Spending almost ten years working on the story, and five writing the script, in Tenet, Christopher Nolan is yet again examining the vagaries of time, a theme that's front and centre in Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). It's undeniably fascinating to see a tent pole Hollywood production engaging with issues such as entropy, thermodynamics, reversibility and irreversibility, the grandfather paradox, and T-symmetry, all the while keeping proceedings housed firmly within the spy genre (it's a Bond movie in all but name). However, the film's main problems aren't related to the squandered existential potential, the much-ballyhooed complexity, the puzzle-like structure, the philosophical musing, or the thematic similarity to Nolan's previous work. Rather, they are more fundamental, existing almost entirely at a structural level (although some of the performances don't help matters, nor does the abysmal sound mixing). The film looks incredible, the practical effects in the action scenes are extraordinarily mounted, the cinematography is stunning, and the editing is superb, but there simply isn't anything of note under the shiny veneer. It's a film with virtually no interest in human beings.
The plot of Tenet is straightforward in outline. We follow a CIA operative known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) as he is recruited into an ultra-secret international espionage squad called Tenet. His mission is simple - at some point in the future, someone has figured out how to reverse the entropy of objects, effectively being able to send them back along the timeline without having to reverse time itself. The implications of this are catastrophic and have set humanity on course for World War III, and probable extinction, unless The Protagonist can figure out who is doing it and put a stop to their machinations.
Tenet is an event movie in every way; this 150-minute, $200m+ original idea is a massive studio tent pole written and directed by the most popular filmmaker alive. And I will say this, the budget is on the screen. Oftentimes, you'll see a movie that's cost a ridiculous amount and you'll sit there thinking, "they must have spent a lot on catering." With Tenet, however, it's all there, front and centre. No small amount of that money, of course, must have gone on the practical effects (incredibly, the film has only 280 VFX shots) - whether it be bungee-jumping onto the side of a building, a close-quarters fight where one of the combatants moves in reverse, a Boeing 747 jet crashing into a building (which was shot for real), a highway chase where some of the cars are going forward in time and others are going backwards, or an all-out battle scene where, again, some of the soldiers travel forward whilst others move in reverse.
It's one of those films where you'll genuinely be asking yourself, "how the hell did they do that?"; a question that's become increasingly rare in our CGI-reliant times. Along the same lines, the cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema is stunning, as he mixes 15-perf 70mm IMAX film with traditional 70mm stock and a few 35mm sequences in a manner where the shifts in aspect ratio are barely noticeable. It's the kind of film that could only exist in the medium of cinema - no other art form could even begin to approximate its aesthetic design and splendour. A celluloid purist, Nolan has always made a big stink about the artistic importance of cinema, and Tenet finds him pushing the aesthetic boundaries of what the art form can accomplish.
Unfortunately, no matter how visually unique or aesthetically impressive it may be, no amount of gloss can hide the fact that the screenplay is a turgid mess and suffers from some fundamental problems - most notably, it's bereft of emotion and populated with cardboard cut-outs that are supposed to be characters. The problems start early when The Protagonist is told that the future of humanity depends on his mission. This is precisely when I started to tune out. Any film that declares its story is none-other than saving humanity has gone so big as to render the people who populate its narrative as insignificant. It's also a cliché, it's dull as dishwater, and we've seen it done a million-and-one-times.
As for the characters, good lord, they're badly written. The Protagonist isn't a person with an interiority; he's a cypher, the audience's surrogate so that Nolan can explain the plot to us. And there's nothing more to him - he's utterly emotionless, seemingly void of any kind of relatable motivation, has no psychological through-line, and nothing even resembling a character arc. As for Kenneth Branagh as Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, think of the most clichéd Russian villain you've ever seen. Now square that and you'll be some way towards imagining how ludicrous Sator is. He isn't a person - he's a collection of near-satirical tics, clichés, and elements from other, better films. Maybe with a more menacing actor in the role, it might have worked, but all I could think whenever he was on screen was "that accent is hilarious." Robert Pattinson's Neil (The Protagonist's handler) and Elizabeth Debicki's Kat (Sator's wife) fair better, but neither set the screen alight. Along the same lines, much of the second half of the film hinges on the fact that The Protagonist and Kat find themselves drawn to one another, yet Washington and Debicki have zero chemistry. At a human level, there's nothing to take a hold of the audience, nothing to make us care about any of these people.
Speaking of Kat, a common criticism of Nolan's filmography as a whole is that his female characters tend to be victims whose deaths motivate men or who need saving by men, and/or women who define themselves almost entirely in terms of their relationship to men. Now, I'm not saying that Nolan is obliged to write more rounded female characters. He isn't. Much like one of his favourite filmmakers, Michael Mann, Nolan's films are androcentric. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, in Mann, there are to be found strong female characters with considerable agency, whereas in Tenet, Kat is nothing more than a pawn in a game played by powerful men who effortlessly control her. She defines herself almost entirely in terms of her role as a self-sacrificing mother, and whilst this is an interesting trait the first couple of times it comes up, by the time Nolan is reminding us of how much she has sacrificed for the 237th time, it had become obvious that this was going to be the extent of her characterisation.
