Big and loud and invigorating as it is, the year’s most anticipated film can’t overpower its flaws.
I kind of hope no one ever successfully explains to me what an algorithm actually is. Because it’s too useful to only have a faint idea. The vaguer concept is such a good tool for reasoning out the world that it’s become almost an article of faith. Whenever something weird or wonky happens on the Internet — and increasingly in real life — I can simply blame The Algorithm, whatever that might be. It’s nice to have an ignorant belief in a thing — a string of code, maybe? — that gives fault to our stars. The algorithm! It’s always the algorithm.
That thought crossed my mind watching Christopher Nolan’s new film Tenet, which comes to rely on an algorithm pretty heavily in its final, confusing act. Nolan probably has a better grasp on what he’s talking about than I do, but in Tenet, the algorithm is still employed as mere easy shorthand, a catch-all MacGuffin that means everything and nothing. Which provides Tenet with one of its few access points: it reminds us that Nolan is just making this shit up, much like the rest of us.
It’s important to bear this in mind should you choose to brave the theater-going experience to see Tenet yourself. I went to a very small press screening in a city with a low coronavirus infection rate (currently, at least), and so was treated to an arguably safer experience than many people will potentially face at their local multiplex. Make the decision for yourself, and wear a mask if you opt to go. (You’ll likely be required to.) But anyway, viewing Tenet as a silly bit of bombast rather than a legible, serious work of science-fiction will aid in your enjoyment. Trying to really get it will lead only to frustration. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
The movie, as you may have guessed from the trailers and early reviews (it’s been playing overseas for over a week now), is about time travel. But this is not the kind of time travel that has someone winking out of the present and popping up in olden times or some terrifyingly gleaming future. The temporal exploration of Tenet is hard and grinding, and is achieved second by grueling second. It’s a process that only looks fast and cool from the reverse perspective. Which is an interesting, and fresh, way to reexamine a well-worn trope, the bracingly practical and technical (if not plausible) approach that has become a hallmark of Nolan’s filmmaking.
Time travel gives Nolan the opportunity to craft a kind of palindromic symmetry in Tenet; we see some set pieces happen forward in time and in reverse. This doesn’t happen terribly often in the film, though, which may come as a disappointment to people looking for the immersive, holistic plunge of Inception. Mostly, Tenet is a straightforward caper movie—maximally staged and very, very loud, but flimsy at its heart. It’s been said that this is Nolan’s version of a James Bond movie, with its supervillain and its gadgets and its exotic locales. That similarity is certainly there. It’s also a true “blank check movie,” an opportunity for Nolan to play with all his favorite toys—planes, aerial photography, women characters there to provide emotional ballast—without the onus of rebuilding a franchise or, y’know, honoring the soldiers of W.W. II.
After a despairing two hours with The New Mutants, I found that to be a welcome pleasure. It’s invigorating, to be subsumed by two and a half hours of Nolan’s impressive pomp. Tenet is a real big-screen movie, a towering sensory riot that sent me out of the theater buzzing and rattled. What joy, to feel that again after so many months spent in the plain confines of home.
Had this movie arrived in a different timeline—one in which COVID never happened—Tenet’s many flaws would likely be more glaring. The script, for one, is a mess. Not because it’s hard to follow, or because Nolan knows what he means but fails to properly explain it to us; I don’t really mind those things, though they do start to get aggravating around the two-hour mark. The real problem with the writing is more basic: it’s awfully trite, a lot of boilerplate action-thriller dialogue that clangs leadenly against Nolan’s sleek aesthetic. The luxe cool of the movie is frequently undermined by dumb lines spoken with strained gravitas.
John David Washington is the lead, playing a character called the Protagonist, who is some sort of special ops somebody. Washington is a fine actor, open and alert and graced with a natural movie-star appeal. But like several of the suits he wears in the film, Tenet is a bad fit. He can’t quite get Nolan’s clunkers out with the cocksure suavity they require. Could anyone? I don’t know. Maybe not. But Washington’s particular energy—the warmth and un-cloying sweetness that make him so engaging in other roles—doesn’t sync with this movie.
The antagonist of the film, a Blofeld-esque Russian baddie with world-ending ambitions, is played by Kenneth Branagh, who recycles the Slavic hamminess of his Jack Ryan villain to disastrous effect. Washington simply doesn’t click with Tenet, but Branagh is downright bad in it. The dialogue he’s been given certainly don’t help, but I suspect even a more elegant script would have been chewed up by all of his mugging.
Robert Pattinson glides more easily through the film, mostly because he gets to play the fun guy—the Tom Hardy in Inception to Washington’s Leonardo DiCaprio. In loose linen suits and a Nolan-ish mop of hair, Pattinson lends the film a needed air of languid nonchalance. He’s having a good time, because he’s been allowed to. Elizabeth Debicki, playing the high-class moll to Branagh’s arms dealer, mostly just re-performs her role in The Night Manager. She’s good at that part, but I wish she had something new to do.
By the end of Tenet, even Nolan’s keen facility for spectacle has begun to fail him. The final set piece is a bracing siege on some kind of military base, a cacophony of gunfire and explosions that renders the core time-travel concept of Tenet more compellingly and convincingly than it has been elsewhere in the film. But that’s not saying much. It’s still really hard to understand what the hell is going on, and all the head-scratching starts to hurt pretty quickly. Nolan’s decision to stage this already confusing melee with all of his actors in obfuscating visored helmets was, perhaps, a poor one.
Picking apart what exactly is confusing about Tenet’s plot would take me too far into spoiler territory. But in a general sense, the film’s tangle of paradoxes is dense and opaque enough to become uninviting. By the end of the film, which teases lightly at a potential franchise that I don’t think will ever happen, I didn’t want to dive further into Tenet’s logical knot—I wanted to swat it away. Maybe a second or third viewing of the film will crack it open for me. But those revisits will have to wait while our world struggles to rescue its own future.