This review of Tenet is coming from a place of privilege. Thanks to Christopher Nolan, his fans, and the media, this movie has been so touted as the saviour of cinema in the time of plague that it is both exhausting and impossible to leave that weight it carries unaddressed. I went to see Tenet, because I am lucky. I live in Canada and in an area that has done relatively well at keeping down the rate of COVID-19. But just because I did this does not mean people in more tenuous situations or in hubs of high infection should risk their health for a movie, any movie. I did not see this movie for Christopher Nolan, but for an exhibition model I love; and I understand and support any critic who has refused to see it and put their lives in danger in the process, just for a well-intentioned but misguided bit of egotism and studio greed.
And having watched Tenet, which has crafted this narrative that there's more riding on it than any other Nolan movie to date, I can assuredly say this movie is not worth all the conversation and drama surrounding it.
Tenet is not a bad film, but nor is it some great masterpiece of theatrical cinema that changes the movie landscape. In fact its' scope and visual calibre isn't even on par with Interstellar, one of Nolans' lesser efforts, or his last film Dunkirk. It is a perfectly decent, middle-of-the-road sci-fi espionage movie from the auteur director that did not need to be a 2020 release. And now that the hype is put to rest (as much as that is possible under the circumstances), we can examine it as a movie.
Simply put, it is standard Nolan. After the refreshing reprieve of Dunkirk, it is him returning to that well of genre film by way of visually compelling high concept that has driven his entire career. The idea in question is "inversion", the state of isolated objects or people having a reversed entropy, and thus moving backwards through time. The technology that allows for this has been developed in the future, the result of a cataclysmic war, the debris of which, particularly bullets, is being sold on the black market. The plot concerns a nameless CIA operative known only as "the Protagonist" (John David Washington) trying to prevent its' inception at the hands of a Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh).
The gears of the plot require a lot of heavy exposition, and the details are highly intricate and convoluted even then. A lot of the movie depends on how quickly you can wrap your head around these concepts of temporal physics, and the urgent spy film pacing certainly doesn't make them any clearer to grasp. Plot is so much more important than story or character here, perhaps more than any other Nolan film, and it doesn't make for a movie easy to connect with. The rules of inversion, the ultimate goal, and the actions taken make more sense as the movie goes along, but the opening scenes are near indecipherable for this. I'm still not entirely sure what the terrorist attack on an opera house in Kyiv did for the movie. It certainly didn't set up the Protagonist very well.
The mere fact that Nolans' lead character is called "the Protagonist" is pretty goofy to me, his use of the term "antagonist" to refer to his opponent even more so. It stinks of a kind of pretentiousness that doesn't match the air, tone, or style of this particular movie. And it just draws attention to how much of a blank slate the character can often be. Sure, as a CIA agent, it works that we don't know much about his history and identity, that Nolan would keep that side of him ambiguous; but he should have some kind of relatable personality and character. Washingtons' best moments in the film are when he is allowed to cut loose a tad and express that, be charismatic and genuinely interesting. On occasion, he displays a nice chemistry with his partner, played by a sterling Robert Pattinson, or Elizabeth Debicki’s vengeful Kat.
Pattinson and a powerfully raw Debicki are the stand-outs of the cast no question, though the film does feature small noteworthy turns from Hamish Patel and Clémence Poésy as well (and the standard Nolan movie Michael Caine appearance). For the second time though, Debicki is cast as a strong-willed woman desperate to escape an abusive marriage to a powerful arms dealer, and it’s a type she deserves to move away from. Her relationship with Branagh’s detestable Andrei Sator is an important side of the movie (and one relatively free of complex language), but handled the way it is, she’s too often an object for him to terrorize and escalate stakes. As for Branagh, he’s certainly menacing enough, and his bad Russian accent is at least more palatable than in his own Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. But he is essentially a Bond villain, which Branagh seems to recognize in aspects of his over-the-top performance, but Nolan doesn’t quite seem to -resulting in a character who never fully comes together to either of their intents.
However as expected, it’s the spectacle where Tenet really does shine. Visually, Tenet is marvellous. Even outside of its’ experimental physics, Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is excellent, really capturing the sense of place and mood (the Nysted Wind Farm off of Denmark I predict will become permanently associated with this movie). And Nolan has only gotten better with staging action scenes, the inversion concept lending itself to some terrific ones. Particularly there’s a great art gallery heist featuring hand-to-hand fights between characters moving through time in opposing directions that is exceptionally shot and choreographed, and plays nicely with the wonky physics; and then there’s an intense car chase that uses the reversals to quite creative effect. Through all this, the special effects and visual trickery is stunning, the inverted aspects really feeling like remnants of another world here on Earth. Honestly though, the climax is probably the weakest of the grand action sequences, as mesmerizing as it can be. There’s not much sense of temporal geography there, and with a much larger assortment of characters, some inverted some not, it’s easy to get lost in the thick of it all.
And for as much technical mastery as there is on screen, there are also some bizarre professional oversights -most notably in the editing during conversational scenes, where the cuts are inconsistent and awkwardly paced (usually in the middle of a line of dialogue) to the point it looks like obvious post-production dubbing is taking place. Maybe this was the case, to make some of the exposition more digestible. Additionally, the sound mixing is bad in places, musical cues or sound effects drowning out action beats or characters. Which is a shame because it distracts from Ludwig Göranssons’ quite exemplary score.
There are a couple ideas by the end of the movie that suggest Nolan isn’t quite finished with them, and I don’t know if he means to sequelize Tenet or not. As it stands though, the movie isn’t quite compelling enough to earn it -which of course makes no difference if it does well enough financially. And I hope it doesn’t. Because now is not the time for people to be going to the movies in droves. With all the build up to Tenet and its’ “courageous” release during this pandemic, one might look at Nolans’ determination and figure ‘this must be the best movie of the year’ for its’ release date to be this stubbornly fought over. It is not. Nor is it one of the worst of the year, it’s right in the middle. Under normal circumstances, it is a film worth seeing in theatres. But these are not normal circumstances. I’m not reviewing the film to boast, but to confirm that it is worth waiting on. Do not go see it if you are immunocompromised or live somewhere with a high infection rate (or you know, just the United States in general). You are not missing much!
The universe may in fact be exacting some sort of retribution on Nolan for forcing Tenet into theatres at this time. I came home from the movie ready to speculate on it and dive into this review, but the moment I opened up Twitter to share a quick reaction, I was faced with the horrible news of Chadwick Bosemans' untimely death -and all thoughts of Tenet were quickly dashed from my mind in light of the far more pressing tragedy. A reminder that it is only a movie after all, far from the most important of things right now. Stay safe.
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