Tenet

I’m not a huge Christopher Nolan fan. In fact I’m not really a fanatical devotee of any directors, even ones that I like, but then I’m not an Internet Movie Guy, so I’m not contractually obliged to be.

Nolan has made some very impressive and enjoyable films, but he also has a lot of bad habits that he’s attracted too much clout and prestige to be prevented from indulging in, and he’s responsible for the most overrated movie in recent film history. I’m not going to say which one I’m talking about, I’m just going to leave that statement hanging.

Actually I lied, it’s The Dark Knight.

For this reason, I wasn’t really looking forward to Tenet, like, at all. The trailers looked cool and it took on a weird cultural relevance back at the start of the pandemic since Nolan threw a big tantrum and insisted that it just had to be released in la cinéma, global crisis be damned. But overall, not really hyped about this one.

So when I say that it still didn’t come anywhere close to meeting those already-low expectations...yeah, this is a total dud.

Normally with Nolan movies I start out really excited about the neat premise and the slick directing, and then I gradually lose interest around the halfway point, but Tenet is travelling backwards in time and so I started out not liking it, before coming around on it pretty heavily. But then it went back into the big metal chamber that reverses entropy, and by the end I didn’t like it at all. That’s just what happens when you mess around with time travel.

(By the way, this is one of those movies that was cloaked in mystery pre-release to the extent that even the basic premise is supposed to be a spoiler, so here’s a spoiler warning in case you want to watch it yourself, which you shouldn’t).

Tenet stars a character who is only ever referred to as ‘the Protagonist’, so yes, this is another Nolan movie that’s about being a movie. Main Character Guy is a US special ops soldier of some kind who’s recruited into Tenet, a shadowy organization fighting an invasion from the future that’s going to result in World War III. Said invasion takes the form of weapons, objects and sometimes soldiers that have been “inverted” so that they travel backwards through time instead of forwards.

Sounds like a cool premise, right? Well actually, most of the movie is only tangentially about all of that. Large chunks of Tenet’s two and a half hour run time--to the point where I’d say it constitutes the actual primary storyline, with all the time travel shit serving as a very elaborate framing story--focus on Protagonist-kun getting involved in the relationship between an abusive Russian arms dealer and his wife, who he falls in love with and seeks to rescue.

This quasi love triangle is a major issue, for a few reasons. None of the people involved are interesting at all; Protagonist is a total blank slate for the entire movie, the husband is a snarling cartoon character (he’s obsessed with fitness and retaining his youth via constantly checking his heart rate monitor, never seen that before) and his wife slots completely into the “abused woman finding strength via being a Mother” stereotype. But more problematically, it just takes up way too much time, which throws off the pacing of the rest of the movie. Even at two and a half hours long, Tenet feels hugely rushed.

Take for example the movie’s extremely frustrating opening, where Hero Guy does special forces stuff at an attack on an opera house in Ukraine, gets captured and tortured, swallows a cyanide pill and then wakes up in the hospital to be told that the pill was a loyalty test and he’s being recruited into Tenet. Sounds like a neat way to start a movie on paper, but the execution is just awful. Dude Person wakes up on a ship, and his handler or whoever is like “that was a test, we’re an international effort trying to save the world from destruction, say ‘Tenet’ to people and they’ll tell you things, okay bye” and Person Character doesn’t ask any sort of follow up question at all, even though the explanation he’s given is actually more perfunctory and nonsensical than the parody version I just wrote.

Shortly afterwards, the Hero Of Time meets someone else who’s supposed to explain things to him (and the audience), and after she tells him that they’re trying to stop World War III he asks none of the obvious follow up questions you’d expect, like “World War III being fought between who?” or “How do you know that’s going to happen?”. It’s like he’s read the script and he knows the plot of the…

Oh, wait. Uh-huh, very clever, Christopher Nolan. No, I’m super impressed.

I think these pacing problems came about because the movie has multiple layers of over-complicated bullshit to grapple with, so things like exposition or plot setup just had to be barreled through at lightning speed because the studio wouldn't let the movie go over two and a half hours. And the thing is, all of this pretzel-logic nonsense is mostly in support of very conventional James Bond-esque spy thriller stuff: international locales, fancy suits, luxurious hotels and restaurants that serve as the settings for unlikely action scenes, guys dramatically announcing that either they or someone else has been compromised, it’s all stuff you’ve seen a million times before.

And then there’s the time travel aspect, which honestly just didn’t work for me at all outside of a few neat visuals (and not even as many of those as I was expecting). In the first half of the movie, it’s really not clear what’s even supposed to be happening during the scenes where dudes are fighting each other in reverse or making bullets fly backwards into their guns. The way it’s explained doesn’t make this seem like some sort of superpower that people can use to win fights, but that’s what it looks like on screen.

