TENƎꓕ

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

What a long and strange journey this film has had, filled with unexpected twists and turns, and drama all its own. Someone could make a compelling movie just about the process of Tenet’s release. They could also start it at the end of the story and work their way back, so that it would be roughly as comprehensible as writer-director Christopher Nolan’s story.

I suppose I could do that, in a way, myself: I only just this week noticed the VOD cost of this movie had finally gone down to $5.99, which is the only reason I am reviewing it now, five months after its initial theatrical release—by far a record for my reviews. In the old world, I would regard a film that I had not reviewed when it was released five months ago something that had simply passed me by. In the present, I waited for its insane starting VOD price of $19.99, which happened a month ago, to go down. I’d never pay that much for a movie even in a theater, let alone to watch one at home, not even the one that is arguably the biggest cinema-related cultural flashpoint of the year 2020. By that measure it’s rivaled only by Wonder Woman 1984. By some measures, Tenet is a better movie. I suppose it depends on whether you’re approaching it head-on or in hindsight. Does that make sense?

Whether it makes sense is beside the point. In a way, for Christopher Nolan, senselessness seems to be the point. At least, with a dash of meta subtlety: the protagonist, played by John David Washington, is literally only ever called “Protagonist.” Early on, a woman we only ever see in this one scene is explaining how things work in this world, serving only as exposition, really: “Don’t try to understand it,” she says. “Feel it.” This line has been quoted in virtually every review already written about Tenet, but what else is there to say? For the viewer, taking that advice is a good idea.

I can say this much: Tenet flies by for a movie with a run time of two and a half hours, and that in spite of countless sequences (including the opening one) in which I found myself thinking, I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I’d call that an accomplishment, of sorts. Tenet is also improved by the mere presence of second-billed Robert Pattinson as Neil, in a rare case of speaking in his native British accent. I got several good laughs out of his performance, with its nice sprinkling of dry humor.

Tenet is also packed wall to wall with clever visual trickery, as its plotting plays with time just as extensively as Inception played with dream states. That said, Nolan seems convinced his being impressive with the “depth” of his ideas, and yet Tenet, when closely examined, turns out to be surprisingly lacking in substance. Instead, it’s packed with “temporal” mumbo jumbo, and in ways that are also surprisingly predictable. Granted, Nolan is an expert at execution, as his manner is novel, but he’s still playing with time travel, examining the very same “paradoxes” we’ve been considering for decades. Not once, but multiple times, the playing around with time results in later scenes moving once again through scenes we already went through earlier, just in an opposite direction. Nolan is either closing loops or demonstrating how they perpetuate, and in the end he just proves that Tenet really has nothing new to say.

There’s a moment when Neil offers a simple explanation of a complex idea in a ridiculously oversimplified way, and then he says, “Does your head hurt yet?” Um, if it does, then Protagonist should not be the one tasked with saving the universe. Speaking of which, Protagonist also guesses at one point that what the threat they are facing is nuclear holocaust, and he’s told it’s “something much worse.” What the hell could be much worse? Well, the threat to the existence of all humanity throughout time. Okay, I guess you could argue that’s worse—not that it matters to anyone now if it comes to that. I mean, if we’re all dead anyway, then who cares?

Which is all to say, the premise of Tenet is far from any reason to watch it. It’ll just come in one ear and out the other, or I guess in from a superficially thrilling present and out into a forgettable past. But, it has incredibly well shot action sequences, all of them with certain people and certain objects moving backward through time while others are simultaneously going forward. One great sequence involves the crashing of an airliner without it ever even taking flight; another features a freeway car chase with some cars going forward while others drive backward (through time!); the climactic sequence presents an elaborate gun battle made compelling only because of the “inverted time” elements.

I’ll tell you my personal favorite thing about Tenet. In a smaller but crucial supporting part, Dimple Kapadia, once a teen sex symbol of sorts in Bollywood in the seventies, plays a powerful woman who is an arms dealer in Mumbai. “Protagonist” must cross her path multiple times, in varying moments in time through which he moves. Only briefly are we introduced to her husband as the initially presumed arms dealer: “A masculine front in a man’s world has its uses,” she says, and her existence in this movie is a great subversion of gender expectations. (As a side note, it shouldn’t be significant that the Protagonist is a Black man whose race is never noted in any way, but it is. Another one of Tenet’s accomplishments is that, unlike in many period films, its “color blind” casting is not a distraction.)

By and large, Tenet is exciting but hollow: I am no scientist, but I can tell Christopher Nolan is a bit of a pretender when he plays with these complex concepts, and often kind of cops out: at the end of one scene, Neil begins to explain to the Protagonist’s quasi-love interest (Elizabeth Debicki), “All the laws of physics—” and then it abruptly cuts to the next scene. Tenet is filled with lines like this, which serve more as wild plot contrivances than anything remotely close to actual scientific insights.

To be fair, insights are not Tenet’s purpose anyway. Its purpose is simply to entertain, and that it absolutely achieves. It’s just occasionally distracting when you have to look away in order to roll your eyes.

Relax, it’s not as twisted as it looks.

Overall: B