Is ‘Tenet’ good enough to revive theaters?
Three years after Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s superbly choreographed war film, the director’s newest mind-bending thriller, Tenet, is finally upon us. Nolan movies have become somewhat of a cultural event amongst movie fans, but with more mainstream viewers as well. As one of the last big directors who can pull in audiences with his name alone, we’ve come to expect a lot from the guy’s smart, original stories and his equally exciting action set pieces. People’s preconceived notions of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker have already put some amount of pressure on Tenet, but when one factor is the time it is being released, there is a much broader kind of pressure being placed on the shoulders of this film.
I’m, of course, speaking about the Coronavirus and the fact that movie theaters have been inaccessible to audiences around the world for the last five to six months. Film studios began pulling their summer releases left and right around April as it became more and more clear that the pandemic would not be going away anytime soon. For an industry that lives off constant theater releases with big box office intakes (especially in the summer), it’s easy to guess that the movie industry isn’t exactly thriving right now.
However, there was one movie that wasn’t actually pulled, even releasing a new trailer in May with the tagline, “Coming to theaters.” Never before had this been such a dramatic declaration for a movie, but I suppose in this strange time of uncertainty we live in now, Tenet could use this as quite the distinguished statement. And although the release date was pushed back and pushed back, the film was finally released. Will it resuscitate the industry? I guess that part is to be seen. But for now, let’s focus on the movie itself.
Tenet is a hard film to describe concisely. A secret agent attempting to stop WWIII with time manipulation stuff that sounds hilariously generic, but you can guess that it’s a bit more complicated in the hands of Christopher Nolan. The Protagonist (John David Washington) joins a secret organization called ‘Tenet’ seeking to find out how and why some objects and people are seemingly moving backwards through time in an effort to prevent a war that is happening in the future, but isn’t happening yet in the present. Oh yeah, did I say Nolan would make this premise a bit more complicated than a generic spy film? I really meant a great deal more complicated. This movie is tough to follow. There were more than a few moments where I wasn’t sure what the characters’ motivations were or even who was who in a battle sequence. And it really doesn’t help that Nolan insists on making the dialogue so quiet in the audio mix while making the score and action sequences almost obnoxiously loud.
And I get it. It’s great that Nolan doesn’t talk down to his audience in his writing; a trait that the filmmaker is actually quite well known for. But he is asking the audience to keep track a lot of information here, most of which is delivered through endless exposition dumps that are sometimes laughably difficult to hear. It can be frustrating to wrap your head around exactly what is unfolding on screen in ways that his past mind-bending thrillers like Inception and Memento were not.
That being said, Tenet is visually fascinating to watch. Seeing some of the ways Nolan plays with the time manipulation in this film is worth the price of admission alone, in my opinion. On multiple occasions, we are treated to fight sequences in which some people are moving forwards in time and others are moving backwards in time, only to watch the reverse side of the same fight just a few minutes later. And every instance of large-scale time bending is built around the practical set pieces Nolan is famous for. If anything, Tenet only further proves that the director is a master at creating thrilling action spectacles, and in this case, turning them on their heads and squeezing out every ounce of mind breaking madness that he can. I’ll admit that some of these larger scale scenes went a little too ‘Nolan’ at times and got a bit lost in their own creative chaos, but overall, I don’t think the action sequences will disappoint.
Speaking of things that won’t disappoint, let’s talk about the score. Man, was the score awesome. Composed by Swedish musician Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, Creed, The Mandalorian, Childish Gambino), Tenet’s score is intense but very unique. From what I could hear, Göransson used a lot of backwards effects throughout the score while infusing them with complex beats that have distinctive timbral qualities which really blew me away at various points. The music definitely elevated the intensity and overall aesthetic of the film, standing out as one of the coolest and most distinguished scores I’ve heard in a while.
Continuing on with more great people, I’ll just say that John David Washington is excellent. Between BlacKkKlansman and this movie, Washington is already proving that he is leading man material, despite being a relative newcomer to feature films. The charismatic but intense nuances in his performance make him the best part of the cast. It’s also great to see a leading man that’s Black, and not have his race as the central conflict in the film. Don’t get me wrong, BlacKkKlansman is an excellent film and one that is very important, especially in today’s racially charged climate. But one of the main points of that film is to highlight the systemic racism that continues to run through the US. Tenet has no social agenda and doesn’t even mention that the main character isn’t a White guy, which is ideally how all movies without White protagonists should be, unless otherwise making a clear statement on racial problems. It would be great to see blockbusters begin to embrace more diversity in leading roles rather than sticking POC in small roles in the background just to cross off the ‘not racist’ box on their checklist, and it’s great to see this movie take the charge.
That being said, Tenet does have a relatively diverse cast, at least for a big Hollywood movie and especially in comparison to older Nolan films like Inception. As previously stated, John David Washington is the badass, charismatic lead that’s simply named ‘The Protagonist.’ Robert Pattinson proves that he is more than just a pretty face from Twilight yet again, with a stellar performance as Neil. Elizabeth Dibicki is great as Kat and is really the emotional crux of the whole film. Himesh Patel of Yesterday fame also makes an appearance as a member of ‘Tenet.’ And how can we forget Kenneth Branagh as the almost comically evil Russian bad guy, Sator?
Generally, these performances are pretty good. Washington is certainly the most compelling character as the lead, but what really hurts some of the acting in this film is the writing. Nolan has never been the strongest writer of dialogue but, jeez, this may be the worst it’s ever been. As mentioned before, the exposition dumps in Tenet are unreal sometimes, as the characters attempt to robotically explain some of the chaos that’s happening while only furthering the confusion due to the dull, unemotional nature of what they’re saying. And of all of Nolan’s films, Tenet may be the most emotionally detached to date.
His movies have never been known for their heartfelt storytelling, but at least there have been reasons to become personally connected to the characters in his past stories. The Dark Knight has Batman rescuing Harvey Dent by accident, leaving his love, Rachel, to die. Inception has Cobb and his family and all that. Interstellar has the scene of Cooper watching his family rapidly grow up before his eyes. Dunkirk may actually be an exception, but I would argue that that movie didn’t really need intimate connections with the characters and was more about the emotional connection to the historical event it portrays. Tenet attempts to get us to care about the characters, but the writing is so clunky and unnatural at times, the personal drama either feels awkward or contrived.
I think this film is a thrilling, albeit confusing, ride that may possibly be able to support the film industry in these hard times, especially when there’s really nothing else to see. Nolan continues to push the envelope when it comes to his fascination with time and its complexities within filmmaking. I do wonder if maybe he pushed it just a bit too much here, leading Tenet to be more inaccessible than his other works. By focusing so much on the complicated plot, the movie loses some heart that it may have needed for us to care just that important extra amount about what was happening and who was involved.
Additionally, Christopher Nolan movies usually raise a lot of interesting questions that I find myself pondering days after I’ve watched them. In this case, my time thinking about Tenet has been absorbed by the mechanics of how the time manipulation worked, rather than its large scale, human implications. The film has a lot to offer, dealing with subject matter that any other remake or franchise film out there wouldn’t dream of taking on. But Tenet may be too amplified for its own good, keeping it from being one of Nolan’s truly great movies.
