Tenet is one of those movies that will either frustrate you or delight you, especially if you’re a Christopher Nolan fan. It’s the love child of Nolan’s yearning to do a Bond film and his eagerness to dive deep into high concept ideas. It’s also a distillation of elements from his greatest hits: there are action scenes that recall the scale of Dunkirk and espionage that harkens back to the heist-themed Inception. Like a home-blended fruit juice, it’s meant to be devoured with pulp in the form of a plot that’s both simple and dense. It’s an experience that Nolan diehards will definitely remember, but it may leave normal movie goers annoyed and flustered.
The movie centers around a man known simply as the Protagonist (John David Washington) who is recruited into a shadowy organization named Tenet after passing a test that involves dealing with terrorists in a Kiev symphony hall. He soon comes to learn about ‘inverted’ objects, which have reverse entropy and travel backwards through time. Apparently, these objects are being sent back in time by humans from a dystopian future. These future humans deal with Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian arms dealer who accepts their mission to destroy the present to prevent their dreadful future. The Protagonist’s job is to find and apprehend Sator before he can accomplish his mission.
Although that may not have sounded much complicated, the film often dives into exposition that explains what’s happening, which often slows down the film. While this was also done in Inception, here, we don’t have a viewpoint character like Ariadne, who can let the audience understand the film’s world and its rules at a comfortable pace. This is not to say that Tenet is not entertaining. The action sequences reek of superior craftsmanship and high production values, featuring inventive ways of pitting normal and inverted objects and people against each other. Inverted cars, for instance, drive backwards; some of these cars actually had to be modified to drive that way. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson do a great job in nailing the film’s slick atmosphere.
The cast is mostly solid, with noticeable performances by supporting players such as Dimple Kapadia. Robert Pattinson’s Neil also has a good dynamic with the Protagonist, and Kenneth Branagh turns in a suitably hammy performance as the antagonist. The emotional core of the film is Sator’s wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who’s trying to find a new life for herself and her son. However, the film isn’t really as interested in an emotional layer as, say, Interstellar was.
There’s an argument to be made that Tenet isn’t as compelling as Nolan’s recent films, let alone classics like the Prestige, and that argument wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
On the other hand, it does leave you feeling like a four year old again, when you barely understood plots and watched movies only for the spectacle.
Tenet was supposed to be one of the cornerstones of 2020’s summer blockbuster slate, and while things turned out very differently, it is doing well in the international market despite a limited release, earning $200 million so far. This is one of those films which you have to rewatch to gain a better appreciation, but that is difficult to do under current circumstances. Looks like most of us will have to wait for the home release a few months later.