Tenet

The Protagonist (John David Washington) flattens the curve in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet

I saw Tenet in theatres in September. I’ve been trying to write a review ever since. Here’s a start:

Everything you’ve heard is true.

It’s long, it’s so loud that the dialogue is sometimes incomprehensible, and its plot is so convoluted that it’s almost—almost—impossible to follow. It’s also masterfully crafted and acted and a deeply frustrating might-have-been.

Protagonist and plot

Tenet follows the Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA operative whose initial mission to thwart a hit on a Ukrainian informant is blown. Having taken a cyanide pill but failed to die, he awakens to be told by one of his handlers that he has passed a test, proven himself capable of missions and tasks that rise even above the level of national interest. The CIA is kicking him upstairs. Armed with the codeword “tenet,” the Protagonist sets about investigating some of the oddities of his last mission, including a mysterious device he lost when his team was captured and bullets that seemed to travel backwards—from their targets into the weapons of the men firing them.

A helpful scientist (Clémence Poésy) tells the Protagonist about “inverted entropy,” a process that reverses the movement of objects through time. A storage locker in her lab is full of “the detritus of a coming war,” a war the Protagonist must find a way to stop. She also gives the Protagonist a piece of advice that is clearly intended not just for him but for the audience: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Leads that the Protagonist and his number two, British intelligence operative Neil (Robert Pattinson), investigate in Mumbai lead them to Russian arms dealer Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) and his estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), an art appraiser who offers the Protagonist the best opening to attack Sator. Kat wants to escape the terrifying, possessive, and violent Sator, but he has leverage over her in the form of their son and a botched art deal from years gone by. Helping Kat, the Protagonist decides, will help him get closer to finding out what Sator is up to, just what “temporal warfare” is, and being able to defeat him.

Bond unbound

So far, so good. Tenet, in its first hour or so, looks and feels very much like a more serious Bond film—and Nolan has made no secret of wishing he could direct a Bond film. John David Washington even wears a close copy of the magnificent three-piece grey suit the late Sean Connery wore in Goldfinger. (I say this as someone who never notices clothing: Washington and Pattinson look dang studly every moment they’re on screen.) As the Protagonist and Neil investigate and work their way first closer to Sator and then deeper into his inner circle, Nolan slowly introduces the true nature of the “cold war” Sator is engaged in. There are the few odd incidents in the opening action sequence, then a bizarre fight against masked antagonists (explicitly referred to as such) in an Oslo vault. Finally, Nolan reveals exactly what “temporal warfare” means in a set of bravura action scenes set in Tallinn, Estonia. These are the chase scenes we saw in every trailer for the film, and they’re stunning—and confusing.

When I first saw Tenet I went in armed and ready. I had heard how difficult it was to follow, how loud it was, how hard one had to concentrate even to hear the exposition. One scene, in which Sator imparts some crucial plot information to the Protagonist, not only takes place on a high-speed racing catamaran but is scored with pulsing electronic music. So I watched the film in theatres prepared to work at it. And I did. Though it lost me in parts I was usually able to puzzle the plot out and really enjoyed it—but found myself, to my astonishment, just checking out during the climax.

Rewatching Tenet on Blu-ray now at least partially confirms what I suspected—in addition to plot points and critical information about the stakes being lost in the noise, the film is too visually confusing.

Nolan has had a reputation for “mind-bending” plots for a while, Inception being the most famous. But he has always devoted a lot of craft to keeping things visually coherent. While the climactic multi-dream-level heist of Inception launched a thousand infographics and “explainers” on the internet, it was really not that complicated to follow because Nolan not only made sure every level of the dreams had been explained beforehand—sometimes laboriously so—but also made each level visually distinct, so that even a casual viewer, disinclined to meet the movie halfway, would know where he was in the story when he saw an LA freeway, a hotel hallway, or a fortress on a snowy mountain. Careful, precise editing helped reinforce these visual cues.

Tenet is altogether different. Like Inception, it’s carefully planned and precisely edited, but the subject matter itself is part of the problem. Time travel stories are complicated enough plotwise, on paper. Visually, most time travel stories feature clear distinctions between past and present. But in Tenet the time travel happens simultaneously, like fish swimming up- and downstream in the same creek, giving us people and objects traveling in both directions through time at the same time onscreen.