At one point early in the film, The Protagonist is told "don't try to understand it, just feel it", which is advice that Nolan is also offering to his audience. The problem is that there's nothing to feel. Tenet is a puzzle, the impenetrability of which will depend on each individual viewer (and how much of the appallingly poorly-mixed dialogue you can make out), but unlike Memento (which remains Nolan's best by a long way), which packed a seriously emotional gut-punch when we finally learn what was at the heart of the puzzle, Tenet offers us nothing more than the task of deciphering it for its own sake. There's no payoff. There's nothing to make us want to penetrate a story that seems more intent on reminding us how clever it is than trying to depict real people or establish real emotional stakes; it's a film more enamoured by the complexity of its own design than by any of the people contained within. It's an emotional void - all technical virtuosity and surface sheen with next to nothing at its core.
The plot of Tenet is straightforward in outline. We follow a CIA operative known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) as he is recruited into an ultra-secret international espionage squad called Tenet. His mission is simple - at some point in the future, someone has figured out how to reverse the entropy of objects, effectively being able to send them back along the timeline without having to reverse time itself. The implications of this are catastrophic and have set humanity on course for World War III, and probable extinction, unless The Protagonist can figure out who is doing it and put a stop to their machinations.
Tenet is an event movie in every way; this 150-minute, $200m+ original idea is a massive studio tent pole written and directed by the most popular filmmaker alive. And I will say this, the budget is on the screen. Oftentimes, you'll see a movie that's cost a ridiculous amount and you'll sit there thinking, "they must have spent a lot on catering." With Tenet, however, it's all there, front and centre. No small amount of that money, of course, must have gone on the practical effects (incredibly, the film has only 280 VFX shots) - whether it be bungee-jumping onto the side of a building, a close-quarters fight where one of the combatants moves in reverse, a Boeing 747 jet crashing into a building (which was shot for real), a highway chase where some of the cars are going forward in time and others are going backwards, or an all-out battle scene where, again, some of the soldiers travel forward whilst others move in reverse.
It's one of those films where you'll genuinely be asking yourself, "how the hell did they do that?"; a question that's become increasingly rare in our CGI-reliant times. Along the same lines, the cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema is stunning, as he mixes 15-perf 70mm IMAX film with traditional 70mm stock and a few 35mm sequences in a manner where the shifts in aspect ratio are barely noticeable. It's the kind of film that could only exist in the medium of cinema - no other art form could even begin to approximate its aesthetic design and splendour. A celluloid purist, Nolan has always made a big stink about the artistic importance of cinema, and Tenet finds him pushing the aesthetic boundaries of what the art form can accomplish.
Unfortunately, no matter how visually unique or aesthetically impressive it may be, no amount of gloss can hide the fact that the screenplay is a turgid mess and suffers from some fundamental problems - most notably, it's bereft of emotion and populated with cardboard cut-outs that are supposed to be characters. The problems start early when The Protagonist is told that the future of humanity depends on his mission. This is precisely when I started to tune out. Any film that declares its story is none-other than saving humanity has gone so big as to render the people who populate its narrative as insignificant. It's also a cliché, it's dull as dishwater, and we've seen it done a million-and-one-times.
As for the characters, good lord, they're badly written. The Protagonist isn't a person with an interiority; he's a cypher, the audience's surrogate so that Nolan can explain the plot to us. And there's nothing more to him - he's utterly emotionless, seemingly void of any kind of relatable motivation, has no psychological through-line, and nothing even resembling a character arc. As for Kenneth Branagh as Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, think of the most clichéd Russian villain you've ever seen. Now square that and you'll be some way towards imagining how ludicrous Sator is. He isn't a person - he's a collection of near-satirical tics, clichés, and elements from other, better films. Maybe with a more menacing actor in the role, it might have worked, but all I could think whenever he was on screen was "that accent is hilarious." Robert Pattinson's Neil (The Protagonist's handler) and Elizabeth Debicki's Kat (Sator's wife) fair better, but neither set the screen alight. Along the same lines, much of the second half of the film hinges on the fact that The Protagonist and Kat find themselves drawn to one another, yet Washington and Debicki have zero chemistry. At a human level, there's nothing to take a hold of the audience, nothing to make us care about any of these people.
Speaking of Kat, a common criticism of Nolan's filmography as a whole is that his female characters tend to be victims whose deaths motivate men or who need saving by men, and/or women who define themselves almost entirely in terms of their relationship to men. Now, I'm not saying that Nolan is obliged to write more rounded female characters. He isn't. Much like one of his favourite filmmakers, Michael Mann, Nolan's films are androcentric. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, in Mann, there are to be found strong female characters with considerable agency, whereas in Tenet, Kat is nothing more than a pawn in a game played by powerful men who effortlessly control her. She defines herself almost entirely in terms of her role as a self-sacrificing mother, and whilst this is an interesting trait the first couple of times it comes up, by the time Nolan is reminding us of how much she has sacrificed for the 237th time, it had become obvious that this was going to be the extent of her characterisation.
At one point early in the film, The Protagonist is told "don't try to understand it, just feel it", which is advice that Nolan is also offering to his audience. The problem is that there's nothing to feel. Tenet is a puzzle, the impenetrability of which will depend on each individual viewer (and how much of the appallingly poorly-mixed dialogue you can make out), but unlike Memento (which remains Nolan's best by a long way), which packed a seriously emotional gut-punch when we finally learn what was at the heart of the puzzle, Tenet offers us nothing more than the task of deciphering it for its own sake. There's no payoff. There's nothing to make us want to penetrate a story that seems more intent on reminding us how clever it is than trying to depict real people or establish real emotional stakes; it's a film more enamoured by the complexity of its own design than by any of the people contained within. It's an emotional void - all technical virtuosity and surface sheen with next to nothing at its core.