Movie Review — ‘Tenet’ Delivers Intense Spectacle, Razor Thin Characters
Christopher Nolan has always loved messing with people’s heads. Since Memento, he’s pitched his tent in the storytelling camp that deals with philosophical and paradoxical riddles. David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, and Darren Aronofsky come to mind with this kind of filmmaking, but what makes Christopher Nolan unique is successfully mixing high concepts into a big blockbuster package; a feat few filmmakers try and succeed at doing.
With Tenet, Christopher Nolan is at it again, taking heady science and philosophical ideas and pumping them into an action-packed spy thriller with some of this year’s best visual spectacle. To that degree, he largely succeeds. But, by leaning so heavily on these elements, Nolan doubles-down on ignoring writing good characters, a flaw that seriously debilitates the overall work. In the end, you’re left with a fast-paced movie that gives you a rush of adrenaline, a subsequent headache, a desire to see it again, and a feeling like something was seriously missing.
Tenet is an espionage thriller about an unnamed main character played by John David Washington (simply known as The Protagonist) that is tasked with preventing World War III by finding a device that can cause “inversion,” or the ability to reverse time. As he slips further down this rabbit hole, he discovers more about just how deep this “inversion” goes and how high the stakes truly become.
It still never ceases to amaze me how good Christopher Nolan is at kicking your skull in with his intense, visceral, and crisp scenes. Add on top of that Hoyte Van Hoytema’s brilliant cinematography and Ludwig Goransson’s heart-pounding score and you feel like you’re eyes and ears are engorging themselves on Thanksgiving Day. It’s that good.
The sound design is of particular interest here. Since, perhaps, Interstellar, Nolan has been fiddling and experimenting with louder sound design than the traditional standard, dividing critics and audience members alike. In Tenet, I think he’s hit the mark. The sound creates a chaotic atmosphere and almost becomes its own being in the movie. It adds so much more to the experience and the storytelling, even if that means it might be tough to understand what people are saying.
As a storyteller, Nolan plays it safe and continues to lean on his strengths, focusing on puzzles and high-concepts to intrigue. To help the audience understand his confusing topics of choice, Nolan heavily relies on exposition, typically using a character to ask a ton of questions for the audience. He did it in Inception and does it again in Tenet, with The Protagonist serving that question asking role, but it only helps so much. His use of exposition grows tiresome at times (more on that later), but I understand why he does it. Without it, his audience would be even more lost than ever, pushing the movie farther away from blockbuster territory.
Overall, Tenet suffers from poor writing, notably with the characters. We know almost nothing about John David Washington’s The Protagonist except whatever he shows us on screen, which also, is almost nothing.
John David Washington’s performance is mixed at best. At times, he’s cool, confident, with a little charisma, but there are many other scenes where his line delivery sounds robotic and wooden, like he’s just a conveyor belt of words, spitting out questions and information with little inflection. Since we know nothing about his character, it can be really hard to care about him. So, Nolan relies on the story’s hook to keep you interested. Because of the story’s unique mechanics, Washington’s character gets somewhat of a pass on not knowing much about him (that’s all I’ll say for fear of spoilers). But the other characters don’t get that pass and they still are razor-thin.
This is why the exposition scenes grow tiresome. Without knowing anything about these characters and have little reason to care about them, the exposition scenes become super painful to follow. Nolan tries to assuage this problem by changing the set pieces and environment as two characters (usually John David Washington and Robert Pattinson) dialogue. It shakes up the dynamics of what you’re watching, but it’s ultimately not enough. It would have been far easier if Nolan just wrote more interesting characters.
The other issue is line delivery and chemistry between characters. In one scene, in particular, Robert Pattinson’s character introduces John David Washington’s character to Himesh Patel’s character. There’s no typical greeting or small talk or any kind of human connection when you first meet a person. It’s just “Meet this guy” and then they continue talking as if that guy knows exactly what they’re talking about and can intimately talk with them like he’s known them for years. It was strange. It felt rushed and awkward and took me out of the scene.
Tenet isn’t a character story and it wasn’t ever meant to be. It’s a puzzle to be solved with no solution — Nolan’s bread and butter. This may excite some and infuriate others. Either way, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet succeeds at doing exactly what Christopher Nolan set out to do — exhilarate and confuse. With that in mind, Tenet is a fairly good film, but not one of Nolan’s best by a long shot. It can be enjoyed with your brain turned off or with your brain amped up to eleven. Whichever you choose, you’ll likely feel hungry to watch it a second time.
Rating — 4 of 5 stars
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