We get this in the chase scene in Tallinn and especially during the climax, in which multiple large units of special ops soldiers attack Sator’s men in a “temporal pincer move,” with some attacking in real time and the others attacking backwards through time, both forces visible at the same time and even intermingling. Earlier in the film Nolan does a good job establishing the weirdness of walking backward through time, as the Protagonist looks at a dustcloud billowing into a pile of sand and the water of a puddle rushing together when he stomps in it. But in the climax, when your mind works not only to make sense of a plot that loops back and forth through time, but also to comprehend action scenes that pound you in the face with noise and spectacle—including those armies of masked and uniformed (and therefore almost indistinguishable) men running both backward and forward and explosions whooshing down into the ground—as well as to keep track of characters who “invert” themselves and seemingly die and come back to life, it shuts down. At least mine did.

But there is an exception to this part of my criticism. The scientist at the beginning of the film had told the Protagonist not to try understanding inverted entropy or how it worked intellectually, but to “Feel it.” As cold and cerebral as Nolan’s reputation is, I think that emphasis on emotional and thematic storytelling has always been a strong part of his work. And the half of Tenet’s climax that undeniably works is the most straightforward part, in which Kat confronts Sator on his yacht while those commandos are blasting their way—both backwards and forwards—into one of Sator’s strongholds. This confrontation works because you do feel it—Kat’s terror of Sator, whom Branagh imbues with a frightening rage, and the stakes, which are of human proportions: the love of a mother for a son and her desire to save him from an evil father. A storytelling lesson built right into Tenet’s climactic action.

Deliberate incomprehensibility

So as much as I liked Tenet and as dedicated as I was to following it, I zoned out during the climax—at least for the half involving the “temporal pincer movement.” That was in theatres.

Rewatching it helped. I bought the Blu-ray when it came out last week and watched it a second time, and Tenet revealed more of its secrets. More of it made sense. I followed more of the climax, and even knew what the stakes were more specifically than We have to stop the end of the world. And I’m confident that the next time I watch it, I will understand yet more.

At the time Tenet came out, Ross Douthat wrote that

Every Nolan movie is made for multiple viewings, but this is the first one to bifurcate the experience it offers. In the theaters, you just have to sit back and let it happen to you, without even trying to understand. Then at home you turn on the subtitles, slo-mo the fight scenes, and after seven or so viewings you might finally comprehend its genius.

So far this has proven to be right. Tenet’s “deliberate incomprehensibility,” Douthat writes, “needs to be treated as what it is—a gonzo, avant-garde experiment, not just a normal B+/A- action movie.”

And that’s the frustrating might-have-been thing about Tenet. Nolan has pushed the envelope and made something genuinely challenging, an extremely demanding film that requires the audience to do more than keep up, and I applaud both him and Warner Brothers for going for it. He has produced a film that, in any other year, would be seen multiple times the way he intended to it be seen. But because it came out this year, and because it was what Warner Brothers banked on to reinvigorate filmgoing among a public either too scared or simply unwilling to go to theatres during the COVID epidemic, even the audience that would take pains to see this film would only see it once. That’s exactly what happened to me.

Feeling it

That’s a shame, because I really like Tenet. If I’ve gone on at length about its flaws—and it does have flaws—it’s only because I’m puzzling out the parts that befuddled me. It’s brilliantly shot on film—part 65mm, part IMAX—by Hoyte van Hoytema, one of the best cinematographers working right now, and has great practical stunts and effects. As unreal as the plot and action are, everything onscreen feels real. One of the big set pieces involving a heist—which we see twice, from two different points of view—is especially well-staged and exciting. The costumes and locations are stunning, especially scenes set on the Amalfi coast. I also really like Ludwig Göransson’s score, which sounds like one part Hans Zimmer, one part Philip Glass, and several parts Tron: Legacy. (You can listen to the whole thing here.)

Best of all—and the thing that really carries you through some of the denser thickets of plot and inversion—the acting is terrific, especially Pattinson and Branagh. Pattinson, whose character Neil has a lot of secrets, is even better on a second viewing, and his final act revelations give the film an extra dose of heart right at the end.

So give Tenet a watch. It’s not Nolan’s best film, but it’s certainly his most daring and complex and, with enough concentration and enough viewings, perhaps his most rewarding.