Tenet

MOVIE #1,153 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 09.18.23 Nolan is one of those directors who — while I don’t really love or even like some of his work — probably deserves a full director focus run-through at some point. But I’ve been critiquing his work piecemeal and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this already at some point along the lines. This is the third feature of his that I’ve reviewed and it’s fitting that these three (Inception, Interstellar and this) are all clearly of a certain ilk that seems very different than his other body of work. And I would call this category, in the plainest of terms, “Movies That Don’t Make a Lick a Sense!” I’m maybe ¼ kidding? If you put the early work, Following and Memento, aside, it definitely seems like Nolan has a few different gears and I give him credit for experimenting with genre and form even if the whole of his output has a visual style that remains mostly consistent.

There’s the excursion into the superhero territory with his Batman trilogy (which I like just fine) and his historical work and adaptations (Oppenheimer and Dunkirk, obviously, but The Prestige, based on a novel, also functions in this mode as a period piece in my opinion). Insomnia — the only film he didn’t write or co-write the screenplay — is really the only outlier. I still haven’t seen either Oppenheimer and Dunkirk, which is on me! I just haven’t gotten around to it. I guess this is because I like torturing myself.

Of the three visually spectacular and totally head-scratching efforts, I think Tenet is clearly the best, even if it MIGHT be the hardest to fully grasp (Inception isn’t so much confusing as it is plain nonsensical). At one point, in the central moment of explaining what the hell is going on, Robert Pattinson literally asks, “does your head hurt yet?”


They seem to be acknowledging in this sequence that it is almost too confusing (if not entirely dense beyond penetration) to fully understand. He’s sort of winking at the audience, saying “trust me” I feel. But I didn’t really care that it “doesn’t make sense” or that “I’m too stupid to understand.” Tenet is a palindrome (duh) and this, in the simplest of terms, is a kind of visual palindrome (in a way, Memento also functions in a similar fashion). I think we can appreciate it on some base level outside of any forced expo about algorithms and advanced physics. But most importantly, this is the apex of Nolan’s big action cinema and the wonderfully paced sequences of planes exploding, bullets flying backwards, insane car chases and everything else in between are far too awesome to hate regardless of any plot they may or may not be in service of.

My only other complaint here is that, on top of its convoluted nature (which, again, whether or not 2+2=4 in the end, I don’t think you can argue that it ISN'T convoluted) Nolan seems to have what I’ll call a “Rian Johnson script problem.” Especially in the dialogue there’s this inflated sense of self/character over realism. He’s always pushing some quip instead of “normal people talking” and this could and maybe should work within the realm of sci-fi, but it’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. It’s distracting and annoying. This is probably another reason why it's so hard to keep pace with the broad revelations of each expo dump, let alone fully grasp the totality of the information.

But I like Pattinson and John David Washington a lot, and Kenneth Branagh is fine as the villain. Like Interstellar, it’s a far more focused affair in terms of characters than the sprawling Inception, which had way too many cooks in the kitchen (among its MANY other problems). The best thing I can say about Tenet is that I definitely want to and will watch it again at some point. Hey, maybe even one day I’ll understand it and I can go about life as one of those guys who understands Tenet, looking down, smugly, upon the monkey-brained plebs who don’t have the capacity. One can only dream. Is the top still spinning???

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Tenet is a 2020 science fiction action thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife Emma Thomas. A co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, it stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The film follows a former CIA agent who is recruited into a secretive organization called "Tenet" who can reverse the flow of time and is trying to prevent an attack from the future that threatens to annihilate the present world. It was released on August 26, 2020.