Christopher Nolan’s latest is Hollywood’s first release in six months, but “it collapses under the weight of all the plot strands and concepts stuffed into it,” writes Nicholas Barber.
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is the first new Hollywood blockbuster to be released in cinemas in almost six months. The good news is that it is so sprawling, so epic, so crammed with exotic locations, snazzy costumes, shoot-outs and explosions that you get six months’ worth of big-screen entertainment in two and a half hours. Clearly, it never occurred to Nolan to tone it down every now and then. Having directed Inception, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy, he’s not someone you associate with quiet, intimate indie dramas. But it’s still startling to see a film so over-the-top that when one character asks if the villains are planning a nuclear holocaust, another character snaps: “No. Something worse.”
The recipient of this unpleasant news is a cool and confident CIA agent (John David Washington, star of BlacKkKlansman) known only as the Protagonist. He is then told that certain objects scattered around the world are moving backwards through time: they were manufactured in the future and are heading into the past. In some way that I didn’t understand, an exposition-spouting scientist (Clémence Poésy) has worked out that these “inverted” objects are the remnants of a war which will be declared centuries from now, and will nonetheless wipe out the whole of history. Got that? No, me neither, but the point is that it makes a nuclear holocaust look like a game of dominos.
Even that reality-smashing threat isn’t enough for Nolan, though. The Protagonist has only just had his beginner’s crash course in time travel when he dashes off on a mission which doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. First, he has to break into an arms dealer’s heavily-guarded flat in Mumbai with the aid of a louche British fixer, Robert Pattinson, who deserves his own spin-off film. Then, he has to pop to a posh restaurant in London for a briefing with a bigwig played by Nolan’s lucky charm, Michael Caine (the character is named Sir Michael in homage). Then, he’s instructed to liaise with a sadistic Russian oligarch, Kenneth Branagh, who conducts his business meetings while skimming over the waves on a top-of-the-range high-speed catamaran. But in order to do that, the Protagonist has to help the oligarch’s wife, Elizabeth Debicki, get out of her marriage by ... errrr ... crashing a jumbo jet into Oslo Airport and stealing a forged Goya drawing. Got that? Once again, me neither. But it is obvious that Nolan didn’t think of a single scene without thinking how he could make it more excessive and expensive.
He has often said that he would like to direct a Bond movie, but he must have got tired of waiting for the producers to hire him, so he has gone ahead and made one of his own. From its opening action set piece, to its whistle-stop tour of international beauty spots, to its super-rich, heavily-accented bad guy with an army of expendable henchmen, Tenet follows the 007 formula to the letter – the only notable change being that the main role has been split in two, with Washington playing the tough, dedicated government agent, and Pattinson adding the English accent, the insouciant humour and the taste for alcohol. 
It’s a while before Nolan gets past this spy-movie stuff and moves on to time inversion. But when he does get there, he takes it to characteristic extremes. He stages frenetic car chases and gun battles in which different people are racing in different directions through the timestream, and he introduces lots of head-hurting ideas which the Protagonist seems to grasp in a second, but which some of us are still struggling with days afterwards. Basically, Tenet is a Bond movie which squeezes Back to the Future 2 and Edge of Tomorrow into its last half-hour.
That sounds pretty tempting, and after a summer without summer blockbusters, I’m grateful for a film which feels like several blockbusters combined. But Nolan and his editor haven’t quite found the right balance between those blockbusters. That is, they have devoted so much of Tenet to the Bond-alike sequences that the later science-fiction sequences are frustratingly hurried, undeveloped and almost impossible to make sense of. The previous Nolan film which most resembles Tenet is Inception, but in Inception, the notion of popping in and out of meticulously designed dreams kept recurring from beginning to end. In Tenet, time inversion is pushed into the background for so long that you start to wonder if Nolan has forgotten about it. After all, we hear early on in the story that inverted objects could obliterate the universe as we know it. It’s hard to care, for the next hour or two, whether an oligarch’s wife is unhappy because she doesn’t see enough of her son, or which high-security vault contains a forged drawing.
Again, you have to hand it to Nolan. To use the old expression, he puts the money on the screen, delivering the kind of noisy, extravagant and fundamentally ridiculous pulp fiction which reminds you why you go to the cinema. But it collapses under the weight of all the plot strands and concepts stuffed into it. You don’t get the impression, which you usually get from his films, that every element is precisely where it should be. Some parts of it go on too long, others not long enough. It’s a treat to see a really big film again, but a smaller one might have been better.
The blams come thick and fast. Tenet, in fact, might be Christopher Nolan’s blammiest film yet. BLAM! A terrifying thing just happened. BLAM! A shocking moment of revelation. BLAM! Here’s a speedboat. (There really is a massive blam accompanying an otherwise ordinary shot of two people on a speedboat.) It’s not even Hans Zimmer this time — here the great Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, The Mandalorian) is on scoring duties, making it all his own (you will nod your head intensely) but without ever scrimping on the blams. Because if a Christopher Nolan film doesn’t sound like the end of the world, then something’s wrong. And this one really is about the end of the world.
We’re told early on — defiantly and resolutely — that this is not a film about time-travel. There are a handful of instances in Tenet where one character lays things out to another, each time telling them it’s okay if they don’t quite get it. “Don’t try to understand it,” says Clémence Poésy’s Laura, Tenet’s Q to John David Washington’s James Bond, as she introduces him to backward bullets (they go back in time… don’t try to understand it) and gives him a brief primer. It’s not time-travel, she tells him, it’s “technology that can reverse an object’s entropy”. In other words, Christopher Nolan wants you to know that this is not Back To The Future. This is serious business. This is about the prevention of World War III. “Nuclear holocaust?” asks Washington’s protagonist. No, she says — this is worse.
This scene, Nolan setting out his stall, is scored sumptuously, romantically — it’s one big swoon, and it speaks volumes. Despite a complex relationship serving as the film’s broken heart (courtesy of Kenneth Branagh’s arms-dealing oligarch Andrei and his estranged and abused wife Kat, played by Elizabeth Debicki), Nolan’s great love affair, of course, is with time itself. From Memento’s muddied, memory-straining recollections to Dunkirk’s triple-pronged timeline and Interstellar’s generational rifts, he can’t get enough of the stuff, and Tenet is awash in it. It’s not a plot device — it’s the thing itself, something to be explored, investigated, played with, twisted, bent.
