Director Report Card: Christopher Nolan (2020)

11. Tenet

A new Christopher Nolan film inevitably brings with it a huge degree of excitement and hype. I guess directing one of the most successful and critically acclaimed superhero movies of all time earns someone that level of fame. From its announcement, “Tenet” was shrouded in secrecy. The trailers were mysterious, never giving us a clear idea of what the movie was actually about but providing plenty of hints to Nolan's puzzle-hungry fans. Of course, now we all know that this hype was a bit premature. Nobody could have predicted COVID-19 completely changing the world we live in and bringing the movie industry to its knees. Whatever merits “Tenet” may have as a movie have been totally overshadowed by the ramifications it will have on the future of cinema. 

But let's not talk about that right now. What is “Tenet” about exactly? A CIA agent participates in an undercover operation at a Kiev opera house. He prevents a terrorist organization from seeking a mysterious object. During the attack, he's saved by a bullet magically firing back into someone's gun. Afterwards, he's drafted into a secret organization known as Tenet. The group is tracking weapons with “inverted” entropy, that go backwards through time. The government has become increasingly concerned that a super weapon from the future is attempting to end life in the past. Teamed with an operative named Neil, the new agent tracks down a weapons dealer who may be driving the world towards total destruction.

The majority of Christopher Nolan's movies have worked in established genres, often pairing them with flashy narrative gimmicks. “Following” and “Memento” were film noirs, paired with twisting, non-linear stories. “Inception” was a heist movie set within the human mind. “Interstellar” drew from previous sci-fi epics and applied time-altering scientific principals to them. From this perspective, “Tenet” is essentially Christopher Nolan finally making his James Bond movie. It follows a blunt instrument super-spy, working for a secret organization, trying to thwart a villain's plan to end the world as we know it. If Nolan's riffing on Cold War ideas couldn't have been more obvious, he even has the characters reference a new Cold War and makes the bad guys Russians.

Added to this espionage structure is a far-out sci-fi idea. “Tenet” is not a time travel movie in the traditional sense. Characters don't go back in time to previous periods in history. Instead, characters and objects who are inverted in “Tenet” eventually have to become un-inverted. People run through events twice, backwards and forward. There's more than one long scene in the movie explaining the far-out science behind this. These exposition dumps get even more convoluted as the movie goes on, the script talking about more ideas like events from the far future affecting the present and discussions of algorithms. 

To be totally honest, I did not really understand the logic behind “Tenet's” time-bending gimmick. As the film starts talking more and more about events that will happen in the future – that are not depicted in the actual movie – it starts to become harder to wrap your brain around. When you have multiple characters moving in opposing directions through time, and vague MacGuffins being pursued, you start to require a mental flow-chart of what exactly is happening. It's not just the movie's science that's hard to decipher. The standard A-to-B plotting is tricky to follow sometimes too. Names and ideas are referenced before we understand them. There's a subplot about art forgery that is very important until it isn't. So many story points are being thrown around so often that I required the Wikipedia page to keep abreast of the film. 

Ultimately, what is all this convoluted exposition and interacting timelines meant to build upon? “Tenet's” particular type of time travel attempts to be paradox free. If something happens while one “inverted” person or object is traveling backwards through time, mirrored events must happen as time flows forward. In other words, the movie is going to show you the same events backwards and forwards. It's a cinematic palindrome, which is hinted at from the title on-down. Once you realize this, “Tenet” actually becomes less interesting. A man the protagonist fights is revealed to be the future version of himself. A minor player in the climax, we soon learn, is actually a major supporting character. Small events glimpsed in the past are given greater significance later on. 

In Nolan's better movie, this kind of narrative preciseness was satisfying. In “Tenet,” it only proves disappointing. This might be because the movie shrouds its own story in so much exposition and mysterious foreboding. Or it could be because we aren't given nearly enough reasons to care about what happens. There's not much of an emotional “in” into “Tenet's” story. The lead character has few relationships, very little in the way of bonds or interpersonal connections. We know so little about him that he's literally never given a name. The end credits refer to the protagonist only as... The Protagonist. The idea of someone being swept up into a confusing, time-bending secret organization could've been relatable but the Protagonist goes about everything with a stern sense of duty. 

