PG-13 | 2h 36m | Sci-Fi, Action, Thriller | Feb. 23, 2024
Released during the pandemic, 2020’s “Tenet” fell through the cracks for me. I missed it again when it re-released earlier this year, so I decided to go have a look. Christopher Nolan is not a director to take lightly, nor pass up. “Tenet” also features a stellar cast.
Unfortunately, what could have been a unique mash-up of a slick James Bond 007-style spy film and a complex sci-fi premise, despite a few fine performances, overall it ends up an emotionally non-engaging head-scratcher.
Story
“Tenet” kicks off with an undercover CIA agent, known only as the “Protagonist” (John David Washington—Denzel’s son) getting made while trying to extract a fellow spy during a terrorist attack.
His willingness to voluntarily sacrifice himself via suicide pill during torture is, unbeknownst to him, the test that will open the door to a new and highly classified spy unit.
Once accepted, he’s given a new mission: prevent a third world war that would eradicate life as we know it. And because this is a Christopher Nolan flick, the new cold war is built around something more menacing than nukes: Somebody in the future has figured out the laws of “temporal inversion,” which causes objects from the future to fly backwards through time.
The Protagonist needs to put a stop to all of this business of backwards streaking bullets, cars swerving around backwards, and explosions sucking back into whatever device detonated them.
Execution
Nolan is no stranger to messing with time and timelines in his films, but “Tenet,” despite its numerous flashy action sequences (a real 747 being crashed into an airport hangar for example), doesn’t manage to convey its concepts cinematically.
“Tenet” will most likely attract the “Star Wars” fan club, who will slice, dice, debate, and submit physics doctoral theses based on the feasibility of the time-twisting concepts presented here. For the rest of us, like I said, there’s likely to be more scratching of the head than light bulbs turning on above the head. The idea of inversion is so complex, the characters have to constantly narrate the plot for us to keep up.
Movies nowadays are jam-packed with pseudo-scientific “explanations” for fantastical situations and magical realism, and some of the smoke and mirrors work more readily than others. I‘ll happily suspend my disbelief regarding flex-capacitor mumbo-jumbo and the “1.21 gigawatts” in “Back to the Future’” needed to facilitate Doc Brown’s travel though the time-space continuum, but the pseudo-explanations in “Tenet,” regardless of being visually CGI-enhanced with aplomb, had part of my brain constantly muttering, “absolutely not.”
Nolan would appear to be attempting to address the “humorless” criticism he’s received over the years; the dry wit of both John David Washington and Robert Pattinson is mildly amusing (much of the film’s enjoyment derives from watching these two one-up each other about who looks more debonair in a bespoke suit), but it’s really not that Nolan’s films lack comedy or jokes, but that he takes his own weltanschauung so seriously his work becomes uncommonly weighty.
Performances
Despite all the time-related confusion, Washington, as the Protagonist, might be the most accessible protagonist to date in a Nolan film, possibly because he often seems as confused as the audience is.Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki, affecting a posh British accent, is somewhat underused in a role that gives her the impression of having formidable agency but in reality, very little to do.
Overall
However, the narrative in “Tenet” is purely driven by the concept and the action, but it lacks human connection, no matter how charismatic the actors are.
It also doesn’t help to have a generic McGuffin and a formulaic bad guy at the core of a two-hour-and-a-half movie packed with heavy exposition about a fictional quantum physics concept. It does help that it surrounds the physics-defying premise with a bubble of realism only achieved by talented people in the various contributing technical departments.
“Oppenheimer” was fascinating, but generally speaking, in a movie about a highly fantastical possibility of World War III, when the world’s on the brink of an actual World War III (what with America and China already deep in a cyber-WWIII), I’m less concerned with physics, atoms, technology, mechanisms, and time in all of it’s various manifestations. I’m more interested in human communication. But that’s not what Christopher Nolan does. While “Tenet” was not my cup of tea, it might be yours.
