A Review of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020)
By Zac Langridge
Christopher Nolan is a master filmmaker, and has proven himself time and time again to be perhaps the most innovative, ambitious and accomplished director of the 21st century. I personally have a tremendous amount of respect for him and his work, and have consistently enjoyed everything that he has done in the past. Unfortunately, as reviews for his latest film Tenet seem to suggest, maybe not all halos last forever.
I want to get this out of the way, and admit that after everything that has gone down in this godforsaken year, I was eagerly awaiting Tenet. The trailers had promised everything you could want from a Nolan movie, and it looked to be a surefire hit. An ambitious action film set in an unpredictable, technologically driven world where all was up in the air? It seemed the perfect bout of escapism for a time period where everything has gone mad. It would be a breath of fresh air to go to a cinema with an ice-cream and forget about everything for a while.
It was also a highly original concept, a beacon in a whirlwind of Disney live action remakes and huge franchise reboots. The release date was consistently pushed back due to Covid19 restrictions, especially overseas, with Nolan insisting that his film (like all his others) was made to be seen on the big screen. I admire the filmmaker’s commitment to his art, refusing to compromise even as Warner Bros. ideally would’ve liked to have dropped it on a streaming service to acquire a nice and easy profit. But no! Tenet deserved to be seen in all it’s cinematic glory, in the dark, with the epic scale and sound to set the mood.
With all the pushbacks and trailers setting up my expectations, Tenet became more than just a movie for me. It transformed into an event; the first film I would see in cinemas since the Covid19 lockdown, and Christopher Nolan’s brand new cinematic masterpiece. So I’d be lying if I sat here and wrote that Tenet didn’t leave me somewhat disappointed.
In many ways, I was expecting to be perplexed, confounded, and even thrown off by the surely incomprehensible concepts and plotting of a film that was sure to be unlike any other made previously. Just like Inception (2010), this is a film that dabbles in the themes of time, and plays with the mathematical components of matter and the mind. I was promptly confused by the aforementioned film when I first saw it, but I was still entertained. Several more viewings have helped me wrap my head around the plot of Inception, and I no doubt have more to learn and discover much about that film through future viewings.
Perhaps the same thing will happen to me with Tenet. Perhaps it will take three viewings or more to fully understand just what in the hell was going on in that film, and perhaps everything will fall into place like the puzzles that Nolan has meticulously created with his films in the past.
That said, I do feel that there is something that Nolan’s more high-concept films, such as Inception and Interstellar (2014) have, that Tenet simply doesn’t.
This is a film that is far more interested in it’s concept than anything else. And that concept is something that I simply just can’t get my head around. The film starts off simply enough, with supposed explanations that will help the audience set their expectations for what’s to come, accomplished by a memorable scene of our protagonist (I cannot remember his name for the life of me) catching bullets with his gun. But yet again, like with other films that Nolan has made, he will often add new layers to the technicalities of how the concept works the further challenge the characters. These new pieces of information all contribute to a plot that is getting larger and larger, all delivered within intense action scenes that often take up most of our attention, and delivered by characters with exposition that’s as fast as it is full of technical jargon, ultimately flying over heads before we have any time to absorb it. While this all creates a movie that feels slick and smart, and keeps a fast pace so as to not bore the audience, it ultimately takes us on a ride that we do not fully understand. Mainstream audiences need more time to absorb information that is being thrown at us from multiple characters, otherwise a good chunk of the movie comes off as white noise. It doesn’t help that Nolan has clearly taken inspiration from the James Bond films, essentially creating a spy thriller with all the complexities and double-crosses that throw off lesser intellects such as myself, while peppering it with complex sci-fi concepts of “inverse time” that are more visually engaging than they are to understand.
