Tenet (2020) - Review
- Sam Bateson
- Jun 30, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 20, 2023
Director: Christopher Nolan | Written by Christopher Nolan | 150m
(Spoilers ahead)
Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
Not time travel. Inversion.
- Warner Bros -
Ah, Tenet, the latest mind-bending, time-twirling adventure from director-auteur Christopher Nolan. The film that was supposed to kick start the cinema experience during a pandemic, deemed a failure because circumstances made it one. As a cinematic experience, it was exactly what audiences needed. As an easily digestible film, well, people need to check their expectations at the door.
Tenet was deemed the "saviour of cinema". In any other year, this would probably be true; Nolan has long espoused the cinema experience as the best way to consume cinematic media, and his films have often been the kind of big-screen experiences that keep theatres in business. But coming halfway through a global pandemic, Tenet was always going to struggle. But at the same time, just because circumstances made it an economic failure does not reflect its failure as a film; it is nothing but a triumph.
Following the unnamed Protagonist (David Washington) as he teams up with the mysterious Neil (Robert Pattinson), a member of the organisation known only by the phrase 'Tenet', against the Russian Oligarch Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who is able to communicate with the future thanks to a technology that is capable of inverting the entropy of an object (he leaves items for the future to find, only for future inhabitants to invert payments of gold that he digs up in the present...). Sator is in search of nine pieces of technology which, when assembled, form an object called the Algorithm, a device which was invented in the future and that can invert the entropy of the universe, destroying everything in creation. Its creators split it into nine and sent each into the past. Sator has been tasked with finding and assembling the pieces and sending them to the future so that it can be activated. Confused yet? Just wait...
Truth be told, Tenet is an incredibly confusing film - that's before we get to the time-inversion plot. To get there, we need to navigate a convoluted plot involving Sator's wife Katherine Barton (Elizabeth Debicki); a Goya painting forged by a Spaniard named Arepo (with whom Katherine is 'close') has landed in the hands of Sator, who bought it for a vast sum after Katherine declared it an original. He now blackmails her with this painting, essentially keeping her estranged from her son Max. Meanwhile, our Protagonist is led to Sator by following a trail of ammunition that was manufactured by Priya Singh (Dimple Kapadia) and sold to Sator, who has had it inverted... *inhales* phew, this movie is difficult to follow.
Tenet bears all the hallmarks of a great Nolan film; it is beautifully presented, with cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema on his trademark film-stock medium, the imagery is rich, deep and dripping with beauty from the first to the last frame. A world-spanning adventure that opens in the Ukraine, then taking us through London (look out for Michael Caine in his one-scene cameo), Oslo and Vietnam (that isn't really Vietnam, but the movie says it is). Rich-looking people do rich-people things, and of course, there's the time-bending element. There's always one. The conceit is relatively straightforward; a character may be moving forward through time, or they may have been 'inverted', meaning they have gone through a turnstile that inverts their entropy. For them, they are still travelling forwards through time but they are actually moving through the past. Seems straightforward, right?
Nolan being Nolan, he plays with the conceit in deliriously complicated ways; at any one time, there may be two or three versions of each character in different parts of the world, conflicting with one another and creating scenarios in the past that have already been paid off in the future. The issue is that Tenet genuinely suffers from one of my least favourite excuses; the people who dislike it generally don't understand it. This is an excuse that has been used before but on a more metaphorical level; "you didn't get the metaphor, therefore you don't understand the movie". This time, the logistics of the plot are so complex that your enjoyment of it comes from how much you understand it; make no mistake, this film is like any other Nolan film, in that it takes several views (with subtitles...) to make sense of much of the story. For instance, a central scene is set in a room split by a glass wall; on one side, characters move forward through time, and on the other, the characters are inverted, moving backwards through time. On the forward side, the first question they answer is the last question they are asked from the perspective of the inverted side and vice versa. Once you've got your head around that, the rest of the movie will make some semblance of sense. Don't get me wrong, this movie makes all kinds of complicated moves, including scenes that later only make sense thanks to inverted characters having indirect influences on things. There was a moment two-thirds of the way through the movie, during the second airport scene, where I genuinely said out loud "holy shit, that's brilliant".
There's lots for the more casual viewer to enjoy here; if the complications of the timeline get too much, at least you can enjoy the brilliantly executed action scenes. I mean, who doesn't want to see a guy get his face ripped off with a cheesegrater. Much has been said that Tenet features less computer generated imagery than your average RomCom, and it shows; fight scenes are shot twice, backwards and forwards, actors were trained to talk, walk and even run in reverse-motion (I feel sorry for poor Brannagh who is occasionally forced to deliver complicated lines in reverse - and in Russian). Nolan is very much a story-driven director, but he doesn't disappoint with the action, which ranges from simple, geographically-sound punch-ups to linear/inverted car chases - and a stunning finale set simultaneously in two different times, three locations, four perspectives and hundreds of characters in various stages of inversion. It's delirious, it's awesome and it's engaging.
For all that is brilliant, there is the serious detractor in the form of the atrocious sound mix. Many of Nolan's films have suffered with this before, such as Interstellar, which crushed dialogue with the music, but here the effect is one less of artistic choice (which worked with Interstellar) and more of a technical one; dialogue frequently peaks and crackles when things get loud. I'm a staunch supporter of old-school filmmaking, but where it is appropriate; a little ADR to replace the offending on-set recordings wouldn't have gone amiss... Tenet is absolutely a film that requires a re-watch with subtitles, even if sometimes even they give up and simply say what is being said is [imperceptible]... (check out 00:35:27 for that one).
I'm often surprised by the number of people who have seen other Christopher Nolan films who still do not expect his movies to play with time; about the only two of his features that are linear are The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Even Dunkirk was presented in a non-linear way; sure, Tenet probably goes way beyond what any reasonable audience can understand, and maybe I'm being a snob by saying "I understand it, therefore I think it is a good film", but I think Tenet suffered mostly because of the circumstances in which it was released; many of Nolan's films will have been watched multiple times during their theatrical releases, increasing their box-office draws and improving audience's understanding, and therefore approval, of them; I doubt that most people would have been keen to go back for multiple re-watches of Tenet thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic Nolan insisted on opening the movie during. I gave the movie a chance upon the home media release, and I can genuinely say that watching it again makes the film better thanks to the simple reason that it is actually easy to follow once you watch it again.
Sam's Score: 7
Tenet is available on home media and most digital video stores.
All images © Warner Brothers
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