Tenet Review

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker whose new releases have become somewhat of an event for me. He was instrumental in the process of my younger self becoming interested in cinema, and while I recognize more and more his faults as a director and storyteller as I grow older, I still find myself looking forward to his ambitious, cerebral and creative projects all the same. So it was that Tenet became one of my most anticipated releases of the fall, as his previous project, Dunkirk, was a creative opus that harnessed everything good about his style of filmmaking into an emotional, experimental tour-de-force that was one of the finest films of 2017.

But while Dunkirk was an example of Christopher Nolan taking full control over his craft and seemingly effortlessly turning all of his flaws into strengths in one fell swoop, Tenet is perhaps the most blatant example yet of his self-indulgent excesses. Following a special CIA agent known only as The Protagonist, played by John David Washington, Tenet tells an at times brilliantly convoluted time travel spy thriller involving an arms dealer distributing special weapons and ammunition that were manufactured in the future to travel inversely through time.

I don’t want to go any further into the details of the plot as there’s a lot to puzzle out here and a lot of it is legitimately fascinating. It’s not the plot itself so much as the way it’s all presented and structured that really makes Tenet one of Christopher Nolan’s weakest films to date. It follows a similar structure to his 2010’s opus Inception, taking a unique premise rooted in a sci-fi twist on a familiar action subgenre (essentially, Tenet is to the spy movie what Inception is to the heist movie), spending the first half of the film setting up a series of rules for the central premise and then paying all of them off in the final act.

A lot of buzz was generated about just how convoluted Inception got, but personally I found it relatively easy to follow. It spent a lot of time setting up the mechanics for its trademarked dream logic, demonstrated the applications of them through visual examples, and then applied them in a real heist situation. All throughout, it used this setup to investigate how ideas can be formed and shaped within our subconscious both by ourselves and others, and how these ideas can drastically shape our perception of ourselves and the reality around us. Perhaps this was more than what most people typically expect from mainstream blockbuster entertainment, and perhaps there was too much wordy exposition – despite my enjoyment of the film, it’s certainly not without its faults – but ultimately it was a well thought out, well-crafted piece of cerebral entertainment.

Tenet is… not that, as much as it pains me to admit it. There are more than enough interesting ideas at play, ideas taken directly from advanced physics and the nature and function of time as a dimension, and how the process of entropy affects it. The big problem is in how these ideas are presented. There’s more hamfisted exposition than ever before, with not just the heavy scientific concepts but also the espionage arms dealer plot – which is suitably complex for a James Bond-esque secret agent action flick – being delivered almost entirely through exposition. Even the things that can be shown are rarely ever demonstrated, and for most of it, these are ideas that the human brain can’t easily comprehend even if we can see their effects.

What makes this all the worse is how hard it can be to even hear the dialogue. The sound mixing in this film is simply atrocious; the sound of guns, fists, and practically any background noise is deafening to the ears, so much so that I had a headache walking out of it, and of course you can’t have a Christopher Nolan movie without an obnoxious booming soundtrack. Everything is loud, that is, except for the dialogue, which almost sounds like either a whisper or a muffled shout compared to everything else going on. This wouldn’t be quite as big of a deal but in a film that’s primarily driven through its dialogue and action, you need to be able to hear the dialogue and Nolan and his crew seriously dropped the ball here.

Ultimately, Tenet just doesn’t make the case for why this story and these ideas are best presented in this way. While the action scenes meshed well with the psychedelic dream imagery of Inception, here it’s more just asking you to think about abstract ideas while watching a generic action scene. It doesn’t quite work, and it wasn’t until halfway through the film – perhaps more – that these ideas actually started being used in creative and interesting ways. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what the purpose of distributing inverted bullets would even be until the film started to showcase the actual strategic benefits of having weapons and agents capable of travelling reversely through time – which again, doesn’t happen until at least halfway through.

There’s a legitimate puzzle to solve in Tenet, which is a saving grace for sure, and the ideas on display represent legitimately bold and daring filmmaking. But the espionage elements really bog things down, the exposition is all very confusing, and there’s not even an emotional hook to ground the audience with. Nolan has always had trouble generating true empathy from his audience, taking a cold, cerebral approach to filmmaking that can be difficult to generate emotion with. But usually there’s something go off of – the tragic main figures of Inception and Memento, the moral quandaries of The Dark Knight Trilogy, the destructive obsessions of the protagonists of The Prestige, and the overwhelming chaotic trauma of Dunkirk are all different ways through which to provide an emotional throughline for the audience that are engaging enough to make up for the times when their respective films’ logic falls flat. But, even in a film with a rather manipulative subplot involving spousal abuse, there’s still barely any reason to care.

It’s certainly not the actors’ fault that things turned out this way; John David Washington is as confidant and charismatic as his rather one-note character allows, and Robert Pattinson makes for an excellent sidekick who perhaps knows a lot more than he’s letting on. I think rather that Christopher Nolan was too confident in himself after the success of Dunkirk and to a lesser extent Interstellar (which critics were divided on but audiences generally seemed to adore). He seems to have gotten so enamored with the ideas on display that he forgot to properly make the case for them, and a lot of his better tendencies seemed to have slipped here; the inventive visuals and editing tricks are certainly there, and there’s one action scene in particular that really stood out, as we got to see another already fairly gripping action scene from earlier in the film played out again in reverse to brilliant affect, but a lot of these flourishes are absent for most of the film until its final act. The intriguing puzzle box plot structure is rather hollow once you figure it out, leaving only his more mundane moment-to-moment compositions, cuts and story and character beats. Meanwhile, his exposition goes through the roof, the emotional core is nonexistent, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to the film once you figure out everything that’s going on. Meanwhile, his abuse of exposition goes through the roof, the emotional core is nonexistent, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to the film once you figure out everything that’s going on.

If it sounds like I’m being too harsh on this movie, perhaps I am, but it’s because I’m used to seeing better from him. As flawed as some of his other films might be, they were always a cause for excitement, and always brought something interesting and fresh to the table, using high concepts to investigate interesting ideas in accessible, crowd pleasing ways, with innovative large scale editing choices providing a familiar yet novel experience. But as much as films like Memento investigated the link between memory and identity and Dunkirk explored what it’s like to go through something truly traumatizing such as war, Tenet doesn’t really seem to be about anything except how weird time is. If this were just an average bond rip-off with a high concept twist from a no-name director, I’d be more okay with it despite its flaws, but I know Nolan can do better than this. Between this and recent reports coming out of him not allowing his cast or crew to sit down on set, it’s beginning to feel like all of his fame might be going to his head. Perhaps someone needs to rein him in, if only a little, in the future.

Overall, I do think Tenet is a pretty interesting film despite my many complaints. It has some really cool ideas and visuals and I feel like I’d enjoy it a lot more on the home screen where I can put on subtitles and not be overwhelmed by the sheer audio-visual assault that this film brings on. Despite the lack of real substance, the mechanics of the film’s time loop plot are fascinating to think about and try and puzzle out. It’s an interesting but highly flawed film that I’m still thinking about in ways that are both good and bad, and it’s far more interesting than other similarly underwhelming films I’ve seen this year. It’s just far, far from Nolan’s best.