Tenet

I feel I must acknowledge right from the beginning that Tenet was supposed to be the movie that would “save” cinema by inspiring people back into theaters. It didn’t. There was reason to think it would flourish. 10 years ago, the thematically similar Inception made nearly $300 million in the U.S. alone. Unfortunately, Tenet isn’t anywhere near as good. Don’t get me wrong. I liked the film and honestly, it was a success everywhere else in the world. Its poor showing at the U.S. box office has a lot more to do with the fact that many markets, including the two largest (New York, Los Angeles) weren’t even open when it was released on September 3.

In retrospect, a talky and confusing spy thriller from the creative imagination of Christopher Nolan wasn’t the best choice to welcome people back into theaters. There are those who will demand the astonishing visuals must be seen on the biggest screen available. They are indeed breathtaking. However, I’m here to say that this feature will probably find its greatest victory at home where viewers can pause and re-rewind to their heart’s content to fully comprehend Christopher Nolan’s impenetrable screenplay. Audiences have also complained that the dialogue can be hard to hear. I didn’t have a problem with it but closed captioning will be a godsend for those who feel this way. Now let’s discuss the story.

A CIA agent (John David Washington) is recruited by an organization from the future called Tenet to save the world. A Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) is dying. He wants to use a device called an Algorithm which allows him to alter time. His doomsday plan is to invert the universe and have humanity die with him. The CIA officer contacts Andrei’s estranged wife Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki) to aid him in his task. Also assisting the “Protagonist” (he’s not given a name) is Neil (Robert Pattinson), his handler in the mission. Of course that’s simplifying things considerably. The plot isn’t straightforward, but that’s all you need to know. This is the mind of Christopher Nolan where he complicates the notion of time travel with a facility called a Turnstile that uses red and blue rooms to invert and revert a traveler’s path. Whatever.

Nolan is obsessed with time. I submit Memento, Inception, and Interstellar as exhibits A, B, and C. It’s his fetish, and Tenet furthers that obsession. He would rather articulate how time travel could occur with verbose specificity and then manipulate that idea even further to the point of nonsense. He exploits that theorem as an excuse to create nifty setpieces where multiple timelines exist concurrently. Time is moving ahead in one chronology and reversed in another simultaneously right before our eyes. I’d argue that the mechanism of time travel never holds up intellectually. Once you accept that principle, the easier it will be to champion any movie that employs that concept.

Suspend your desire to understand the baffling exposition. Simply delight in the sheer scale of the extravaganza that is presented. You will be satisfied. There are spectacles created within this environment that are too beautiful to dismiss. A shootout at the opera, a fistfight in a hallway, a plane crash at an airport, a reverse car chase, and the climax when the protagonist is inverted and he goes back in time while another team is advancing forward. It is is a vivid action display that is easily the most thrilling sequence of the year. Buildings collapsing, coming back together, and exploding again is a sight I won’t soon forget. The action is highlighted by the type of blasting soundscape of a score we’ve come to expect in a Nolan production. Ludwig Göransson’s music reverberates with bass to thrillingly punctuate the action. Does the chronicle make coherent sense? No, but I enjoy Tenet for the same reasons I appreciate the 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. It’s not about rationalizing every plot detail or understanding the dense narrative. It’s about the manifestation of spectacular style that could only triumph within the world of cinema.

09-29-20