This scene, Nolan setting out his stall, is scored sumptuously, romantically — it’s one big swoon, and it speaks volumes. Despite a complex relationship serving as the film’s broken heart (courtesy of Kenneth Branagh’s arms-dealing oligarch Andrei and his estranged and abused wife Kat, played by Elizabeth Debicki), Nolan’s great love affair, of course, is with time itself. From Memento’s muddied, memory-straining recollections to Dunkirk’s triple-pronged timeline and Interstellar’s generational rifts, he can’t get enough of the stuff, and Tenet is awash in it. It’s not a plot device — it’s the thing itself, something to be explored, investigated, played with, twisted, bent.
For the most part, that’s welcome. “Try to keep up,” one character says in regards to the mechanics of it all. “Does your head hurt?” another asks later. Somebody is told they need to stop thinking in linear terms. No doubt some big brains will be fine with all of this — and will be able to follow the plot — but for the rest of us, Tenet is often a baffling, bewildering ride. Does it matter? Kind of. It’s hard to completely invest in things that go completely over your head. The broad strokes are there, and it’s consistently compelling, but it’s a little taxing. No doubt it all makes sense on Nolan’s hard drive, but it’s difficult to emotionally engage with it all.
If that’s even what the film wants us to do. These are great actors — Washington, Pattinson, Branagh and Debicki are all immensely watchable — but only towards the end, as things begin to pay off, do you really get the chills here and there. For the most part, everybody’s on a mission, doing their job, the film barely stopping to breathe, certainly not to take any sentimental detours. And nobody involved looms larger than Nolan himself. This is a film engineered for dissection and deconstruction. Just as Inception was, this is an M.C. Escher painting, but folded, origami-like, and with holes poked into it for its own denizens to fall through. It may not be Back To The Future, but regardless, it has its cake, eats it, then goes back in time and eats it again. It may not be a hokey time-travel film, but that doesn’t mean Nolan can’t get his rocks off playing around with paradoxes.
And ultimately, for all of that, Tenet once again proves Nolan’s undying commitment to big-screen thrills and spills. There’s a lot riding on this film, to resurrect cinema, to wrench people away from their televisions, facemasks and all. It may well do the trick: if you’re after a big old explosive Nolan braingasm, that is exactly what you’re going to get, shot on old-fashioned film too (as the end credits proudly state). By the time it’s done, you might not know what the hell’s gone on, but it is exciting nevertheless. It is ferociously entertaining.
This mind-bender is the director at his most coldly intellectual.
Christopher Nolan has never been what you’d call a sentimental filmmaker, but his highly anticipated eleventh movie seems to have had every trace of humanity surgically removed in post. Tenet will be many people’s first movie theater experience in months, and it’s a perfect reintroduction—a dizzyingly ambitious, exhilarating popcorn thriller that demands to be seen on the big screen, peppered with visuals that feel genuinely groundbreaking. It’s also a strangely apt choice for the social distancing era because nobody on screen is relating to each other in a normal way, or sharing anything that feels like intimacy.
Back in March, Nolan wrote a heartfelt and touching ode to movie theaters in The Washington Post, which doubled as an explanation for why he was holding out to release Tenet in theaters. Nolan’s passion for the moviegoing experience as a way people can come together and connect resonated deeply with me, and it echoed what I was seeking as I made my way to the theater this week.
My cinema experience, in a part of the UK where coronavirus cases are currently low, was surreal. At a weekday matinee, I counted eleven people in a 172 seat screen, many of us solo, all of us appropriately distanced. Everyone wore masks, and kept them on throughout the movie except to occasionally sip a beverage. Nobody was eating popcorn. The atmosphere was somber, but not tense. We felt uneasy, but not unsafe. And soon enough we were whisked out of reality by the nerve-wracking opening moments of Tenet—which, as it happens, depict an opera house audience being terrorized by armed gunmen (so much for relaxing back into the theater experience!). That opening sequence set the tone for a film that delivers on spectacle and thrills, but lacks the emotional catharsis I was longing for.
Nolan’s films have always been driven more by concepts than characters, but in the past those concepts had psychological questions behind them: In Memento, Guy Pearce’s protagonist can’t trust his own memory, so what does that do to his psyche? Inception’s characters are lucid dreamers by profession, so how do they keep a grip on reality? In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey bends the fabric of space and time to save the world, but can he ever make amends to the daughter he abandoned? In Tenet, there is no discernible human story being told. Its characters are mostly gorgeous ciphers, zipping from one high-octane set piece to the next unencumbered by personality, and if you accept that from the jump, you’ll have fun.
Tenet’s central idea is that it’s possible for objects to move backwards through time, as well as forwards. This process, known as inversion, isn’t like traditional time travel – it’s a radiation-fueled process that changes the object on a cellular level, reversing its entropy, and it’s enormously dangerous in the wrong hands. Though loosely grounded in science, inversion is a knowingly convoluted and mind-boggling concept that only becomes more so as the film goes on. “Don’t try to understand it,” a scientist urges John David Washington’s CIA agent, who is simply named The Protagonist. “Just feel it.” He obeys, and so should you.
Being good at taking orders is one of The Protagonist’s few discernible traits, and Washington’s raw charisma is even more noticeable given how little he has to play. He’s enlisted to help prevent an apocalypse that would be even worse than a nuclear holocaust, and is on the horizon because someone is sending “inverted weapons” into the present from the future. Inverted weapons are much more dangerous than regular ones not only because trying to understand how they work is liable to induce a migraine, but because their destructive power can affect the past as well as the future. In other words, an inverted weapon could destroy not only civilization, but also all of history. That’s a chilling idea that’s never fully explored, but works well enough to create stakes.
Working with Robert Pattinson’s mysterious, winsome Neil, The Protagonist traces the inverted weapons back to arms dealer Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian baddie who seems to have wandered right onto set from a forgotten Bond movie. He’s developed an algorithm that would invert the entire world, putting it into reverse and therefore destroying civilization. His weakness is his abused, blackmailed wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who loathes him enough to join forces with The Protagonist and Neil to bring him down.
