Genre: Sci-Fi/Spy Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
About: Tenet has had a complicated release journey. There was all this behind-the-scenes talk about how Christopher Nolan wanted Tenet to be the film that saved the movie business. He wasn’t just releasing this for Warner Brothers. He was releasing it for the world! But it’s said Nolan nearly had a heart attack when it was suggested that Tenet would need to be played in – GASP – drive-in theaters! All of a sudden, Nolan considered waiting until the pandemic was over. In the end, the movie was forced into an unenviable staggered release pattern. Some places would get it, some wouldn’t, which would make box office boasting – a key marketing tool for studios – difficult. Tenet isn’t even playing in my home town, Hollywood. How ironic is that? I had to travel down to San Diego to see the film. But see the film I did.
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Details: 150 minutes
Tenet.
It’ll open the right doors.
Some of the wrong ones too.
That’s a line from the movie. Which is apropos considering Christopher Nolan himself has opened some of the right doors with Tenet, but also many of the wrong ones.
The Protagonist (yes, that’s our hero’s name) is a CIA agent who tries to kill himself via a suicide pill rather than give up his men. But it wasn’t a suicide pill. It was a test. To see who was willing to go the distance. Now that he’s proven his worth, he’s been recruited into a next level mission. It’s called Tenet. Unfortunately, that’s all he’s told. I guess the Protagonist will have to figure out the rest on his own!
He eventually meets up with a female version of Morpheus who explains what “tenet” is – it’s time inversion. The secret tenet gatekeepers keep finding these small artifacts – such as bullets – that do things backwards. So instead of shooting the bullet, you “receive” the bullet back into the gun. Female Morpheus doesn’t know where these artifacts are coming from. That will be the Protagonists’s job.
A lot of stuff happens here but, long story short, the Protagonist bumps into a sloppy drunk named Neil, who may or may not work for a secret organization, and the two interrogate the manufacturer of the inverted bullets, a billionaire Indian woman named Priya. It turns out these bullets are being manufactured in the future. So Priya doesn’t even know she’s manufactured them yet (or does she? Tenet).
All signs of these inverted weapons point to a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator. Sator is so big time that the Protagonist’s only way in is through his wife, Kat. Kat hates Sator, so there’s an opening there. She’s only still with him because he refuses to give her her son if she leaves. To prove his value to Kat, the Protagonist steals a painting for her. Okay, she says, she’ll introduce him.
The details are complicated, but to sum it up, Sator is secretly receiving gold and inverted weapons from his future self. This is what’s allowed him to become so freaking rich. He has also been searching for seven deliberately hidden pieces of a super weapon in the past from the future (Tenet). Once he finds all seven pieces, he will activate them, creating a super-inversion situation whereby the present and future will collide and the world will be destroyed.
Sator momentarily lets the Protagonist into his inner circle when he learns that he knows about tenet. Meanwhile, the Protagonist’s buddy, Neil, is looking for that seventh and final piece to the Wand of Inversion. They must get that final piece before Sator does. It’s the only way to stop the extinction level event. But then everything is complicated when it’s revealed that Sator has rigged himself so that if he commits suicide, the inversion event will happen automatically. I think. You think. Maybe. Maybe not? Tenet.
The one inarguable thing I’ve always said about Christopher Nolan is that he’s a great filmmaker.
He shoots everything in camera. There are no special effects. He’s said in numerous interviews that he believes the audience can feel when something has been done for real as opposed to with computer graphics. And I agree with that.
He casts his movies well. Everybody here is awesome. John David Washington is the perfect 2020 movie star. He’s got that screen presence a movie star needs yet he’s not too masculine. He almost has this cool feminine side to his demeanor that balances him out, making him easily accessible to audiences. I’m in love with Elizabeth Debicki. On the contrary, there’s something almost inaccessible about her that makes her alluring. She may be the perfect female star for a Christopher Nolan film. Kenneth Branaugh is over the top here, but my desire to see Sator go down proves that whatever he was doing was effective. Even Robert Pattinson was solid. He certainly looks good in those suits they dressed him up in.
And just the production value of a Christopher Nolan movie is so impressive. There was this moment around the halfway point where the characters are all out on one of those double-pontoon sailing skiffs. That scene did a better job of transporting me to another place than anything I’ve seen so far this year. Cause, to me, that’s what a Hollywood movie should do. It should take you to places you’ve never been. Show you things you’ve never seen.
