What the hell happened here?
It hasn’t happened it.
It’s odd in a way that it took Christopher Nolan so long to get here. As a writer and a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan is obsessed with time; I’ll give you a second to recover from that brilliant insight. But while he’s put his audience through the paces when it comes to our experience of time, for the most part, his characters haven’t experienced the same kind of slipperiness in that area. You’d think it wouldn’t have been twenty years into his career before Christopher Nolan made a movie that fits comfortably under the umbrella of the “time travel” genre. Of course, Nolan claims that the basic idea for this story has been around in various forms since very early in his career; he said the same thing about Inception when it came out, supposedly having pitched Inception as his follow up to Memento, albeit as a horror movie, not a heist movie. I find this vaguely reminiscent of the fabled “Napkin from the First Pixar Meeting.” There for a while, every movie that came out was rumored to have come from that very first meeting and eventually you’re kind of like, “Okay, so how big was this napkin because this is like the sixteenth movie you’ve claimed was outlined on that one napkin?” Is Christopher Nolan’s Memento-Insomnia period littered with scripts and outlines of ridiculously high-concept sci-fi films? One can only ponder . . . and tremble.
But back to Tenet, I know the posters would have you believe this isn’t a “time travel” movie (it’s “inversion!”), but it is. It’s central method of time travel, the inversion at the center of the film, is, in fact, borrowed from Primer, a low-budget indie from 2004, which is, it should be said, maybe the best time-travel movie of all time. Primer is a movie that fully commits to its opacity and what I think it nails exactly is the notion that, should humanity ever actually conquer the flow of linear time, it will be absolutely brain-breaking. We’ll have no real way of even thinking about a world where we can travel into the past or the future. Primer ultimately becomes a head-spinning exercise; there’s a montage near the end where you just kind of let it wash over you and I think it’s purposely ambiguous and confusing. Tenet is, I think, going for the same kind of confusion and sense of dislocation, but it achieves its ends less artfully, I think. There is, in my opinion, just missing information in Tenet; I don’t think you can just read the script to Tenet and understand it. Partly, this is to cover up holes, I think, but every time-travel movie has them. But it is also to that central point of creating a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the viewer. Would Tenet have been a hit if the pandemic hadn’t happened? I doubt it. It’s not a movie where you can’t wait to see it again because you want to understand more about it or see all the clues you missed; it’s a movie that you kind of don’t care to see again because you feel like a rewatch wouldn’t actually clear anything up.
Though, crucially, I kind of don’t care. In some ways, I think this is a good thing. I do prefer this movie’s withholding of information to Inception’s exposition logorrhea and the fact that, when the movie ends, I don’t feel in anyway that I need to understand the temporal pincer movement at the movie’s climax is a testament to Nolan’s ability to entertain and wow without that kind of understanding. On the other hand, maybe it means that there’s a level of apathy there; I still haven’t sought out any of the, probably, hundreds of YouTube videos that promise “TENET’S ENDING EXPLAINED!!” and I doubt I ever will. Isn’t there something inherently wrong with a movie if I care that little about the climax? I don’t know how to think about Tenet really. Which, again, is probably the point. But what’s the point to that being the point?
Still, where Tenet does succeed is in some of the ways Nolan’s movies often excel: eye-popping, jaw-dropping visuals; a compellingly entertaining vibe; and good performances. I mean, Tenet is, underneath the gimmick, an action movie and some of the action sequences here are genuinely breathtaking. The scene where John David Washington’s Protagonist confronts an inverted attacker is mind-blowingly great and when we see that scene again later from a different perspective, it’s just as good the second time, if somewhat less surprising since we’ve seen the backwards effects before. Likewise a highway chase/heist sequence is thrilling and surprisingly economical. It’s simple in a lot of ways, but the moment you first see the car racing backwards toward our protagonists is an “oh ****” moment of the highest order. That’s also about the last sequence in the movie I feel like I totally understood; once the Protagonist goes through the carousel and becomes inverted himself, I have to say that I got pretty lost in terms of the plot and by the time I got to that final temporal pincer movement, I didn’t really understand anything that was happening and then why was there a three way standoff at the end and why did that standoff resolve as it did? I still don’t understand that.
And yet I did care about the characters, even though they’ve written very minimally. I think a lot of that has to do with the performances. Washington is a compellingly cool and charismatic lead and I felt pretty compelled by his journey in the film from a guy who understands nothing to the guy in charge. Robert Pattinson is entertaining, though also kind of wasted. Elizabeth Debicki is really excellent in my opinion and I thought her character’s journey was really the heart of the movie. And while I don’t know that I would argue that Kenneth Branagh’s Bond-villain turn as Sator is “good acting” on a technical level, it’s wildly entertaining and he’s repulsive to the degree that, as an audience member, I really wanted to see him get his comeuppance.
And, as with Dunkirk, I found the movie very thematically moving. The central notion of the film is really powerful to me, this idea of the disaster or the atrocity stopped before they happen. The sniper that doesn’t get the shot off; the bomb that doesn’t trigger; I found those ideas really compelling and maybe part of that was because of this movie’s context; if Tenet was real, maybe 2020 is just another year, a year with a virus that doesn’t spread, because someone out there stopped it. It’s a compelling notion of heroism and when the Protagonist is in that car at the end, he’s a hero that we’ll never know existed specifically because of his heroism. You get to just shrug off that bad feeling as just a fluke because he was there and the bad thing never happened. That’s beautiful in a way and I think it speaks to a desire for an ordered universe; that’s a desire I think we all have at the best of times, so in unprecedented times, it’s a desire that feels like an ache and Tenet’s ultimate optimism is to believe in heroism, even in a world that feels like all you’re doing is going through the motions at the mercy of fate. Tenet isn’t top tier Nolan; it’s not even second tier Nolan in my opinion. But it’s a broad, sprawling epic that delivers thought-provoking ideas, jaw-dropping set-pieces and a plot head-spinning enough that you simply can’t think about anything else while you’re watching it. It’s grand entertainment in a grand style and, while that may not make it great, it’s still really something. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – grand epic boasts amazing set-pieces and compelling themes; the plot is purposely ambiguous and not entirely satisfying, but it’s entertainment on a massive scale. 3 ½ stars.