TENET: A Flawed Masterpiece
Not Nolan’s best work but still worth a watch.
Are you a huge cinema fan stuck in quarantine, desperate to get back into that IMAX theatre only to have your expectations crushed by Christopher Nolan’s Tenet?. You’re not alone; it happened to me too.
Who am I kidding? I love Tenet. Time inversion, enormous spectacle, John David Washington. What not to like? It’s no surprise, to be honest. I am a Christopher Nolan fanboy. Inception and The Dark Knight are two of my all-time favorites, not to mention The Prestige and Memento. I even enjoyed Interstellar (sorry Dunkirk, you don’t get any love).
That said, not a lot of people have enjoyed the movie the way I did. And that made me think about giving that little fanboy inside a rest. An unbiased look at Tenet shows some glaring issues. Here’s how I think these issues could’ve been fixed:
Tenet, as a blockbuster, faces the hard task of introducing a mainstream audience to a very complicated concept. Instead of following a laid back approach and relying on exposition to explain everything that happens, Tenet provides the audience with information as they are revealed to the characters.
An excellent decision that was trumped by the fact that the pacing of the movie was too fast. The audience is bombarded with information without enough time to comprehend it. I couldn’t get a moment to think without missing a car chase, a time inverted fight scene, or a cool explosion.
This left me feeling a bit lost at points during the movie when I didn’t understand what was happening or why it was happening as much as I would have liked. My only choice was to follow the director’s advice, “Don’t try to understand it, feel it.” and to that, I say: “This movie is too fast, fix it.” But at least that won’t be a problem during the numerous rewatches I’m planning.
Remember how the movie takes you from the opera house in Oslo to Mumbai, England, Estonia, and Italy? The film was shot in seven different countries, and yet, they all felt kind of the same (even the Mumbai scenes were mostly at night). This could be because the color palette did not provide any sort of uniqueness to any of the locations.
Good color grading should make locations pop. The audience should be able to identify where the events are happening without waiting for the dialogue to explain it. Also, the characters seemed to jump to a different country without any sort of an establishing shot. This felt a bit disorienting at times, and an establishing shot every now and then wouldn’t hurt. In fact, they could have helped with the pacing issue we mentioned.
We live in a twilight world, and a few of my friends at dusk felt like they didn’t have a deep understanding of the characters’ motivations. They didn’t connect to the characters enough. And I don’t really blame them. I mean, this is a movie that never mentions the main character’s name, not even once.
John David Washington’s character is only referred to as “The Protagonist”. We know nothing about “Neil” (Robert Pattinson), his history, and motivations. The only grounded character with a real relationship is “Kat” (Elizabeth Debicki) and her son, and even that relationship felt kind of forced. Maybe the relationship between “The Protagonist” and “ Neil” could’ve been flushed a little bit more. This would have balanced the whole dynamic, especially since they turned out to share a lot of history together.
That said, I still had a great experience watching this movie. After all, Tenet is an exciting movie. It is one of the best examples of excellent filmmaking. It has a unique, creative, daring concept that was very well written and incredibly executed. It is the kind of movie that only Christopher Nolan can make. Some people would argue it is not his best work, but despite its flaws, Tenet most definitely is a Masterpiece.
