Tenet: Two-films-in-one makes for a film that resists reviewing
Having become one of the world’s most accomplished filmmakers, Nolan has allowed himself to turn into one of the most incompetent
Do I love Tenet or hate it? Let’s cut to the chase: its action sequences are phenomenal—more than this, they are engrossing. After two and a half hours of watching explosions in reverse and trying to play back the inverted timelines in your head to make sense of them, your brain acclimatises to this new logic and the world outside begins to look odd in the absence of mayhem. It is overwhelming, it is unique. If you are lucky, the experience of Tenet might even be so unique that you won’t be disappointed with the rest of the film.
Unfortunately, this disappointment was too big a hurdle for me to jump. It wasn’t for nitpicking that the rest of Tenet left me with much to be desired in its story, its characters, its (lack of) emotional resonance, its coherence. Don’t take that criticism lightly — by blockbuster standards it is below average. It sounds petty but the lack of quality in the sound mixing also can hardly be understated. Audio has always been poor in Christopher Nolan’s films; here it is borderline nauseating. I cannot recommend a subtitled screening enough if you want to hear any of the dialogue.
That said, there is an argument to be made for avoiding a subtitled screening to spare yourself from the full brunt of the ham-fisted exposition that comprises the first, long thirty minutes or so. From the get-go, the Nolan formula is overt: after a brief, scarcely relevant action sequence, we whizz through a wild goose chase of lectures from never-again seen characters, which Nolan simultaneously wants the audience to regard intently (lest we miss a single line crucial to understanding the next scene) and ignore (lest overthinking the logic spoils the visceral wonder of the action).
“Don’t think about it—feel it,” advises one such fleeting character in her only appearing scene; yet the only emotion we are provoked to feel is awe, which, again, is brilliant, but not mutually exclusive with the others that are missing. In short, Nolan tells his audience how we should experience his film, but fails to give us all the reasons we might follow his advice. The variance in quality between the action and the rest is astounding, like watching two movies that have been spliced together.
As the plot slogs through Nolan’s human-shaped conduits of high-density exposition, one can acclimatise to this, too; when the central characters finally arrive on scene, it takes a while to realise they are actually important and that we might be expected to care for them at some point. Even then, Nolan provides little reason to involve ourselves in their story — all of the attention, still, is in appreciation of the action, and not on the characters. Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat is vulnerably dainty and a devoted mother, fresh from a bad Bond film, and Robert Pattinson’s Neil has a nice smile; I think that’s the extent of character development.
Ambitiously uninvigorating (even for him) Kenneth Branagh is the worst of the cast. The dullest of Bond villains would look like Michael Corleone or Roy Batty next to him. His character Andrei Sator is abusive, Russian, and has a senseless, motiveless plot to end the world—which is technically as many facets as Debicki and Pattinson were given between them, so I suppose we should be grateful. (He also gets a surname — good for him.) John David Washington’s ‘protagonist’ is a little better, saved by the virtue of the character’s ignorance. Sitting in the same boat as the audience, he provides something for us to latch onto; thus there is, at the very least, a canonical explanation for why the opening act is incomprehensible even in retrospect.
But what else can I say? No-one turned up to Tenet for the plot, or the characters, or to understand the dialogue. We went for the spectacle, which is frankly undeniable. In Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, there’s a joke that critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg watches every film seven times, one of which is always in reverse, in order to master understanding of it. I haven’t yet tested the hypothesis, but Tenet might be the first film to be just as entertaining played either way. Two particular sequences (airport and desert — you’ll know them when you see them) could entertain me for hours on their own.
Yet, while it is understandable that Nolan’s filmmaking style has become so egoistic, it is his strengths that make the weaknesses so frustrating. Either no-one is prepared to argue with him or he is simply too stubborn to listen, but none of Tenet’s problems couldn’t have been fixed by hiring a second writer to plug the gaps in Nolan’s expertise. Unfortunately, it seems this is the trade-off for having a brilliant and unrestricted visionary who knows he is the authority on dreamlike sci-fi action: such a director would never stop and think his writing could be so poor.
So, in short, do I love Tenet or hate it? The answer is probably both. But I’d undoubtedly recommend the experience, provided your local cinema has the appropriate safety measures in place.
