“Tenet” Review : Christopher Nolan’s Crash Course on Time Travel (Spoiler Free)
It brings me absolutely zero pleasure to say I didn’t like Tenet. And it’s not because I didn’t understand Tenet.
I’m someone that’s always been in Christopher Nolan’s corner. Normally where I’d list one or two movies that stand out, it’s easier for me to simply say his entire filmography is something I’ve been invested in since taking a vaunted interest in movies. I’ve also watched a movie of his like The Prestige enough times to know it’s not fully “graspable” on the first go-round. That’s a movie I rented over and over again as a teenager, trying to wrap my head around what I was watching like a pre-med student cramming for a final. Even when I didn’t always understand what I was watching, I knew I was always enjoying the process of the puzzle.
And I think that’s where Nolan finds his undoing with his newest movie. Tenet carries on its shoulders the weight of welcoming so many back to the theater. It’s a big, methodical blockbuster originally slated for mid-July in the latter half of a busy summer season that’s now one of the only blockbusters we’ll see in 2020. Put together on the classically “big scale” Nolan’s gotten accustomed to with a production as laborious as Dunkirk, the $200 million project will likely recoup its budget… eventually. Tenet will probably stick around in theaters until Halloween; which is ideal, because the first viewing has a learning curve similar to honor’s course calculus.
All of Christopher Nolan’s movies have some dealings or focus on time, but Tenet is by far his most literal. The plot hinges on an arms dealer from the future wreaking havoc in the past. Bullets, cars, even people can travel timelines in reverse: “inverted”, as the movie calls it. That’s about all you should know going into the movie to carefully tip-toe spoilers.
Explaining time travel is a fool’s errand. The movies that have done it best avoid the pitfalls of worrying too much about the logistical pitfalls. Back to the Future and Terminator as franchises sweep most of their fallacies under the rug… “if we pretend it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.” Rian Johnson’s Looper handles it in perhaps my personal favorite way, as the protagonist shares a conversation with the future version of himself:
Tenet is obsessed with adding new wrinkles and rules for the audience to add to their understanding of what’s going on at a relentless pace. Reading, then re-reading the film’s plot summary on Wikipedia days later only added to my confusion. I’ll come back to Tenet, and maybe after a certain number of rewatches, pauses and some necessary note-taking everything will click into place. However, why that entire process, like we’ve had to do with every Nolan movie, isn’t as enticing this time around… we’ll get to later.
Where I think we find its biggest failure is not giving us a scene where Nolan brings things to a crawl to address the audience. Two perfect examples can be found in two other Christopher Nolan movies, Inception or Interstellar. Early on in Inception, DiCaprio’s character takes Ellen Page’s character through the “dream building” process. Not due to the fact that it’s something that could just as easily be handled off-screen, but because we as the audience need time to breathe. In just a few minutes we’re given rules and stakes that all pay off later on.
Four years later, Interstellar does something similar in a much more abbreviated way. In a movie where Nolan recreates the literal outreaches of space for us to behold, one of the best special effects simply uses a piece of paper and a pencil.
A perfect example of a complementary hurdle the movie fails to clear is the “subplot” surrounding Kenneth Branagh’s villain and his wife, played by Elizabeth Debicki. At their core, Nolan’s movies always feature a husband or father examining their character as they face some sort of moral quandry (Hugh Jackman in Prestige, Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar are all perfect examples). While it’s usually a great way to ground the lofty concepts for his movies, I think it only bogs down the much better “espionage” plot between John David Washington and Robert Pattinson’s characters. I don’t know if it’s strictly a fault of Nolan’s writing (who penned the script himself), but Tenet greatly suffers in not being entertaining enough on the first watch to make you want to come back a second time to figure things out.
In bittersweet fashion, I think Tenet has some of the most ambitious action he’s ever filmed. He fills the screen with practical effects to a scale that’s almost become exclusive to his signature style. There are some great, over-the-top stunts showcased in the last act of the film that’s been really well-hidden from the movie’s marketing. Like he does with so many of his projects, you can feel him wringing every last drop of potential from a genuinely cinematic idea. Tenet, for better or worse, is gonna be a movie we talk about for a while. It deserves to be discussed how he interpreted and decided to present his incarnation of literal time travel; there are things being done on the screen we’ve never seen before.
When I say I don’t particularly like Tenet it’s not to discredit or discount any of the achievements his movie makes. It’s a technical marvel that made me glad to be back in the cool comfort of a movie theater. It’s difficult, but possible, to divorce the film from the expectations that THIS is the movie we’ve been waiting for; had it come out sandwiched between several other big-budget movies in a summer season where we’re overwhelmed by choices to go see it probably wouldn’t have been under such a strict microscope. I think Tenet is a new watermark for Christopher Nolan as a creator of blockbuster spectacle. As for Christopher Nolan the story teller, much like one of the characters reversing through time, it feels like he’s moving backwards.
6 / 10
