This movie ramps up the stakes to impossible heights. One character describes what they are trying to stop as being something worse than nuclear holocaust and World War III. These are the biggest stakes you’ll see outside of a Marvel movie.
- The score, by Ludwig Göransson, is a little overbearing, but pretty great. I loved it.
- I read somewhere that Nolan is a right-winger, and there are several references in Tenet about how private property is sacrosanct. During the most exciting James Bond-esque heist sequence, The Protagonist must break into an airplane hangar that houses priceless objects owned by the ultra-wealthy. The motto of the company that secures these items is, “We have no priority above your property.”
- The recent television limited-series Devs, written and directed by Alex Garland, plays with the same mind-trip effect-preceding-cause premise. Devs does a much better job of laying out just enough for things to make sense, and leaving the rest shrouded in tantalizing mystery. I highly recommend Devs if you haven’t seen it.
- Speaking of confusing storytelling, please don’t think I wasn’t on board for Tenet just because I didn’t understand what was going on most of the time. As proof, please see my review for I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Looking at those two movies side-by-side is a case study in how making a movie that doesn’t make sense on the surface can ultimately be a success or a failure.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- As I said last week, I went to a drive-in theater to see Tenet, so I could remain socially distanced, and in an open-air environment. The last time I was at a drive-in was in 1985 or ‘86 when my parents took us all to see The Jewel of the Nile. I can say unequivocally that it was a neat experience (aside from my car battery dying, and having to get a jump from a very helpful theater employee), and I’m anxious to do it again. It was like a perfect mix of two of my favorite things: camping and watching movies.