So for many, Tenet is inaccessible in regards to its story and concept. But even if the plots of Interstellar and Inception managed to lose me at certain points, the characters and emotional elements managed to hold up the experiences. This is where Tenet truly falters. Making a high-concept film is totally fine, so long as it encourages me to keep going and not tune out, even if I can’t fully immerse myself in the world it sets up. This is obviously where characters and thematic elements come into play, helping to ground us in the moment where the plot doesn’t. Unfortunately, Nolan seems to have bet all his chips on the time-traveling aspect of the film, and has left his characters as generally hollow shells making their way through gun battles and highly volatile scenarios that should leave us feeling greatly concerned for their safety, yet we can’t feel a thing. With most of their dialogue dedicated to plot exposition and explanations of time concepts, it’s often hard to feel like these are human beings at all, but rather robots programmed to dance to the tune of the script and scenarios that are really all the movie is invested in. True these characters are supposed to be Secret Service agents, but even in their most personal moments, Nolan never allows us to dive into their personal lives and explore their true feelings about what they’ve got themselves into. The most I felt for any character was for the film’s female lead, played by Elizabeth Debicki, largely because she is the only one who has a relatable motivation (wanting to reconnect with her son), and faces a genuinely human challenge (dealing with an abusive husband). The scenes between her character and Kenneth Branagh are the film’s most compelling, because seeing her suffer at the hands of a controlling and violent man are very relevant to our society, where women are often treated like slaves at the hands of powerful millionaires. Everyone else on the other hand, all feel like puppets with no agency over themselves, all dancing to Nolan’s epic scale, high-concept plot that intrigues and baffles simultaneously, leading only to frustration and eventual boredom.
This film has clearly been granted a world class production, with all it’s 200 million dollar budget (give or take) having clearly gone into something. But all that money and extreme attention to detail doesn’t really hold up for me in this case, especially when the crucial pillars of plot and characters that are supposed to support that up in the air, are too weak to keep it from crumbling. As said, Nolan has clearly taken inspiration from James Bond, having utilized a series of vast locations around the world to encompass his story. Ukraine, Italy and India are just a few countries featured. Accompanied by Robert Pattinson’s suitable British charisma and the added bonus of gun combat, one can certainly picture this as an alternate James Bond adventure for those obsessed with sci-fi concepts. In one scene, our protagonist is about to enjoy a dinner in a glorious temple-like dining hall atop a vast mountain overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, with the accompanying sinister bodyguards and fancifully dressed female lead being enough to convince any poor sod ignorantly wandering in without any context that they are in fact watching a Bond movie with a new coat of paint. While the cruelty of the villain towards his wife sets him up as one to be feared, we never get too much of an insight into his motivations besides a dramatic monologue near the end that was, unfortunately, obscured by Branagh’s fabricated accent and the film’s booming sound design (or was that simply my theater having dreadful speakers?).
Multiple moments of dialogue being suffocated by the surrounding sound certainly didn’t help my following of the story, and there was ultimately considerable lack of tension and danger that would help us fear the consequences of our protagonists failing. Though the film makes it very clear that the inverse timing technology is going to contribute to the equivalent of a World War 3, yet due to our lack of understanding of the characters and the world they inhabit, we never feel as though the apocalypse ever is truly just around the corner. The world of Tenet is presented through Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography as being enormous and expansive, yet we never feel much of a soul coming through, with little human connection established to install a sense of fear for the lives of our own Earth that could be lost due to the destructive potential of inverse time. For all the locations and beautiful vistas that Nolan presents to us, the danger never feels apparent, because that scenery itself is not threatened as it would be in, say, a nuclear war. In order to feel fear for the humans on Earth, a connection to those people would ideally be established, but as previously said, Nolan sadly never allows this, so the danger feels absent. Furthermore, we never really see the effects of inverse time on large groups of people - it’s mostly confined to bullets being fired in reverse, a highway chase, and a fight between two versions of our main character. Other than that, an awful lot of the concepts of inverse time and its consequences that are brought up, and were so promised to be explored in the trailers, are simply left unclear or up to the imagination.
