This is a re-posting of my 08.26.20 review of Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” as it is now available on home video via Blu-Ray, DVD, and rental streaming. I have seen the film three times now, each viewing a little better than the next, but I still contend that this is the weakest film of Nolan’s career.
Christopher Nolan has somehow managed to make a movie that makes his 2010 Mindbender “Inception” easy to follow. In “Tenet,” which very much feels like Inception-on-steroids, the ubiquitous writer-director cuts down on the exposition and manages to give us his most complicated and confusing movie to date. I, quite honestly, had no idea what was going on in some scenes. It’s a film that doesn’t wait for you to catch your breath or think things through; it hammers you to a pulp, with its 153 minutes a relentless assault on the senses.
A woefully classic case of putting concept before story, “Tenet” is heavy on pseudo-science as it tackles time-traveling through reverse engineering, in a clear-cut world-hopping homage to James Bond movies, but with a sci-fi twist. There is no way a single viewing is sufficient to understand the full breadth and scope of Christopher Nolan’s byzantine vision. He plays around with time and place in sometimes playful, but ultimately frustrating ways.
What we do gather from the story being told is that Ukrainian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) was in the right place at the right time, and discovered a device sent back in time with a set of instructions and his name encased in it. Since then, he has carefully been extracting parts of a bomb sent back in time from the future and has been able to create and identify machines that let him travel temporarily between the past and the present to alter and identify important information. His plan is quite simple and adheres to the objectives of most Bond villains: to cause a nuclear holocaust.
The “good guys” are played by John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, both excellent in underwritten roles, and they are trying to prevent Sator from accomplishing his goal of eliciting a third world war, but they have to travel both to the past and the present to do so. Got that? Even if you “get” the gist of the plot, “Tenet” gets confusing when you start to realize that the movie itself is already part of a loop, and things we are seeing may have already happened, and that their current actions are being re-performed for a better outcome.
The action is much what you would expect; Nolan still hasn’t fully mastered them technically. A car chase sequence on a highway, where cars are reversed and thrust forward, feels like nothing you have seen before, and yet, editor Jennifer Lame doesn’t give us any breathing room to fully grasp the totality of the events, cutting relentlessly from one shot to the next. More succesfully is a daring scene at a Ukrainian opera house, where Washington’s character (solely called The Protagonist in the credits) leads a counter-swat TEAM to stop a daring heist.
Much like most Nolan affairs, dialogue at key moments sounds inaudible; Nolan’s sound editing and mixing is and has always been so atrocious that one wonders why he never fixes it given that it’s a common complaint in all of his movies. In “Tenet,” the indecipherable booming bass muffles out what his on-screen characters are saying, and it does become detrimental since the film is heavy on expository dialogue.
“Tenet” overdoses with action scenes to the point where I felt exhausted halfway through. Nolan is obsessed with guys in suits running, driving cars on the highway, and really, just blowing stuff up. I didn’t always understand why the characters were performing all their actions. Maybe that was Nolan’s goal, but this took out all the intrigue of the action, which left me sometimes bored, and other times bewildered, to the point where I just didn’t care about the outcome.
A good chunk of Nolan’s screenplay is convoluted and cryptic, but not because it makes sense or it serves a purpose, but rather, I suspect, it is to conceal the fact that this is all just utter nonsense. Its 150 minutes are ruthlessly clever, to the point of ad nauseum. Nolan is trying to preach us a new world, a new way of seeing and understanding things, but one wonders if he even understands it. If the goal in films such as “Inception,” and “Interstellar” was to not spoil the plot, we would not even be capable to do so with the obtusively vague “Tenet” because, well, it’s impossible to disentangle for comprehensive purposes.
If “Tenet” can be a hard movie to fully get invested in emotionally, or even comprehend it for that matter, the craftsmanship is second to none. Sometimes, letting go and just experiencing its visceral thrills is better than continuously trying to figure out its puzzle. Visually, the film looks great, the practical effects mixed with SFX are astonishing to look at, and kudos to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema who produces widescreen visual miracles much like he did in “Dunkirk.”