And as much grief as I give Nolan for his pretentious film school approach (I mean who titles their main character “The Protagonist” other than an insufferable pretentious film school student? Come on.), he’s literally the only mega budget filmmaker making his own stuff. Without him, it’s all Disney and Marvel folks.
Maybe that’s why it’s so frustrating that Tenet didn’t work.
I fear that Nolan is approaching George Lucas level bubble territory. That elusive world where nobody says ‘no’ to you because of how successful you are. And this is the type of movie that requires a strong “no” person. It’s such a heady concept that if you don’t have people in your circle saying, “I don’t understand that, it needs to be clearer,” the movie isn’t going to work. And that appears to be what happened.
I mean there’s this moment early on where Female Morpheus is explaining to the Protagonist how inversion works. She hints at this idea of a Matrix like situation. That you can control this power. He tries to make the bullet come up to his hand but it won’t. “You have to drop it first” she says. He tries again, this time the bullet comes into his hand. But he didn’t drop it. She literally said, “You have to drop it first.” And he didn’t drop it and it still came up to his hand. The fact that nobody stopped to ask if the audience would be confused after that moment encapsulated what was wrong here.
The insurmountable issue with Tenet is that “inversion” is a difficult concept to understand. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense. That’s why you’re getting so many reactions that describe the film as “frustrating.” Because people don’t understand how the central concept of the film works.
One of the reasons the Matrix was so great was because its central concept was so easy to understand. “We’re unknowingly living in a virtual reality.” Boom. Understood! Tenet is the opposite. Even right now, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to figure out if inverted objects work under a different set of rules than inverted people. Aren’t inverted people on a pre-set tape? They’ve already gone that way (backwards), so there’s nothing you can do to stop them. These objects, however, you seem to be able to do unique things to them on a repeatable basis. Make them go backwards into your gun over and over again, for example. How does that make sense?
Nolan only makes things harder on himself with a borderline incomprehensible plot. I could take a UCLA course on why the Protagonist needed to a) steal a painting and b) do it by crashing an airplane and still not understand the logic, or what it had to do with the rest of the movie. He only exacerbates this issue by extending the film out to two and a half hours. It gives the audience even more time to get lost.
Maybe the best representation of what went wrong with this movie was the climax. In theory, it was a fun idea. You’re using both regular and inverted soldiers to obtain the final piece of the staff. I love that idea. But that’s all it ended up being, an idea. The actual execution was bizarre. We’re seeing soldiers head onto the battlefield while, simultaneously, soldiers leave the battlefield via the inverted timeline. They had already been through the mission.
So my first thought was, “Well then you already know you were successful, right?” But then I thought, “Wait, those are the different soldiers. Not the same ones.” “Or wait, are they the same soldiers?” The fact that I was still asking these questions this late in the game confirms how poorly the rules were explained to us. Because, at this point, I should be enjoying the moment. Instead, I’m trying to make sense of it all.
Nolan needs a “No” man moving forward or he’s in danger of becoming a parody of himself. A lot of us saw this as far back as Inception, which relied too heavily on exposition. Then came Interstellar, which had a lazy wonky structure. And now this. An idea that doesn’t even work at the concept stage.
Look, Nolan is a great filmmaker. Nobody argues that. But he needs to take a hard look in the mirror when it comes to his writing. He’s not doing himself any favors there. The one clean narrative he’s had out of his last four films was Dunkirk and the reason for that is that the timeline was simple. Everything happened on the same day. Moving forward, focus on what you’re good at – the directing side. But when it comes to writing, unless you’re going to hire people whose professional job it is to write, don’t do any more of these overly complicated concepts with sprawling narratives. They don’t hold together.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You want your ending to be the biggest exploitation of your concept of the entire movie. Tenet got this right. The movie is about time inversion. So what better an ending than throwing both regular AND inverted soldiers at the enemy? Sort of an “attack on the Death Star” but with multiple timeines happening at once. The only reason it didn’t work was because the concept was weak to begin with. But this is the right move as a screenwriter. If your movie is about dinosaurs on an island, your climax better deliver the best dinosaur versus human situation we could possibly imagine. It shouldn’t feature a plane crash.
