Tenet Reviewed

 

Tenet is a blistering, fast-paced, epic action thriller with a highly complex premise that leaves keeps you guessing and thoroughly engaged.  Go see it with a friends so you have someone to break it down with afterward.  Expect to need multiple viewing.  

 

 

Christopher Nolan is at it again.  High-concept complexity has become one of the hallmarks of the famed director’s solo projects.  While the rest of the movie industry has settled into safe profitable action franchises guaranteed to deliver at the box-office (even if they don’t meet expectation: see Star Wars); Nolan continues to tread a different path.  Nolan seems to be constantly pushing the bounds of what is possible within the standard movie constraints.  Each of his recent movies (aside from Dunkirk) has given audiences a greater and greater level of complexity.  

 

Inception gave you a dream within a dream.  Interstellar gave you Einstein’s Relativity and 4th dimensional space culminating in that trippy, infinite view of a girl’s bedroom.  In Tenet, Nolan takes it to a new level with the concept of Temporal Inversion.  Objects and even people can be ‘inverted’ so that they experience ‘reverse entropy’.  Essentially they begin running backwards in time.  Let the chaos begin.

 

This film is intense.  The intensity begins about 15 seconds in with the first gunshot.  From that point for the next hour this movie doesn’t stop and doesn’t even slow down.  I’ve never seen a movie sustain this kind of intense pace for this long.  You follow the story through the lens of John David Washington’s character “The Protagonist” (yes, this film doesn’t slow down long enough to reveal his name).  The Protagonist is thrown from scene to scene over the first half of the film.  

 

After a failed rescue mission that left The Protagonist attempting to kill himself rather than give up his colleagues, he is recruited into the mysterious world of Tenet, something he knows nothing about.  Give just the word Tenet and a hand gesture, he’s asked to proceed.  He begins to uncover the battle between the future and the present.  The future is attempting to destroy the film’s present using temporal objects and people who have been temporally inverted.  He must prevent the future, with allies in the present, from using an algorithm to annihilate time.  This is where the film gets crazy.  

 

One of the critiques of Nolan’s previous films has been that he devotes so much screen time to explaining what is actually happening in the film.  Think about the first cafe scene or the Penrose steps scene from Inception, or the explanation of a wormhole using a piece of paper from Interstellar. This critique, in my mind, is a bit unfair.  This criticism, however, cannot be level at Tenet.  The explanation scenes about inversion, and about how the world works are fast paced and quick.  It’s not so much that the concepts are not understandable or that the explanations are incomplete, it’s simply that the film moves on so quickly that they aren’t given the time to breathe.  The moment a concept is explained it’s immediately put into action before your brain has had time to process fully.  This leads to the feeling that you only half understanding everything that is happening throughout the movie.  

 

That being said, the half you are understanding is absolutely enthralling.  The concept of inversion is not merely time travel, but you have people and things existing in the same space but traveling the opposite direction in time.  In most time travel movies, you journey instantly into the past, then time runs forward again.  Tenet invests in the actual journey backward.  This leads to some of the most unique and eye-popping action sequences you’ve ever seen.  The fight scenes and battles between normal time flow and inverted is something we’ve never witnessed.  

 

The genius of it is immediately apparent.  If you had the privilege of seeing The Matrix when it first debuted, you’ll be familiar with the feeling witnessing something groundbreaking.  Tenet engenders that same feeling.  What further heightens this uniqueness was Nolan’s insistence that as much of the movie as possible be real and not done with special effects in post production.  Perhaps the scene that embodies this difference most was the crashing and subsequent blowing up of a jumbo jet.  When it crashes, the crash feels different, the explosion just feels and looks different to your eyes, because we aren’t used to seeing the real thing.  

 

As the film culminates, the final battle combines everything this film is about into menagerie of intensity.  The final battle is a ‘temporal pincer maneuver’.  In order to stop the present from being destroyed, you have a group of inverted troops and a group of normal troops on each side battling each other.  You have building blowing up, building reassembling, bullets flying forward and bullets reversing.  Troops moving forward and backward.  It’s chaos, in all the best ways possible.  Just sit back and enjoy, but don’t expect to fully understand what you are watching the first time.  

 

Nolan is creating films that are more and more designed not to be completely understood in the first sitting.  They are designed, much like an onion, to pealed back in greater and greater detail the more you engage with them.  As the complexity slowly gives way to understanding over time, the greater the level of appreciation you have for what was attempted.  In this way, his films are like great works of art that continually surprise you with brilliance.  But there is a danger in that pursuit. The chasm between a great work of deep complexity and indecipherable nonsense is not as wide as you might think. It is possible that Nolan will one day push the bounds of complexity so far that the multi-viewing journey of understanding no longer becomes worth it for audiences. Tenet is not the film that will push him over the limit.  Instead, Tenet leaves you wanting to reengage and understand.  This, ultimately, makes it a success.