As a blockbuster innovator, Nolan is unmatched, and it’s his ability to bring seemingly impossible concepts to life onscreen that gives Tenet its biggest thrills. Without going too far into spoiler territory, there’s a fight sequence in which The Protagonist and Neil are moving forwards in time while their attackers are moving in reverse that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on screen before, recalling the extraordinary moment when Paris folds in upon itself in Inception. Other set pieces here are lifted right out of the spy movie playbook—a car chase, a boat chase, a plane crash – but are delivered with a Nolan spin that keeps them fresh.
Debicki’s role is technically the meatiest of the main three, but her sole motivation is her love for a son who we barely see onscreen, and she spends a tiresome amount of time as the damsel in distress before finally getting a satisfying arc. Washington and Pattinson actually get to have more fun by virtue of their wafer-thin characters, and their sparky banter gives the movie its only moments of human connection.
What makes Tenet so watchable is the sense that Nolan knows exactly what he’s doing. Like it or not, the thinness of the characters and the complexity of the concepts is all by design; both are wryly acknowledged in the script more than once, but you barely have time to get too hung up on either before the next breathtaking action sequence arrives to demand your attention. And at a time of extraordinary failure in national leadership, it sure is comforting to imagine a world in which highly competent, impeccably dressed government agents work behind the scenes to avert disasters before they happen.
We go to the movies for many things—for escapism and excitement, but also to feel something. For all Tenet’s thrills, it left me wanting on that front. As a longtime fan of his work, I’d love to see how the Nolan of 2020 would approach a stripped-down character drama like Memento, or even a mid-budget movie like The Prestige whose ingenuity is all in its script, not its technical effects. If the pandemic has a lasting impact on Hollywood’s ability to shoot large-scale productions, forcing filmmakers to think more indie for a while, we just might find out.
Go with it, and Christopher Nolan’s high-concept action romp will leave you ripping off your face mask for air, even as you wonder what it was all about
Who shall save cinema? Not James Bond apparently. There’s been a brand-new Daniel Craig spectacular ready to go since Easter, arguably just the thing to get punters’ actual bums back on actual seats. But Team 007 is wimping out, unwilling to splurge their product irreversibly into some potential new ruinous lockdown – and Disney has suffered a comparable bottle-loss, dumping its live-action version of the Mulan legend on to streaming services.
So it’s up to the mighty Christopher Nolan to take the heroic, morale-boosting gamble and open his big new film in cinemas. Tenet is a gigantically confusing, gigantically entertaining and gigantically gigantic metaphysical action thriller in which a protagonist called The Protagonist battles cosmic incursions from the future while time flows backwards and forwards at the same time. There’s a 747 plane that crashes into a warehouse and then uncrashes back out of it, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.
The palindromic narrative concept is epitomised by that coolly hi-tech, high-concept title (maybe Nolan briefly considered something similarly resonant like Radar or Noon). With its international locations and stunt set pieces along with all the temporal weirdness, it’s actually quite like a Bond film called No Time To Die To Time No.
Of course it’s madly preposterous, and I sympathise with anyone who thinks that abolishing the cause-effect sequence to mess with “time” effectively cancels jeopardy and annuls suspense and moreover runs up against the illogic of what happens when the altered past meets the join of the unaltered present – what this film identifies as the “grandfather paradox”, though without solving the problem. And to some degree, all the film’s explosions (and implosions) are there to divert your attention from this basic insolubility.
But for me, Tenet is preposterous in the tradition of Boorman’s Point Blank, or even Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a deadpan jeu d’esprit, a cerebral cadenza, a deadpan flourish of crazy implausibility – but supercharged with steroidal energy and imagination. As head-scratchers go, it’s a scalp-shredder, a skull-mangler. But it’s gloriously ambitious and I staggered out of the cinema, plucking off my face mask dizzy with Nolan-vertigo. (People wear face masks in the film also.) It’s also got moments of deadpan wit, surreality and style and Robert Pattinson may have singlehandedly made the double-breasted suit acceptable once more in men’s tailoring.
Pattinson plays Neil, a dapper, and slightly louche British intelligence officer in Mumbai who makes contact with The Protagonist, played by a toughly unemoting John David Washington. The Protag, as no one calls him, is ordered by a shadowy American government agency to tackle a new cold war situation: an attack from the future from forces capable of reversing time. Washington is shown guns that suck bullets from the wall when you pull the trigger, an innovation he greets with a kind of mildly disapproving surprise, as if he is watching a TV news item about driverless Ubers. Who is going to make use of this terrifying technology and how is it to be countered? This leads our unnamed hero into contact with a mega-rich Indian contractor (elegantly played by Dimple Kapadia) and a creepy Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) and his tragically poised and willowy wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki).
It is Debicki who has the most recognisable human emotions here, shouting, crying and even smiling in a way that no one else quite does, and her performance is very strong, though my tiny quarrel with Tenet is that it pinches ideas wholesale from the BBC adaptation of The Night Manager, and Debicki herself is called upon to play essentially the same role. As for Washington and Pattinson, they have to tamp down their natural warmth, though there are hints of what might even be called a bromance. But that is not the point: they are not ciphers exactly, but they are agents. The point is the phenomenal, dreamlike display itself, a vision of the end of the world. Maybe Nolan wants to meditate on the great palindrome of mortality: from dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.
Perhaps Tenet is not finally as challenging as his other temporal disruptor, the early masterpiece Memento from 2000, but there are such amazing moments in it – symmetrically recurring fist-fight scenes, revisited from different viewpoints, in which the combatants are apparently governed by different time-flows: one forward, one backward. It shouldn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. What it makes is amazing cinema. Wow.
Writer-director Christopher Nolan sends star John David Washington moving back and forth in every dimension in this sci-fi thriller costarring Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki.

