Watching Tenet

Note: This Review Contains Spoilers.

I wasn't going to risk my life to see Christopher Nolan's newest film, Tenet, when it was released in its spectacular IMAX glory last summer.  Instead, I preordered the Blu-ray edition and watched the film on my television just before Christmas.  Settling into January I watched it again, this time with the subtitles on because Nolan seems to prefer to make his dialog indistinguishable from the music and special effects for clarity.  Several important lines were not discernible to my ears.  According to Nolan, I am “hard of hearing,” the option offered on the Blu-ray menu to select English subtitles.

As I've said before, Nolan is my favorite living director so I was excited to see his latest effort. The film opens with a impressive para-military event in, of all places, a large Russian opera house.  The sequence ends with a large explosion immediately seguing into the grizzly death of the leading character (John David Washington). Having been captured, he is tortured with pliers pulling out several of his teeth until just before he chooses death.  Queue opening title.  Nolan is a master at creating immediate tension in his films and Tenet is no different.  

It turns out the Protagonist does not die.  The whole thing was really just to “test” his resolve.  Instead, he is placed in a medically-induced coma, his mouth is repaired, and he is revived for a new mission.  Basically, he is to prevent World War III from starting, only the context for that war is murky.  Interestingly, Nolan never tells us this character's name.  He is simply “the Protagonist.”  

“Inversion” is the basis for World War III.  Objects are coming backward (inverted) through time into the present – out of the future.  These are disassembled bits and pieces of weapons and equipment.  No one understands what the pieces are or how/if they all fit together.  They are “the detritus of a coming war,” as a minor character classifies them for the Protagonist.   

As viewers, we don't know anything about anything except what little we are being told and some crazy stuff we are shown.  The first act of the movie has to be taken in with little comprehension, almost like a David Lynch film.  It is some sort of elaborate puzzle but parts of it make no sense whatsoever. 

To grip our interest, however, there are several entertaining action sequences, each more sensational than the previous.  We are given some interesting details about the international art market that turn out to be not nearly as important as they first seem.  But at least this part of the narrative is understandable, giving us something to hold on to while we become oriented to the rest of the film.  

All the while, the Protagonist is working his way through a world of wealth and power in search of an international arms dealer (played brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh).  The dealer apparently has connections with “people in the future” and is somehow (we later learn it is through a “turnstile”) receiving inverted munitions and weapons in the present.  These are highly advanced weapons firing “inverted” rounds which, by their very nature, inflict extraordinary devastation on their targets.

To humanize the story a bit, Nolan works in an interesting side-kick (Robert Pattinson) for the Protagonist.  This allows for a touch of humor and comradeship to the film.  Mysteriously, the side-kick knows an uncanny amount of intimate details about the Protagonist.  Yet, they have never met before.  Nothing too weird about that, however.  He could know it from some intelligence dossier or something.  Beyond this, there is the deeper character development of the arm dealer's wife (Elizabeth Debicki) who is basically a prisoner of her husband and his ultra-wealthy world.  Here the film gets a little cliché, and this bothered me as I was watching it the second time.  

She tells the Protagonist of the time she last saw her husband.  It was on his yacht.  While returning from a shore trip, she caught a glimpse of another woman diving into the water off yacht.  She believes the woman to have been his lover.  Reflectively, she says to the Protagonist: “I've never felt such envy.  Of her freedom.  You know how I dream of just diving off the boat?”  

Nolan makes a necessary attempt to invest the viewer in her plight in order to balance the strange, confusing time-play of the main plot.  While we try to piece together the puzzle of the film's main action (we are given info-dumps of essential facts now and then so we can all go “oh I see” or scratch our heads further), we are given a rather straightforward wife and mother's misery to connect with.  Though it is difficult to see how this relates to anything at the time.

About 1 hour and 15 minutes into the film, a terrific traffic sequence (part elaborate heist, part wicked car chase) finally starts answering the multitude of questions viewers by now has swinging around in their disoriented minds. Oddball events have been happening all along.  We later discover that the film has, in fact, been moving backward and forward in time all along.  But now, suddenly, the viewer begins to see events as they occur backward with much more frequency and starts to relate to the characters coming out of the future as well as those in the present.  

“A temporal pincer movement,” is how this is repeatedly referenced.  In effect, the Protagonist has been moving forward into the future but his side-kick is actually moving backward out of the future.  This is as strange and challenging for the viewer to grasp as it sounds.  We begin to see more and more events coming out of the future and intermingling with the present moving forward.  Nolan seems to be saying that the present is forwarding time into the future while the future is leaking into the present.

“Does your head hurt yet?” The side-kick asks the Protagonist at one point.  But the question is really a humorous nod to the audience.  The action is often spectacular, exactly what you would expect from a “summer blockbuster” movie.  It is obvious that Tenet (which is, obviously, spelled the same backward and forward) is intended to be seen on a gigantic screen, not my television – but that's another story entirely.  For all the explosions and sensational images, they are not gratuitous.  Everything is crafted around this complex plot of inversion of weaponry (among other things) coming out of the future.

An obvious question, after you finally get oriented (sort of) with the film's time-play, is why?  Why are people in the future sending us weapons to destroy us, their progenitors?  The answer is vague, as is typical with Nolan's love for ambiguity.  It is suggested that we really screwed up the planet and they resent us for making their lives more difficult.  As much was we desire a firm answer, “why” doesn't really matter does it?  