The lack of character depth and increasingly convoluted story makes “Tenet” seem more and more like a formal exercise as it goes on. Was Nolan more interested in Big Scientific Ideas and the far-out set pieces he could engineer with them? Perhaps. However, it must be said, those set pieces are pretty cool. The high-light of the movie is a car chase, in which cars going backwards smash into a car going forward. The way that scene unravels, with a hand being pressed down on a brake pedal, is pretty novel. The twitchy, reversed motion action provides a really interesting visual. The scene that follows, where a conversation that has two different meanings depending on which direction it goes in, is also a clever sequence. The reverse motion melee, that we see play off from two perspectives, also takes advantage of that unique style.

As you'd probably expect, Nolan makes sure to engineer some very large stunts, to further play with this premise he's invented. That cool car chase climaxes with the very cool sight of a flipped vehicle righting itself. More than one explosion is shown both unfolding and de-folding. One of the film's most elaborate set pieces concerns a grounded airplane being crashed into a building, which we naturally see rewind as well. Yet, as “Tenet” goes on, this trick looses its panache. The film's climax is a blurrily depicted combat sequence. Watching army guys in face-concealing mask scramble through a gray desert can only generate so many thrills, even if there's a cool shot of a collapsing building reassembling itself.

The Protagonist is a tricky character to get invested in, largely because we learn so little about him. His history is left a complete blank. He's utterly devoted to his task of saving the world, though we never learn why. He forms one major friendship through the film but his connections to other people are kept largely professional. Even if our unnamed hero is intentionally kept blank, one thing is certain about this Protagonist: He's cool. John David Washington plays him with an almost unflappable sense of certainty. While fighting off a trio of thugs in a kitchen, he's casually smashing heads into plates. Washington strikes the right attitude for a role like this, using his clear movie star charisma to turn a blank at least into someone we can root for.

Another role that is similarly thin on paper but brought to life by an electrifying actor is Neil. If the Protagonist is Nolan's weirdly sexless riff on Bond, then Robert Pattinson's Neil is the equivalent of sorts of Felix Leiter. That would be a frequent partner that is more wily than his brute force companion. Pattinson gets all the movie's best lines, producing most of the film's laughs, and enlivening every scene he's in. Kenneth Branagh plays Sator, the film's Russian villain with a global death wish. It's cool to see Branagh utilizes his aristocratic presence for an intimidating villain, someone determined to do absolutely anything to further his own goals. Michael Caine and Fiona Dourif appear for small roles. It's nice to see them. 

The closest thing “Tenet” has to an emotional through-line involves Elizabeth Debicki as Kat, Sator's estranged wife and the Protagonist's primary contact. Her embittered relationship with her husband, and the desire to protect their child, is the closest thing to an identifiable human element driving “Tenet's” story. A major theme running throughout the movie seems to be what you are willing to sacrifice for whatever you believe the greater good to be. Though Debicki does everything she can to bring this idea to life, her performance can't prop up the entire heart and soul of this movie. (Though we've gotta give Chris some credit for not including another dead wife in the story.)

Ultimately, the quality of “Tenet” is almost besides the point. Christopher Nolan's insistence on getting the movie in theaters, in the middle of a global pandemic, forced cinemas to reopen prematurely. Not only did this lead to “Tenet” having mediocre box office, it may have ramifications on the entire medium. Because “Tenet” did not keep movie theaters alive single-handedly, Warner Brothers will be releasing their entire 2021 slate on their streaming services. Which will bleed business from whatever theaters remain open. Nolan has been pissed about this, which is rich considering the shit show is partially his fault. But I won't let that color my opinion on “Tenet.” While the film might play better on a second viewing, a script that is structurally dense but emotionally shallow leads to a largely frustrating experience. All the bad-ass stunts in the world can't make up for characters or a story you don't care about. [Grade: C+]