Item: Tenet
Rating: 5
Author: Matt Rooney

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Read our other, more positive, take on TENET here!

PLOT: After being recruited by an agency named Tenet, an agent must confront the very force of time itself to save the world from a madman who wants to see the past wiped out for good.

REVIEW: I would say that my disappointment with TENET – the time-bending, head-scratching new movie from Christopher Nolan – is unexpected, but given everything else about 2020 so far, it actually makes sense that this would be the year the director released his worst movie. Granted, that’s not saying much considering some of the modern classics he’s dished out over the last two decades. But even his most ardent fans may have a hard time taking to the message boards in defense and praise of an effort that has the high-concept smarts but none of the human soul that make his past movies both thought-provoking and emotionally rewarding.

As far as the high-concept smarts, it wouldn’t quite be a typical Nolan movie if it didn’t have a premise that made you wished you paid more attention to physics and psychology class. The closest we’ll likely ever come to a Nolan-directed James Bond flick, the story centers on the nameless Protagonist (John David Washington), who is recruited into an agency called Tenet that deals with the very survival of the human race. After discovering weapons and objects that operate via time inversion (i.e. bullets firing back into a gun rather than out of one) it’s revealed there is a weapon out there with the capability to wipe out time as we know it. Assembling a crack team that includes Neil (Robert Pattinson) and, well, that’s about it, to track it down and save the world and such. Factor in some exotic locations, a few speed boats, and a Russian villain (Kenneth Branagh) and it’s your typical thriller that Nolan guarantees will confuse the hell out of you with its time-reversing gimmick.

Much like past movies INTERSTELLAR and DUNKIRK, Nolan continues to make time the central component of TENET’s story and action. However, while the former explores the nature of time via a space odyssey and father-child tale, and in DUNKIRK he uses time to craft a purely visceral, nail-biting experience, Nolan mostly uses it here to flip some cars in reverse and do a lot of complicated explaining. As you’re watching Pattinson’s Neil explain the complicated physics of “inversion” entropy you may find yourself trying to pay really close attention so as to perhaps comprehend what he’s saying, but if you’re like me, you’ll give up when you realize not only will understanding it all in no way enhance the viewing experience but that actually you simply don’t care about any of it.

What's made Nolan as beloved a director as he is that he’s so uniquely blended blockbuster scope with intellectual complexity, all without losing the human core of his stories. That’s what makes something like the exposition of INCEPTION worth engaging with. You care who these characters are, where they’re going, how they’ll get back, etc. With TENET, he’s finally made a movie so wrapped up in itself and it’s “cool” premise that there’s no time for worthwhile character development or a story that has any noticeable depth.

Washington’s Protagonist is charming, intelligent and a traditional kind of heroic, as he’s easily willing to sacrifice his life for everyone else’s. But that’s it. He’s all about the business of saving the world and navigating around the bonkers nature of time inversion that there’s no moment where you can connect with him as a human with more to him than his mission. The same goes for Pattinson’s Neil, who’s knowledge of how everything works leaves some room for suspect from the Protagonist, but otherwise exists solely to explain things are convenient times. There’s nothing much to them besides the mission and a nice back and forth that buds into a solid friendship. If there is room for character complexity, it’s in Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat, a woman stuck in an abusive relationship with Branagh’s cold, vindictive baddie, and who wants to help the two men save the world if it also means getting her son away from his unsettling father. When you feel for someone in the story, it will almost certainly be her.

But even still, her role feels to come second to Nolan trying to get from one set piece another, each one blending what the audience will view as “normal”, forward-moving time with other objects and people moving backward in time. Nolan is too gifted a filmmaker to not make audiences marvel at the sheer tact he clearly puts into staging his action, whether it be a real plane crashing into a real building (from the ground, sadly), or Protagonist going hand-to-hand against a figure moving backward. While the latter can look a bit silly at times, there is something magnificent about how the action and effects were staged, to the point where it truly doesn’t matter to understand how it all works, all because it simply looks so crazy.

But there, again, lies the movie’s biggest, constantly obvious problem: There’s nothing going on worth caring about or wasting time analyzing. While other Nolan films may reward you should you dive back in for deeper analysis and repeat viewings, all TENET provides you with is a physics lesson. Understanding time inversion gets no closer to caring about the characters or shallow story, and will only make look at the action make a bit more sense from a logistics standpoint. Even then it may still leave you with a sense of dissatisfaction because truly the best way to experience the movie is to sit back, let an excellent Ludwig Goransson score get the nerves racing, and allow the madness of the action lift you out of the rest of the otherwise dull moments.

And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? For as complex and mind-bending a journey as Nolan tried to create, it’s his shallowest viewing experience. It’s entertainment done technically well and with a few tricks up its sleeve and sporting a talented cast getting as much mileage they can from thin material, but offers nothing else to justify a second two-and-a-half-hour trip.