The bizarre situation is what it is.  Or, in terms of moving in either direction within time, “what's happened happened.”  Its not fate when you are moving backward, it is the future, but it still happens.  Nolan actually plays with this philosophical idea in several small places of the film.  That is one reason I enjoy his films so much.  They all have a hefty dose of intelligence to chew on.

The pincer movement is an attempt to converge on a moment of time and stop the arms dealer's plan for basically destroying the world through the inversion of entropy.  Once you scramble the a basic law of physics everything just disappears. Right?  But does the future disappear as well, since it is destroying its own the past?  That question is asked a couple of times.  The only answer posed is "the grandfather paradox."  Which, frankly, is not an answer at all.  As one character puts it, “don't think about it.”  With Tenet it is just better to roll with it.

For the final act of the film, the Protagonist is inverted and, for the first time, we see the events of the first half of film from his new perspective, as he moves backwards through them.  We see scenes replayed backwards that we have already witnessed forward earlier in the film.  Seeing the backward moving characters within the previous scenes is a startling epiphany for the viewer.  We really are moving forward and backward in time and we have been shown what that means in terms of the Protagonist.

Once inverted, he must breathe oxygen because the lungs don't work correctly when inverted.  He wears special forces type military gear including a oxygen/gas mask and helmet.  The Protagonist earlier in the film inexplicably gets into a fistfight with a para-military man.  Now the viewer understands that the forward moving Protagonist was actually fighting his backward moving self.

The entire pincer movement is to prevent an event from happening.  Doesn't this fly in the face of “whatever happened happened”?  Nolan does not really address this except with the fact that, since the future is trying to make something happen in the past, it hasn't happened that way yet.  Previously, the past happens in the past for the present.  No, the future is trying to happen in the past for the present.  

Maybe this is more difficult than these future people expected or perhaps they knew it would be difficult.  The future inventor of the most powerful inverted weapon, we are told, committed suicide after her discovery, so that others might not replicate her work.  That is a seemingly pointless tidbit Nolan leaves for the viewer to consider.  As usual, much of Nolan's entertainment value is not in the spectral but in his mind.

Sitting that aside, it takes the execution of the pincer movement on the screen, a large battle sequence, to fully appreciate inversion.  Seeing a large team of soldiers move forward through a complex assault that is all moving backward (the explosions simply appear and then compact themselves down into the ground, for example) is something that has never before been filmed.  It is strange to behold and certainly would have been impressive on an IMAX theater screen.  Even on TV, it is a most remarkable sequence in a long string of fantastic effects throughout the film.

But for all of its mammoth and sensational action and visuals Tenet strikes me as excessive, something decadent.  Yes, the plot is a wonderful puzzle to figure out and, once you do, it is highly rewarding in its implications.  Yes, the effects and action sequences are expertly directed.  But, the truth is I don't really care much about any of the characters in the film.  I don't know very much about them, other than the wife, and even she is a distant figure.  Her love for her son, which should be the linchpin for the humanity of the film, just isn't shown as much as its talked about.  

The Protagonist has no idea who he even is.  He is a mystery to himself that (unfortunately) he never really bothers to investigate since he is focused on the mission.  So we know almost nothing about him.  A bit more on-screen self-rumination would have made the character multi-dimensional.

There is just nothing in the film to give Tenet the human element that Nolan offered up so strongly in films like Inception, The Dark Knight, and Memento.  Tenet is character sterile and, therefore, it's metaphysically BIG nature feels excessive, perhaps overindulgent.  Just a glorified James Bond film.

I don't buy the Protagonist's concern for the arms trader's wife.  Too much of the weight of the film ends up riding on this oddly motivated action.  If the Protagonist were a super hero it would be OK but he's not that sort of character at all.  Even though, as it turns out, this is as vitally important as the pincer movement, it is without corresponding emotive force.  Thereby it feels conveniently contrived and dilutes the punch of the film.  I hope Nolan will return to the humanity he showed in virtually all his other films before he sets up his next big mind-bender.

There is one small, nice character-related touch.  Recall that the wife saw a woman jumping off her husband's yacht?  Recall that she envied the freedom of that unknown woman just to swim away from the husband's she hates.  It turns out, as these inversion things go, the wife was actually that woman and she simply saw herself without realizing it.  So, the woman she was so envious of earlier in the film was herself.  What happened happened.  

But it is too little, too late.  I did not care about any of the characters in Tenet.  They are wonderfully portrayed, it is just that Nolan's narrative does not make any of them in to much of anyone.  They are simply pieces on the board of a master-level game of chess.  The pieces matter but they have no individuality.  You don't end up especially rooting for the Protagonist or anyone else.  Partly, that is because you are unsure exactly what they are doing and why.  And though the whats and whys are finally revealed, the who's are like cardboard cut outs of people situated in the stadiums of the abbreviated baseball season we had in 2020.

The cardboard faces were meant to replace real people in the stands because of the pandemic, of course.  Perhaps there should have been cardboard people the theaters that premiered Tenet because of the pandemic, of course.  Certainly, COVID made the film a financial failure considering what the colossal expectations were before the world became infinitely more interesting and threatening than the world Christopher Nolan created.  

It isn't Nolan's fault.  No world is stranger or more captivating than Earth 2020.  As I said before, fantasy and science fiction are inadequate and unnecessary when you are living in an  actual dystopia complete with natural disasters and global warming and murderous riots and authoritarianism.  Under previous circumstances, Tenet might have been the escape movie everyone needed in the summer of 2020.  As it was, it was a movie everyone was afraid to go see during the summer and, after you finally did see it, you realized it was fun but the escape it provided was not what we needed at all.