TENET is Christopher Nolan’s Worst Film Yet
If you don’t have a compelling story, the action sequences are only secondary.
*This piece contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.*
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM is the first sound effect you hear in Christopher Nolan’s TENET, a film so unfathomably loud it tries to hide its terrible script underneath a plethora of Merzbow-esque/noise music and shrill sound effects to distract its audience in thinking it is “smart.”
Yet, nothing about TENET feels smart, or important, as it tells the story (?) of an unnamed protagonist (John David Washington) tasked to….do what? Save the world and prevent World War III? Yes! Save the world! From what? An algorithm? What algorithm? What does the algorithm do, and what is its formula? Who knows and who cares! As long as there are enough BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMs, I’ll say it was a fun time!
Trying to figure what TENET is about is as painful as the splitting headache and ear pain you’ll get after seeing it. It starts with an incredibly kinetic sequence at an Opera house in Kyiv and completely puts us on edge. Ludwig Göransson’s musical cues are in perfect synchronism with Hoyte Van Hoytema’s gorgeous IMAX cinematography and action choreography that could very well be Christopher Nolan at his best. Every action sequence is as excitingly creative as the last one, with some of Nolan’s most ambitious practical stunts yet.
John David Washington powerhouses every single one of them, as a malleable protagonist ranging from James Bond to Call of Duty soldier with expert range. The kitchen fight sequence is a perfect representation of Nolan’s desire to do James Bond, as the tightness of the room and movements staged with precise tactility reminisces us of the many tight train fistfights in 007 movies. Washington and Robert Pattinson (who plays the protagonist’s sidekick, Neil) would make terrific James Bond as they are both terrific in the movie.
If you weren’t on board with the idea of Pattinson as Batman, you’ll be sold after seeing TENET. Nolan’s eclectic mesh of different forms of action sub-genres and franchises brings out the best in Pattinson, who gives an extremely charismatic performance and can showcase through his effortless charm and fantastic kinetic abilities that he’s one of the most versatile actors working today.
Yet, amidst all of this gargantuan action on display, capping off with Nolan’s wildest climax (in IMAX) taken straight out of Call of Duty, but backward (and forwards) in time, TENET misses the one great ingredient Nolan has perfected throughout his entire filmography: audience engagement.
If you don’t have a compelling story, the action sequences are only secondary. Yes, they are fascinating to watch — visually arresting inversion effects will take your breath away, everyone looks and feels important in those incredible suits, yet that’s part of the excitement. A good intrigue is key for the action sequences to truly work — yet I couldn’t tell you what TENET’s about, even after reading plot summaries and analyses on the movie. The first 40-or-so minutes of the film is nothing but endless exposition, in which The Protagonist meets one video game NPC after another to explain to them how he will get close to the film’s main antagonist, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), BUT FIRST:
PHYSICS
1 . We need to set-up TENET and explain the concept of inversion, which is summarized as objects whose entropy runs backward — but they don’t know how it’s able to do this because the technique was made in the future, and it’s being projected forwards (or backward?) in time (?) — doesn’t matter we have to move on to
MUMBAI
2. The protagonist needs to meet the maker of these inverted bullets and stumbles upon his wife, Priya (Dimple Kapadia), who is a member of TENET (?) because she crosses her arms and says the dumbest line of the film :
To say anything about a client would violate the tenets he lives by.
To which the protagonist replies:
If tenets are important to you, then you can tell me.
She explains that Sator is the man behind the bullets because he’s able, for some reason that’s never explained, to commune with the future because he created some sort of machines in different freeports (?) that makes him able to become inverted and go backwards & forwards in time? BUT, to get close to Sator, he must first do a pit-stop at:
LONDON
3. The protagonist meets with Sir Michael Crosby (Michael Caine), who eats steak in 65mm and tells him that the only way to get close to Sator is through his wife, Katherine (Elizabeth Debicki) so
4. He goes to meet Kat, who tells the protagonist all about HER SON and how it’s important to her for Sator to die so she can finally reunite with HER SON (take a drink every time she says MY SON) — so she decides to help him (?) to perform a heist (?) at a Freeport in Oslo to steal some object (actually, I don’t think they stole anything) and then the plane crash sequence begins. You have no clue as to what they are actually doing.
I can continue to explain what the film is about, but I’ll stop there for my sanity. TENET’s script is an endless mountain of contradictory exposition that never. Ever. Stops. Every new concept introduced to explain inversion/entropy either contradicts what was previously set-up or adds to our confusion. Some filmgoers deem Memento and Inception confusing. The latter is actually easy to follow and understand once you grasp the concept of “dreams-within-dreams,” and Memento is a masterpiece once you understand how the film was structured. TENET's difference is that it has no plot because most of the characters are too busy explaining challenging concepts in a flash, without allowing them to catch up.
Because of this, TENET lacks any form of “weight” or “stakes”. Even if the Stalsk-12 climax is a feast for the eyes (in IMAX, no less), you have no emotional attachment to the film’s characters as it seems that their only purpose is to spew dense exposition — even the main antagonist can’t help but explain what he’s quasi-trying to accomplish (which is kill himself to end the world because if he can’t have Kat nobody can? Is that it? If so, this is stupid).
Branagh can’t do a compelling Russian accent to save his performance— it was prevalent in his Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and it’s no different in TENET. There’s one particular moment in which his accent made me laugh uncontrollably, even though this moment was no laughing matter. However, his villainous performance is insanely caricatured (and, dare I say, Shakespearean!) that I couldn’t help but unintentionally become in stitches.
Hey, if your “evil villain who’ll end the world because he’s dying of cancer and seems to be hung up on his wife who doesn’t even love him, only HER SON and who’ll kill him at the end of the movie, which could’ve caused armageddon because she cares too much about HER SON (and herself!), can’t bring audience engagement, you can forget about the rest of the film pulling the audience. It’s weird because Nolan does such a great job pulling us in through its Opera siege; you’d think the film will be as terrific as its prologue but quickly loses itself in exhausting exposition that trying to figure out what TENET’s about feels like a brand-new Olympic sport.
Some critics/fans of the film might repeat a line from Clémence Poésy in the film to tell you that you didn’t get it: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”
Even if you watch TENET with the “feel it” approach, I don’t believe frustration, unintentional laughter, and pure confusion are emotions that you’ll be glad to feel. Don’t try to understand it. Don’t feel it. Don’t watch it. That’s how I feel.
