Tenet
- Nolan has expertly crafted another movie that is both interesting and exciting. Does it always make logical sense? That’s unclear, but the movie meets its ambitious mark more often than not.
Full Disclosure: This was the first movie I had seen in a theatre in about 6 months. The experience was a little weird – it felt a bit like I had been given permission to roam around a business that wasn’t open, given how empty it was – but it was still amazing to finally be able to see a movie on the big screen again. So, much like finding water in a desert, I was probably going to enjoy the movie no matter how unpalatable it might otherwise have been. I don’t think this is the case here though, this was a genuinely great movie. Also, props to the staff of the theatre and anyone else involved in the reopening. It all seemed very well set up and perfectly safe.
Review
Christopher Nolan is becoming the master of the “thinking person’s blockbuster”, and by that I mean that he forces you to think while watching his movies. It’s hard to come up with another director today who would be given blockbuster-sized budgets to make movies with convoluted plots that require so much attention from their audience. There’s a reason for that: he almost always pulls it off. Even if his films don’t 100 percent rise to the level of their ambition, they’re always expertly made, enjoyable, and, most importantly for his studio partners, make money.
Nolan loves playing with time. He’s made non-linear storytelling a central focus of movies like Memento, Inception, and Interstellar. Even a World War 2 movie like Dunkirk played around with tempo, with three different stories being told simultaneously but over different periods of time. With Tenet, not only is non-traditional time a central conceit of the movie, the manipulation of time is itself the great threat posed by the antagonist.
The central idea of the movie is this: John David Washington’s character (credited only as “The Protagonist”), formerly of the CIA, is recruited to join a secret, unknown organization that has been tracking objects that have been “inverted”, meaning that they move backwards through time. The members of the organization, known by their codeword, Tenet, are concerned that whoever is inverting objects in the future has a destructive objective in mind. The Protagonist’s mission is to find out what the aim of the future antagonists is by getting close to Andrei Sator (played by Kenneth Branagh), a Russian arms dealer in the present who has been linked to inverted weaponry, and his wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki).
John David Washington’s “Protagonist”, along with Robert Pattinson (also good in this movie) looking suave and well-dressed as they stroll into a building prepping for an art heist.
This is a movie where you really have to concentrate to know what’s going on, and even then you might not totally understand what is happening some of the time. In that way, it’s a pefect movie to watch in a theatre, where you won’t be distracted by messages on your phone or a million other things around the house. However, Nolan also adds just enough of the blockbuster-type action, that even if you don’t want to sit there and puzzle out the plot, you’ll still be entertained. Case in point – there’s one scene where Washington and crew crash a plane into a building, mostly just because they can. It isn’t really “necessary”, but it’s fun and it looks cool in a trailer, so why not. I imagine that’s exactly how Nolan justified it to himself and the movie’s investors.
Does the central conceit of the movie work? Yes and no. For much of the movie you’re spending so much time wondering “wait, does this make sense?” that sometimes it’s hard to just sit back and enjoy the movie. I’m not entirely sure that everything works logically. For example, the fight scenes between someone who is temporally inverted and someone who isn’t certainly look cool, but maybe don’t follow logically from the rules that are established for conversion in the film. I’ll likely have to go back for a repeat viewing to puzzle over those questions a little more. However, it all seems to work well enough that by the movie’s 3rd Act everything comes together to make it all pretty damn exciting.
Spoilers Ahead
Why crash a plane into a building? If you’re Christopher Nolan, apparently just because you can.
The movie’s biggest weakness comes in the form of its erstwhile antagonist, Sator. His apparent credo of “If I can’t have you, no one will” seems forced in the first instance when it’s shouted at his wife earlier in the movie, and then comes across as clumsy when it’s applied to life itself in the final showdown. The motivations of his unseen futuristic colleagues are also glossed over. It’s never entirely clear why all of this is happening, aside from a few tossed away lines that don’t fully explain the situation. One could try to make a case that this fits with a theme of the inevitability of time, except that this seems to be undercut by the fact that The Protagonist has so much agency to be able to change things.
There are various reveals in the last part of the movie, and while they don’t come across as shocking, they’re definitely cool. One of them involves an earlier operation, and we discover that a fight that we’ve previously seen is actually Washington’s character fighting with himself in an inverted time progression. The other comes near the end, where both the protagonist and the viewers find out that he is the one in charge of the Tenet organization, but in the future, having recruited his colleagues and set some of them on missions in inverted time into the past. Again, does this all make logical sense? Maybe, maybe not, but it makes for a fun moment.
Debicki and Branagh, seen here in front of a bunch of guns that seem to have no real purpose other than to tell us, “this guy is an arms dealer.”
5 Quick Hits
Washington has become a good actor in his own right, and for the most part sinks into his roles, from his work in Ballers to Black Klansman to this film, but every once and a while he makes a gesture, or has a facial expression that hits you with the fact “oh yeah, that’s Denzel’s son!”
I’d only ever seen Himesh Patel in Yesterday (I’m not exactly an EastEnders watcher), so it came as a bit of a surprise to see him in a role where he plays a badass, as he does in this movie in a small part.
Nolan loves his music to be dramatic. It becomes a part of the movie, it doesn’t just fade into the background – which is why he’s worked so successfully with Hans Zimmer in the past. Ludwig Goransson nails Zimmer’s flair for the dramatic, just with a younger, more modern vibe. Following his work on Black Panther (for which he won the Oscar), Creed, and The Mandalorian, he’s definitely a composer to watch, and one of the rising young stars in that field.
After the incredibly sad news about Chadwick Boseman’s passing, I was reminded of an interview that Denzel Washington once gave about being the middle guy in a relay for African American actors, taking over from Sidney Poitier, and passing the baton on to guys like Boseman and many others. His son is definitely in that great new group of young black actors. And it’s heartening to see that while Boseman is remembered for iconic black roles, parts like this for Washington are ones that anyone could play but are now being offered to African American actors. Progress in Hollywood has been far too slow, but there is progress to see.
I’ll just say it, at times Elizabeth Debicki is distractingly tall. So it speaks to her burgeoning acting talent that she is building a great career of characters where that trait doesn’t play a part in those roles. I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does with the role of Princess Diana in the upcoming seasons of The Crown.