Tenet is surely the most eagerly anticipated film to be released theatrically since the coronavirus pandemic began. That’s only partly because, in some places, it will be the only film to be released theatrically since the virus arrived.

As befits a blockbuster about nothing less than a few people trying to save the world from “something worse” than Armageddon, there is a lot riding on Tenet succeeding with its own set of missions. Mission one: get released in the first place so it can start recouping what must have been a massive production budget. Next mission: save theaters and exhibition chains on the brink of bankruptcy, and all the workers that depend on them. In fact, while it’s at it, the film may need to save the very future of venue-based cinema, those hallowed gathering places for “collective human engagement,” to quote its writer-director Christopher Nolan’s Washington Post opinion piece from the spring.

That’s a megaton of pressure for one sci-fi action film with a not-yet-A-list lead actor on the poster (John David Washington from BlacKkKlansman, dashing but a little dull).

Even some of us critics here in the U.K., among the first to see the film, are feeling the heat. There will be viewers scrutinizing every tweet, review and opinion aggregator as they weigh whether to leave their quarantine bubbles to see it when it opens August 26 in select, less virally-loaded territories.

By sheer coincidence, the press screenings in London took place during the same week as the Democratic National Convention in the U.S., where nearly every speaker urged American citizens to vote like the future of democracy is hanging in the balance. (Because it is.) With all that future to worry about, both political and cinematic, it’s enough to drive an expat to, well, Xanax.

Like Xanax, Tenet’s title is a palindrome, spelled the same way backward and forward. That's fitting for a story about technology that can “invert” people and things, making them capable of going back in time. And like Xanax, Tenet makes you feel floaty, mesmerized and, to an extent, soothed by its spectacle — but also so cloudy in the head that the only option is to relax and let it blow your mind around like a balloon, buffeted by seaside breezes and hot air.

The idea is that this inversion tech was/will be invented by people in the future, but the material — bolts, gears, broken watches, assorted time-travel-controlling MacGuffins — keeps washing up in the present, the “detritus of a coming war.” The protagonist (Washington), a C.I.A. operative recruited to help the shadowy Tenet organization that’s trying to stop the aforementioned worse-than-Armageddon event, learns from lab-coated expert Barbara (Clémence Poésy) that an inverted bullet isn’t fired, for example, it’s caught in the gun. Likewise, an inverted car seems to drive solely in reverse, and a person who has gone through one of the “time stiles” that invert things appears to be moving, talking, even breathing backwards. That makes the hand-to-hand fight sequences especially snappy and unsettling to watch, filmed in claustrophobically tight shots that look like a cross between capoeira, boxing and avant-garde modern dance.

At one point, the protagonist — who, in an irritatingly meta screenwriting conceit, is literally called “the protagonist” in the end credits and is never named otherwise throughout the film — discusses the classic paradox of time travel with his colleague, Neil (Robert Pattinson). The protagonist asks, for example: If you went back in time and killed your grandfather before you were born, would you instantly disappear? There is no answer, Neil replies unhelpfully, because it’s a paradox. Or, as he circuitously declares later about another matter, “Whatever happened, happened.”

Apologies for making everything about the state of American politics these days, but the latter phrase, repeated a couple of times in the film, by sheer accident evokes Donald Trump’s indifferent shrug at 170,000 Americans dying by coronavirus that “it is what it is" — a line Michelle Obama slyly re-purposed for her convention speech earlier this week. And maybe it’s a side effect of the dreamy, bewitching spell the film casts to find echoes of it in the real world, but a similar kind of callous, fatalistic disregard for life runs through this fiction. There’s something a little bit retro, a bit alienating, about the way the protagonist, his colleagues and the bad guys blithely murder secondary characters and no one mourns, no one cares. As in the dreams in Inception, the Nolan film Tenet most closely resembles, each reverie within a nightmare is basically another movie with guns and car chases. Death not only has no dominion; it’s practically meaningless.

In the opening sequence of Tenet, beautifully executed though it is, a whole auditorium of classical-music concert goers are put at risk of being blown up by an explosive device, a fact the protagonist seems to sort of laugh off. “Only the people in the cheap seats” might get killed. Not so much sympathy there for people experiencing “collective human engagement” together.

If it seems like this review is shying away from describing the plot, that’s not just out of concern to avoid spoilers. I watched the movie twice for this review, and still feel very confused about what is supposed to be going on and why. Even more baffling than the why is the how, the fictional physics of inversion. All those outfits that make YouTube videos about movie plot holes and cinematic inconsistencies are going to implode with joy when they get a load of this.

Suffice it to say, the protagonist, Neil and their colleagues from the Tenet org — including Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a military type sporting an enormous hipster beard — are striving to collect, Pokemon-style, all the assorted chunky bits of hardware that will enable that worse-than-Armageddon event. To do this, they also need the help of Kat (Elizabeth Debicki, Widows), the elegant English wife of a ruthless but also deeply damaged Russian oligarch named Sator (Kenneth Branagh), not to be confused with shady Russia-born Trumpworld fixer Felix Sater.

This allows Nolan to delve into a whole realm of human experience — matrimony — that he usually shies away from, apart from the murderous imaginary wife Marion Cotillard played in Inception. Otherwise, wives in Nolan films are almost always saintly and/or dead except for in flashbacks. Here, Kat, sometimes impulsive and reckless, is almost but not entirely saintly (she is sacrificing everything for the sake of her child) and alive (although that life is at one point put in grave danger). Nevertheless, her female presence adds a color to Nolan’s palette, and Debicki has persuasive chemistry with Branagh in their joint portrait of a violent, dysfunctional love-hate relationship.

Unfortunately, it all too often feels like Kat’s function in the story is either to be endangered enough to push the plot forward or to be merely decorative, like so much of the lush, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-infamous production design by Nathan Crowley (a Nolan regular along with most of the top-credit crew). Crowley and DP Hoyte van Hoytema adhere to a stark palette of neutrals throughout, mostly the color of concrete, desert dust and rust. This is interleaved with bright but cold images of blue water and sky in the many boat-, shipping container- and aquatic-adjacent-set sequences.