Now, in the second half we do get explanations for all of this, but it’s the explanation you probably guessed based solely on the premise: pretty much anytime something weird and time travel-related happens, you later find out it was actually the characters themselves, travelling backwards through time and interacting in various roundabout ways with their present selves. This is supposed to make you go “Oh, man, so that’s what was happening!”, but the action scenes are so chaotic and hard to follow, and it happens so often, that I didn’t have any reaction to any of it. The best action scene in the whole movie is a very conventional “someone jumps between two moving cars” bit that doesn’t involve any time travel stuff at all.

Just to drive home how uninteresting the time travel element in this movie about weird time travel stuff is: when fucking Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban did the exact same thing, it pulled it off a thousand times more elegantly. And believe me, that’s a sentence I never thought I was going to write given that Prisoner of Azkaban is my go-to example for why writers should think twice before introducing time travel to their stories.

(Also, there’s one bit where Gun Dude tries to shoot his past self in the head during a fight, even though he’s been explicitly told that no one knows if doing that makes you die in the present).

Tenet has been described as a confusing movie. I was all ready to put on my smug Big Brain Hat going into it, since most of the time I don’t find movies described that way confusing at all, but no, it really is very hard to follow. But not because the time travel stuff is complicated.

Oh, it is complicated--extremely complicated--but most of it doesn’t actually matter, so that’s not an issue. The movie is just confusing due to the way it’s written, shot and edited. Nolan has always tended to rely way too much on fast, chaotic cuts, but he ramps that up to extreme levels here, with even completely un-exciting exposition dialogue scenes refusing to hold the camera on any shot longer than a second and a half. Things get way worse during the action scenes, which are mostly disorganized jumbles of seemingly random edits that are extremely hard to parse; there’s one crucial bit revealing the fate of a plot-critical object during a car chase that I didn’t understand at all even after multiple viewings.

The lack of clear explanation that I talked about in relation to the opening scenes continues throughout the movie, coupled with a screenplay that’s just astonishingly sloppy. It feels like the entire scenario with the future invasion is being made up on the spot, and I don’t mean by the screenwriter, I mean the characters themselves seem like they’re just pulling arbitrary bullshit out of their asses to troll Protagonist. New rules for how the time travel works, backstory information, motivations and other elements of, like, the plot just come out of nowhere in a continuous stream: “This is what Tenet is doing, and this is how time travel works and oh make sure you see yourself through the window before you go into the make-things-go-backwards machine, which is from the future and also Tenet is from the future and by the way the Russian guy is dying of cancer and there was a scientist in the future who made an algorithm that can reverse entropy and destroy the past but after she made it she decided the grandfather paradox isn’t real so she killed herself and sent the algorithm back in time and now the bad guy has the algorithm but he’s not going to use it until this one specific point in time because

If that sounds like total nonsense, imagine it’s being delivered by characters who are mostly off-screen because the camera won’t calm the fuck down, and also you can barely hear half the dialogue because Christoper Nolan is a giant primma donna and he won’t listen to people who tell him his movies have bad sound mixing.

Due to all of this confusion, by the time I got to the movie’s climax--the usual Chris Nolan exhausting twenty minute action sequence with lots of chaotic shots of explosions and people randomly firing guns--I had no idea what the characters were trying to do, or why, or who the army of soldiers fighting them were. This is not because the climax is some sort of Primer-esque gordian knot that’s beyond human comprehension, nor do I feel like I’m not smart enough to understand it. The climax of Inception is also complicated, and I had no trouble understanding that. It’s just badly made.

Mostly, Tenet just feels like a huge waste of potential. It looks gorgeous, the soundtrack is amazing, a lot of the action scenes and special effects must have taken incredible skill and effort to pull off, and it makes a very strong case for John David Washington as a big action star (take note, whoever is casting the next Bond). But none of that matters, because the story is total bullshit. It clearly thinks it’s tackling big, weighty themes like the way history and memory influence relationships, but a story isn’t about something just because the characters keep talking about it.

“Wasted potential” is also increasingly how I’m coming to view Christopher Nolan. The man is clearly an extremely talented director and technical craftsman, and he’s carved out a valuable niche for himself as someone who can get big budgets for weird, arty movies with strange premises. But his career has increasingly come to rely on cheap gimmicks and self-referential navel gazing, his movies having no point beyond their own existence and existing in reference to nothing but themselves, popping into cinemas ex nihilo like particles in a quantum vacuum and lasting about as long in the memories of audiences.