It’s genuinely unfortunate that Tenet fails to engage both on a plotting level, and on a character based level because, as with any Christopher Nolan movie, there is absolutely high-class filmmaking here. The technical aspects of the film were shown to be impeccable in the trailers, and sets a high standard for any large-scale epic to be released in the coming years. Nolan has shot the movie on glorious 70 millimeter film, resulting in a warm, fuzzy photographic quality that occasionally appears to flicker like an old projector from the 1960’s. The cinematography, often shot on IMAX, is full of highly dynamic images that set the perfect mood for a high-concept film in the 21st century where the future of our world is at stake. Eerie Koyaanisqatsi (1982) style shots of abandoned Soviet-era cities in a wasteland of gravel and coal, and sweeping vistas of wind turbines erected in the ocean paint a picture of a new world, modernist and driven by technology, heading towards an unknown fate - the ideal backdrop for a movie that’s about the prevention of a third world war. If nothing else, this film should provide perfect inspiration for modernist photographers. I was also very happy with the film’s music. Although very surprised to discover during the end credits that it was not Hans Zimmer who composed it, Ludwig Göransson’s score for Tenet again ups the modernist elements, the music is pretty much (from what I can recall) composed entirely with synthesizers, eschewing Zimmer’s string ostinatos for pulsing electronic blasts that occasionally seemed to emulate the sound of the infamous Inception horn and the Joker textures from The Dark Knight (2008). The crashing drums were enough to keep me on the edge of my seat, and there was often an experimental avant-garde edge to the whole affair that is sure to make it a unique and memorable score for years to come, even if it’s lack of memorable melodies and music themes is something for traditionalists to lament.
The action scenes are staged with an eye for gargantuan scale, especially towards the end of the film, and the usage of in-camera imagery ensures that this movie will remain timeless for years to come. Nolan eschews usage of CGI for practical explosions and real-life gunfire that gives everything a sense of tangibility that’s often missing from big-budget blockbusters nowadays. A particular fight scene with our lead, played by John Washington, proves to be particularly memorable - brutal (including one move with a cheese-grater) and efficiently reminding me of Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018) - and a particular scene with an airplane at an airport remains probably the most ambitious and large-scale you could get with this film. There were times where it was impossible not to gawk at the scale of what was being shown on screen, and marvel at the ambition of the filmmaker in charge. With all the computer imagery at your disposal, what other filmmaker nowadays would dare to crash a real full-scale jumbo jet into a hangar? The actual reverse time effects were impressive, especially during a moment where a high-rise building is targeted by a rocket launcher, and were used somewhat restrainfully, giving off the sense that Nolan was attempting to utilize it the way the makers of the original Star Wars trilogy utilized lightsabers - not trying to dazzle the audience with the fancy eye-candy too early, or too much. It’s just too bad that the finale involved a huge army of characters dressed in identical uniforms, wearing helmets that obscured their faces, resulting in a chaotic battle where your eyes are trying desperately to work out who’s who, where they are, and what they’re doing. And ultimately, if you don’t really know what’s going on, or don’t feel what they’re supposed to be fighting for, what’s the point?
I’m hesitant to call Tenet a bad movie, because truthfully, I don’t know if it is. Just like with Nolan’s other time-bending epic, Inception, it’s probably a film I’ll have to see multiple times in order to understand, and therefore, to fully appreciate. But all the same, for all the complexities of his past films, Nolan has consistently given his films either a thematic point or characters to latch onto. Inception gave you the camaraderie between Leonardo DiCaprio and his gang; Interstellar centered around a relationship between a father and his daughter; Dunkirk (2017) was a reconstruction of important historical events. Tenet in comparison, is merely a film that’s in love with its own ideas and concepts, but never delivers on anything beyond that and the obvious technical flair.
This is a film for those that enjoy picking apart complex plots and enjoy sorting through timelines in order to piece together a puzzle of a story. While it may grow on me over time, I can safely say that, while I respect the movie and it’s maker, Tenet is not really a film for me.