Altogether, it makes for a chilly, cerebral film — easy to admire, especially since it's so rich in audacity and originality, but almost impossible to love, lacking as it is in a certain humanity.

Nolan’s high-concept espionage thriller is the rare action film where the characters don’t just say the world will end if they fail in their mission – you feel it, too.
Will Tenet save cinema? We’ve somehow let everything ride on a single film, the first studio tentpole to be released since the pandemic began. We’re convinced it can take the pressure. Christopher Nolan’s films have always been great, lumbering beasts of cinema – super-sized, puzzle-box epics that have become irresistible box office draws. Surely, people will come masked and in droves, ready to dissect it as furiously as they did with Inception or Interstellar?
And there’s Nolan himself, the purist who made a dogged last stand against the digital release model. Tenet will be seen in cinemas, he declared, or it will not be seen at all. It’s a shame that the narrative around its release will inevitably cloud any real discussion of the film’s merits. Tenet is as intricately and exquisitely designed as Nolan’s earlier work. It boasts some of the most spectacular, memorable set-pieces of his career.
Ostensibly an espionage thriller, it opens on a nameless figure (BlacKkKlansman’s John David Washington), whose commitment to his work sees him recruited by a mystery organisation, then sent off into the world with a single palindrome: “Tenet”. This word will “open the right doors and some of the wrong ones, too”. He crosses paths with allies (Robert Pattinson’s Neil, and Michael Caine in a brief cameo) and foes (Kenneth Branagh’s Andrei Sator, with a Russian accent as thick as borscht).
He stumbles into a great, yawning chasm of possibility and probability – namely, the discovery that objects can travel forwards and backwards through time, carving out wide channels in the fabric of reality. It’s a time travel film. But, also, as the director himself insists, not a time travel film. It’s the most complex of Nolan’s contraptions. It can be frightening. It can be claustrophobic. At times, it verges on the incomprehensible. We expect the complex and byzantine from Nolan’s work. But here, with an idea he’s wrestled with for over a decade, the director’s managed to reach new heights of obfuscation.
Nolan seems to almost revel in the futility of words here. The central conceit – that it’s possible to reverse an object’s passage through time – is easy to follow. But the director makes the smaller details deliberately hard to track, with the dialogue often delivered in whispers or from behind masks. It’s been seemingly engineered for multiple viewings.
Does it matter all that much, though? Tenet is a thrilling place to get lost in. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” explains Laura (Clémence Poésy), who serves as one of the film’s exposition machines. The advice is directed as much to us as it is to the film’s hero. But while the appeal of Nolan’s films usually comes from watching all the pieces fall neatly into place, the final picture bringing a sense of order to existence, the director has found himself increasingly drawn towards chaos.
The sturdy, logical dream levels of Inception have been replaced by the bombs of Dunkirk. They whizz past, without a target or a specific purpose, guided by an invisible hand. The film sends waves of helplessness crashing over its audience. Tenet, too, has much to do with the terror of the unseen and the unknowable. Threats emerge from hidden sources, their tendrils reaching out and slowly wrapping themselves around the Earth’s circumference.
In the place of words, atmosphere thrives. Tenet is ruled by a deep, perfidious sense of tension. It’s the rare action film where the characters don’t just say the world will end if they fail in their mission – you feel it, too. Ludwig Göransson (stepping into the shoes of Nolan’s usual collaborator, Hans Zimmer) creates a score built of low, anxious vibrations that pulsate through even the most incidental of scenes. Most of the colours we see are familiar to Nolan’s worlds – yellow tones make everything feel like it’s been lightly coated in toxic smog – though one particular, showstopping scene is bathed in hellish reds and blues. The action scenes, all carefully shaped around the idea of “inverted time”, are coordinated to look like some kind of strange, modernist ballet.
There’s something alluring about the way the surreal rubs shoulders with the usual trappings of the spy genre: the exotic locations, chilly British dames (The Night Manager’s Elizabeth Debicki as Kat, wife of Sator), and brash hero. Washington’s charisma is undeniable – an ideal combination of likeability and cool reserve, which the rising star delivers with Bond-like flair – though his quips can be a little predictable. “Where I’m from, you buy me dinner first,” he says to a security guard, post-pat-down. Nolan at least seems aware that the character suffers from a certain two-dimensionality. The credits simply call him “The Protagonist”.
A little harder to forgive is his script’s depiction of Kat. Nolan may have moved on from his obsession with dead wives, who haunt the edges of his frames, but his female lead is here still defined by the male figures in her life – the son she’s been separated from and the husband who holds power over her. But while Nolan finds almost nothing to say about motherhood, there’s something genuinely unnerving about Sator’s firecracker nature. Branagh is unexpectedly fearsome in the role. His violence is unpredictable, his nihilism a menace.
Nolan prides himself on these bold choices. He’s here to shake foundations. But no film could ever save the theatrical experience single-handed from the jaws of a never-ending pandemic and a cataclysmic recession. When we look back on 2020, we won’t remember what Tenet did for the film industry. We’ll remember the governments that failed their people, their economies, and the arts. Tenet is no saviour. It is, and will always be, a victim of circumstance.

What the hell was that?!

Director Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” finally arrives in theaters Thursday, and watching it one thing is immediately clear: The months-long shroud of secrecy around the film’s plot was not for fear of spoilers, but rather because Warner Bros. couldn’t find a smart enough marketer to summarize this science blither-blather.

Even for the vaunted director of “Inception,” an epic about shared dreams, and “Memento,” in which scenes play out in reverse, “Tenet” is heady stuff. Trying to understand the story can make you feel like you’re sitting on a stool in a dunce cap.

The points I’m confident about: The main characters are trying to save the world from total annihilation; the leading man is romantically interested in Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a British art dealer married to a weapons dealer (did they meet in dealing school?); and the film is, in the broadest possible terms, about time travel.

The rest is murky.

Nolan’s most irritating choice is to name John David Washington’s leading man The Protagonist. Are we in Physics or Lit Class, Chris? He’s a CIA agent, who after nearly dying on a mission in Ukraine, is given a new life on a secret team called Tenet.

