Tonight I’ll be attending a 35mm screening of Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet.” I haven’t seen the film since its original release back in 2020. That’s three full years of not caring or giving the slightest attention to this exhausting film.
From what I can remember about “Tenet,” Nolan had somehow managed to make a movie that, in comparison, made his 2010 mindbender “Inception” easy to follow.
The opening 10 minutes were remarkable. A set-piece at a Kiev opera house involving the film’s lead character John-David Washington, known simply as, The Protagonist. He gets recruited by the mysterious “Tenet” agency to save the world.
The Protagonist is brought up to speed on a variety of things, from backward-traveling bullets, to the news of an impending third World War, masterminded by Ukrainian Oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh).
The film’s other central relationship centers around Washington and his mysterious ally Neil, played with an air of levity and charisma by Robert Pattinson who brings real playfulness to the otherwise cold world Nolan has created.
In “Tenet,” which very much felt like Inception-on-steroids, Nolan somehow managed to give us his most complicated and confusing movie to date. It hammered me to a pulp, with its relentless 153 minutes assault on the senses.
I watched it for a second time the following week. Grasped the plot more, understood the stakes better and found myself a tad more invested. However, “Tenet” still felt like a woefully classic case of putting concept over story, a film heavy on pseudo-science as it tackled time-travelling via reverse engineering, in a clear-cut world-hopping homage to Bond movies.
What I concluded was that, even if you “got” the gist of the plot, followed the action with a keen eye for attention, the movie itself was already part of a loop, and the things we were seeing may have already happened, and that the characters’ actions were maybe being re-performed for a better outcome. Still with me?
The filmmaker’s byzantinian vision kept playing around with time and place, in sometimes playful, but ultimately frustrating ways. After watching “Tenet” for a second time, I was exhausted. I had no desire to ever go back to this world.
And yet, here I am, curious again, about to watch “Tenet” for the third time. Maybe it’s time wasted, but, for some reason, I seem to be in the mood for it. Something seems to be luring me back towards this movie.
Alongside Blanchett, the film features a wildly eclectic ensemble including Dave Bautista, Lily-Rose Depp, Riley Keough, Léa Seydoux, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Chris Pine