Tenet

I never thought a film would come along that would make me appreciate Inception, Christopher Nolan’s goofy mind-bending, globetrotting, sci-fi, shoot-um-up from 2010. But leave it to Nolan himself to create an even more mind-bending, globetrotting, quasi-sci-fi action picture so dull and insipid it makes Inception look like a masterpiece. Where Inception had a first-rate cast, a fun (if ridiculous) premise, and eye-popping visual effects, Tenet possesses no such charms. So even for those of us who don’t expect greatness from Christopher Nolan, Tenet is a colossal disappointment.

John David Washington stars as a CIA agent, known only as the Protagonist, who must embark on a time-warping mission to prevent the start of World War III. His adventure revolves around “inverting the entropy” of objects and people, resulting in time reversibility that enables the Protagonist and other characters to enter events that have already occurred but are replaying backwards—literally backwards, like a movie playing in a real-time rewind mode.

As with so many of Nolan’s films, Tenet forsakes a satisfying story in favor of a puzzle-like narrative that can’t really be solved because the pieces only fit together viscerally, not logically. The action is relentless; so we never have to think too much about why any of it is happening, if any of it makes sense, or if it even matters whether or not the characters achieve their objectives. This “rollercoaster ride” quality would be fine in a disposable summer blockbuster if so much screen time weren’t devoted to exposition and quasi-scientific mumbo-jumbo, and if the sound mix wasn’t produced in Nolan’s now-standard style of mixing dialogue as if it were no more important than any other sound effect. The director seems to want to have his cake, eat his cake, and reverse the entropy of his cake too—in that each sequence only exists to deliver empty thrills, yet he forces the characters to spout lengthy explanations so that it seems like maybe everything has some basis in scientific fact, yet he then mixes the audio in such a way that it’s impossible to fully understand what anyone is saying.

The script is awash in highfalutin’ technobabble, but it never fully engages with any of the scientific concepts it trades in because, if it did, the entire movie would implode. Nolan constructs a house-of-cards plot—referencing entropy and other concepts of thermodynamics and theoretical physics—and he then runs his characters around inside the flimsy structure, leaving it up to the viewer as to whether the cards were knocked down or the characters were able to "engineer themselves" in such a way that no part of the house-of-cards was ever disturbed. Genius!

Nolan’s recent films [The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012), The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017)] were all flawed but they were also all well worth seeing. These pictures offered moviegoers things we simply weren’t getting from anyone else releasing big-budget blockbusters in the new millennium. These movies were all shot on celluloid—often in 70mm or IMAX—using practical and physical special effects whenever possible. They all possessed striking imagery that made you want to go see the film when you caught a glimpse of any shots in a trailer or commercial, and you wanted to re-watch the film just to see some of those images in context again. Also, the large, A-list casts of Nolan’s previous movies were all fully committed to putting across the preposterous notions inherent in the scripts with credibility and conviction. Tenet contains none of these elements. 

The major special effect in Tenet is action that runs backwards. Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema worked with IMAX to build a special camera that could expose film both backwards and forward so that every frame of Tenet, regardless of direction, could be printed directly from the original camera negative—removing the need to create these reverse effects in post-production. As with much of Nolan’s craft, I appreciate the effort and attention to detail, but the result here is just people and cars running backwards. Tenet is built around the least special special effect in pictures. That’s not to say that filmmakers from Georges Méliès to Jean Cocteau to James Cameron haven’t utilized shooting in reverse to great effect, but this is the first time someone’s ever built an entire movie around this extremely limited photographic trick.

Even more generic are Tenet’s cast and characters: two-dimensional heroes, sit-com level villains, exotic ethnic information dumpers, and blank damsels in distress. John David Washington—who so impressively navigated the tonal inconsistencies in Spike Lee’s historical political satire polemic BlacKKKlansman (2018)—proves utterly inept at selling Nolan’s gobbledygook technobabble. He plays the Protagonists as one prolonged blank stare in a perfectly tailored suit. It’s a flat character that Washington seems to deliberately try to make even flatter.  His co-stars Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, and a moustache-twirling Kenneth Branagh do slightly better wrapping their mouths around the absurd gibberish, but they too never make us believe they actually understand what they’re saying—something the casts of Inception and Interstellar were able to do.  

Ultimately, Tenet fails to engage because every character seems irrelevant to the complex multi-dimensional world unfolding around them. It should feel the opposite. The Protagonist, his handler, and the evil Russian oligarch at the center of the story should feel like the most important individuals on Earth, as it often seems only they can cause or prevent a disaster that would end all life on the planet. But we’re never sure if anything they’re doing will really have an effect on the future, or if the future can be actually affected, or if the present we’re witnessing is our present or some alternate reality that’s like our reality but not our reality. All this empty false complexity makes it impossible to invest in the characters or in the outcome of their mission.

Like its title, Tenet is a palindrome. Like a palindrome, it doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It contains no themes, no subtext, and the only ideas at play are surface understandings of concepts that, if properly explored, would not result in a slam-bang blockbuster. Tenet wants to be a thinking-persons action movie, so it’s ironic that the only way to enjoy it is to shut your brain all the way off. Why would anyone want to watch this where there are much more entertaining mindless shoot-em-ups that ask you to sit through so much banal and inaudible exposition?