Tenet’s scientists have discovered mysterious objects, such as bullets, that can move backward through time. These anomalies, they believe, were developed hundreds of years in the future as weapons to fight a cataclysmic war, like a Terminator without pecs or an Austrian accent. “Inverted,” they call them.

“Don’t try to understand it,” The Protagonist is told. “Feel it.” Nolan is delivering a PSA to his perplexed audience as well.

The inverted weapons have fallen into the wrong hands, which leads the Protagonist through a seedy network of arms dealers in Mumbai, London and luxe yachts on the Amalfi Coast. He teams up with Neil, played by a wisecracking Robert Pattinson. The Brit, who channels Dudley Moore, gets better with every role.

The frame is simple enough. But contained within its James Bondian plot is an endless series of unanswered questions. After the movie debuted in Europe, some commenters said it makes more sense after rewatching it. But that’s a cop-out. Just about everything in life is better the second time. We shouldn’t have to drop another $15 to appreciate the nuances.

With too many long stretches that beg the question, “What on earth is going on?” your first experience with “Tenet” won’t leave you satisfied.

Still, we’re swept up by Nolan’s incomparable cinematic vision. He is one of the few directors working today who consistently churns out visually seismic, sophisticated action films — a genre that’s become dumb as a Wahlberg.

The chases and combat of “Tenet” — featuring fighters who are in our forward-moving present, and others who are inverted, or battling backwards — are sensational. Even the basic sequences are terrific. Washington takes a cheese grater to a bad guy’s face.

A certifiable badass, Washington’s character, not by his own fault, is too unflappable. He’s calm and collected, and speaks like Spock, but could use some doubt and fear to humanize him. Spike Lee’s gutsier film, “BlackKklansman” showed him off much better. Debicki is good, if a dead ringer for Emily Blunt, and wears her peril on her sleeve. And as her scary Soviet husband, Kenneth Branagh does his most honest work in ages.

Nolan, who has become a regular in the Oscars race, is probably not going to get a nod for this one. But kudos for him, these last few months, for being a champion of the movies.

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.

The structural complications of Nolan's storytelling are nifty enough, but it's the muscular gusto of his filmmaking that inspires wonder.
“Tenet” was already shaping up as the year’s premier event movie before a certain global pandemic turned it into something closer to a holy grail: an unknown, unattainable object of intrigue, its enigmatic allure intensifying as it moved further and further away on the blighted release schedule. That’s an absurd way to regard any film, but amid the business-minded panic and frustration of its chronic postponement, one wonders if director Christopher Nolan was secretly at least a little amused by the heightened mystique around it all. A blockbuster artist who tends to cocoon his works in ceremonial secrecy at the best of times, he has wound up releasing his 11th feature into an aptly disordered environment. A concrete cornucopia of global chaos and threat, in which humanity’s survival depends on the minor matter of reshaping time and space, “Tenet” looks well suited to an anxious age.
But it’s also just a movie: a big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable one that will provide succor to audiences long-starved for escapist spectacle on this beefy, made-for-Imax scale. (Opening on Aug. 26 in international markets, it will make its way to the U.S. on Sept. 3.) It’s not, however, a film with much of consequence to say about the real world it’s finally entering, or indeed the elaborately rearranged, eve-of-destruction world it has devised on screen. That’s not a mark against it. It’s just that “Tenet,” for the better part of 2020, came to seem practically an abstract object, as fans pored over the palindromic implications of its title, and assembled the few, opaque scraps of publicity we were fed into a puzzle not of the film’s own making.
That the film turns out to be more straightforward — however ornately presented — than our wildest speculation about it is quite disarming. Like “Inception,” which used the essential language of the heist film as an organizing structure for Nolan’s peculiar fixations of chronology and consciousness, “Tenet” tricks out the spy thriller with expanded science-fiction parameters to return to those pet themes.
Again, his musings are rooted more in physics than philosophy or psychology, with the film’s grabby hook — that you can change the world not by traveling through time, but inverting it — explored in terms of how it practically works, not how it makes anyone feel. If this tendency leads Nolan’s critics to label him a chilly filmmaker, there’s the barest hint of knowing silliness to “Tenet” that warms it up. It plays best when it stops showing us its work and morphs into the fanciest James Bond romp you ever did see, complete with dizzy global location-hopping, car chases that slip and loop like spaghetti, and bespoke tailoring you actually want to reach into the screen and stroke.
As for what it’s actually about, “Tenet” places any reviewer in a familiar bind with Nolan: What’s narratively most interesting about it is strictly off-limits in any pre-screening discussion. A pounding introductory set-piece plunges us into a packed Kiev opera house as it falls prey to a terrorist heist, infiltrated in turn by an unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) to retrieve some manner of asset. Nolan’s script is evasive and sketchy on details at first, which may lead you to think this immersively choreographed scene is just a bit of formal flexing before the story begins in earnest. (The first sound we hear in the film, after all, is that of an orchestra tuning up, before composer Ludwig Göransson — more than ably filling in for Nolan standby Hans Zimmer — thunders in with his own thrilling percussive clatter.)
Yet this apparent prologue is also rife with clues and cues for later reference, as befits a film in which present, past and future aren’t always neatly sequential, but sometimes as swiftly cut through as three lanes on a fast-moving highway. Following the Kiev operation, Washington’s stoically imposing character — only ever identified as the Protagonist — is promptly released from the CIA and into a shadowy, less identifiable international espionage organization. Allied with flip, knowing English handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), about whom we learn little but his cool knack for working an upturned blazer collar, he’s set on a mission that is variously described as preventing World War III and saving the world altogether — such generically high-stakes objectives that you can’t help wondering if Nolan is taking us, and indeed his bemused Protagonist, for a ride.
Either way, the quest shuttles us on a trail of elaborately planted MacGuffins from India to Estonia, from the Bay of Naples to the notorious “closed cities” of Russia. (In these, Nathan Crowley’s production design wittily plays off the retro-futurism of their Brutalist architecture to reflect the film’s own overlaid timelines.) A sinister whisper network of international arms dealers emerges, with one of them, Priya (the wonderful Dimple Kapadia, in the film’s wiliest performance) serving principally to coax the Protagonist through the corridors of Nolan’s storytelling. But the ultimate target is Sator (Kenneth Branagh, wielding another ripe cod-Russian accent), a bottomlessly evil oligarch who may or may not hold the world in his clammy hands — often raised in anger to his estranged but trapped wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a brittle art auctioneer for whom the script permits its Protagonist the bare minimum of feeling.
Written this way, the setup sounds like standard-issue Ian Fleming stuff. The trick, of course, lies in that misty, sexy concept of time inversion, which is better seen on the screen than explained on the page — though Nolan, as is his wont as a screenwriter, doesn’t skimp on slightly stodgy, film-pausing explanations either. Like “Inception,” it’s a film where well-informed characters often ask questions (“Do you know what a freeport is?” “You’re familiar with the Manhattan Project?”) to which they immediately supply a detailed answer. As much verbiage as Nolan devotes to unpicking his jazziest ideas, the excitement is all in their cinematic illustration: The film’s eerie images of bullets hurtling backwards through inverted air (the detritus of a coming war, we’re told) are more striking than the neat theory behind their trajectory.
“Don’t try to understand it, feel it,” a cryptic scientist (Clémence Poésy) counsels the Protagonist early on, and whether Nolan intends it or not, this feels like solid advice for the viewer too. “Tenet” is not in itself that difficult to understand: It’s more convoluted than it is complex, wider than it is deep, and there’s more linearity to its form than you might guess, though it offers some elegantly executed structural figure-eights along the way. (Indie-trained editor Jennifer Lame, new to Nolan’s crew, pulls off these coups with a deft, surprising lack of fuss and flash.)
All of which is to say that precisely tracing the dense graph of the plotting in “Tenet” feels like work at the expense of its more sensory, movie-movie pleasures. Those range from the propulsive tumble of its fight sequences to the mesmerizing, carved-in-marble beauty of its stars, clothed in an infinite supply of cloud-soft, immaculately cinched suiting by costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and slicked in the oily gloss of Hoyte van Hoytema’s black-and-blue lensing.
The sheer meticulousness of Nolan’s grand-canvas action aesthetic is enthralling, as if to compensate for the stray loose threads and teasing paradoxes of his screenplay — or perhaps simply to underline that they don’t matter all that much. “Tenet” is no holy grail, but for all its stern, solemn posing, it’s dizzy, expensive, bang-up entertainment of both the old and new school. Right now, as it belatedly crashes a dormant global release calendar, it seems something of a time inversion in itself.

Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller looks like it was very hard to make. But it falls a little flat.
Let’s start with the good stuff. Tenet — surely the most widely anticipated film of 2020, for several overlapping reasons — is a slick and stylish thriller bearing Christopher Nolan’s unmistakeable thumbprints. John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki are very good in it. The movie is often exciting, and it has a couple good fights and car chases of a kind we haven’t quite seen before. It is always surprising, and it’s innovative in a way massive-budget blockbuster films rarely get to be. Tenet looks like it was very hard to make, and thus it is very impressive. Whatever else it is, you can’t say it’s not ambitious.
But it’s that “whatever else it is” part that I keep tripping over. I’m not the only critic who’s noted the impossibility of really describing this movie, even to your friends in private. It’s seems spoiler-proof by design; the entire plot was posted (accurately) on Wikipedia within days of the film’s first international screenings, but I can’t say that reading it will really tell you a lot about the movie, or its secrets and twists.
That’s not a problem, however. Tenet is not really a film that is ”about” its plot. The story is more of an excuse to turn the form of the movie into a mind game, a brain tease, like one of those jangly puzzle things you can pick up at a museum gift shop to fiddle with when you’re bored. Every time you think you’ve figured it out, another bit of it pops loose, and you have to start all over again.
To what end, I am not sure. I have uniformly loved, or at least admired, every film Christopher Nolan has ever made. He is perhaps the only household-name director in Hollywood who can turn out impeccable, ambitious, original films that meet the standards of many cinephiles while also luring huge general-interest audiences. It’s a tricky feat to pull off, but he’s done it for decades now.
Still, there’s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven’t felt in his previous work. The stakes, presumably, couldn’t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie, I don’t understand why I was meant to care. As an intellectual exercise, Tenet is very interesting, if not entirely successful. As a movie, I’m not so sure.
Tenet is both highly ambitious and a little unimaginative
Here I have to mention the elephant in the room. Normally I would’ve tried to see a film like Tenet at least one more time before reviewing it, to try to pick apart some of its trickier mechanisms and determine whether they click into place or fall apart under scrutiny. But I won’t be doing that with Tenet, because I can’t.
I live in New York, where movie theaters remain closed. So to see the movie, I had to rent a car and drive out of state to attend a private screening, in which a tiny handful of people wearing masks sat in a massive and very clean theater, with no concessions and far more than 6 feet between us. It was a privilege afforded me because of my job, and one that most people won’t have. Even if I could buy a ticket to see Tenet again this weekend, closer to home, I’d still be wary, given epidemiologists’ cautions, of voluntarily spending hours in an enclosed room with people who might choose to remove their masks to eat or drink.
But since I can’t buy a ticket where I live, that choice has been made for me. I cannot make that choice for you, and I won’t. I can say that if you’re planning to wait, for whatever reason, until you can see Tenet at home, that’s perfectly fine. I saw it on an IMAX screen, but unlike with Nolan’s 2017 masterpiece Dunkirk, I don’t really feel that the shifted aspect ratio added much to the Tenet experience. In Dunkirk, the IMAX footage cranked up the movie’s emotional heft, portraying the magnitude of the challenge the soldiers faced. Shot by frequent Nolan collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema, Tenet is often very nice to look at, but there’s no real reason to see it huge. (Be warned: It is also very loud.)The thing about movie reviews, however, is that they aren’t only (or even primarily) written for the present; they’re records for the future, to show how a movie was received in its historical context. And I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, when people may sit down to watch the movie in a theater or at home, totally detached from the context of a global pandemic. So imagine along with me — and with a measure of thematic appropriateness — that the rest of this review is for the future, when I hope with all my might that we as a society won’t be contemplating whether we’re risking our lives to go sit in a dark room and be entertained for a couple hours.
As I’ve said, I couldn’t spoil Tenet even if I wanted to. But I can briefly set it up: The story involves an agent whom the credits call “the Protagonist” (John David Washington). The Protagonist is sent on a truly brain-bending mission, for reasons he does not understand. Along the way he encounters an unhappy woman (Elizabeth Debicki) married to a cruel, fabulously wealthy oligarch (Kenneth Branagh, doing a Russian accent) who also seems to be dealing with some shadowy and devious figures. The Protagonist partners up with Neil (Robert Pattinson, excellent as always), who seems to know more about what’s happening than he lets on. Also, there is some kind of group called Tenet pulling the strings behind the scenes, and someone, somewhere, has hatched a plot to destroy humanity. The Protagonist and Neil hop around the world, climb things, jump off things, shoot guns, drink martinis in fancy places — Tenet’s nods to the spy genre are undeniable. And, of course, things get messy, physically and metaphysically.
The apocalyptic plot point was where my disappointment started. Whenever a blockbuster declares “and all of humanity will be destroyed!” to establish its stakes, I assume it’s a crutch to get us to care about the characters. But we can only be asked to care about the end of the world so many times (while living through our own hair-raising serial apocalypses) before it loses its punch. Somehow, I expected something more ... surprising? ... from a filmmaker of Nolan’s caliber.
Some of the other things I found frustrating, I hesitate to reveal, because the discovery of them can be enjoyable. Tenet moves so fast that it’s only afterward you’ll start thinking, Wait, what? Possibly all the pieces hold together; possibly I was just bewildered by watching a movie on a huge screen after six months of watching movies on my laptop. But the internal logic of Tenet doesn’t quite work.
So-called “plot holes” are never a reason to dismiss a movie out of hand. Our pleasure in watching any film depends, first and foremost, on suspending our disbelief and allowing a filmmaker to play in a grand sandbox of their own devising while we watch. Sometimes things don’t hold together perfectly — a problem that time travel movies have dealt with for decades (which is a running joke, by the way, in the new Bill and Ted movie) — but we like them anyhow because of how they make us feel and think.
Perhaps my biggest issue with Tenet, then, is that while it forced me to think, it didn’t reward my efforts to figure out what was happening. In movies that are puzzle boxes, mysteries, or elaborate tricks — for instance, Nolan’s 2006 thriller The Prestige — the audience experiences a satisfying moment where the thing they’ve been watching clicks into place. Maybe the mystery isn’t solved, but suddenly the pieces slot together and you see the magnificent creation the director was crafting the whole time, in plain sight, while you were looking at other things.
I never experienced that moment with Tenet, and what’s more, I think the movie tried to inspire that moment and failed. Similarly, it also fails to give us enough reason to care about its characters, though it seems to try. You can feel the great movie Tenet could have been, which makes the striving and falling short feel worse by comparison.
Tenet continues Christopher Nolan’s explorations of his grandest themes
Still, it’s not a failure of a movie. Nolan is almost singular among well-known contemporary filmmakers in his pursuit of a few matters, and the most gratifying part of Tenet is seeing two of his obsessions rear their heads once again.
The first is the way that time itself — a thing we’re accustomed to thinking of as a fixed fact of life, ticking forward steadily — is actually much more slippery, much more tied to our lived humanity. He’s played with this idea off and on throughout his films, but the best example is probably Dunkirk, in which three timelines unfold at the same time but at different rates, mimicking the experiences of the characters for whom time is rushing by or dragging, depending on where they sit and what they anticipate or dread.
I don’t know if Nolan’s fixation on time is why he became a filmmaker or if it’s the other way around, but his job and his fascination with time are certainly linked. One of the joys of cinema is that when we watch a movie, we are watching time pass. The director can speed it up or slow it down through editing and other technical tricks, and we can have the illusion that we’ve lived through a full day when it’s been only a couple of hours (as with Sam Mendes’s 1917, for instance). Normally we can only perceive time, not control it, but a filmmaker gets to reverse that rule and be in charge of time, if only for a while.
Time is also linked to our memories, and memory is a way to relive lost time — something Nolan has explored from very early on in his career, such as with 2000’s Memento, as well as in other films like 2010’s Inception. What and who we remember is, in a sense, the summation of who we are. Tenet poses a question: Can your identity be linked to something that can’t reside in your memory yet? It’s an intriguing possibility, even if it doesn’t quite feel like Tenet does much with it.
And this finally brings me to the grander, more interesting project of Nolan’s, which seems to be the exploration of how ostensibly sterile systems and concepts like math and science intersect with the intangible and metaphysical aspects of being a human. Memory, yes. But also things like love (see 2014’s Interstellar) and, in Tenet’s case, faith. In a story about time and fate, it’s no shocker that faith comes up; the question of predestination lurks around the corners of the film. But the larger question, raised by Pattinson’s character as Tenet concludes, is whether “faith” might just be faith in the mechanics of the world.
That Nolan makes more than a few nods in Tenet to the Sator square — an ancient palindrome some scholars believe was meant to be a covert sign of pagan or Christian faith, or perhaps an incantation — leads me to believe this line is meant to be more than just a snappy way to finish a film. He is continuing his probe into the heart of being human, of being alive in a universe we barely understand, and he’s using cinema to do it.
But exploring interesting ideas isn’t enough to make for a good movie — and that’s why Tenet still doesn’t work for me. It’s the first Nolan movie in a long while that I’ve left feeling disappointed. And yet there is enough good stuff buried beneath its antiseptic, perhaps overly showy technique, once you get past the clankier bits, that is worth exploring. Tenet masquerades as a puzzle box, but it reads more like another key that Nolan has stuck into the door that conceals the secret of life.