Tenet infuriated me the first time, but I was jazzed for the IMAX re-release. The central concept, “inversion,” is rad. A man walks into a room. When he walks out, the world moves in reverse. From the world’s perspective, he’s rewinding. Backwards film is an old-fashioned, effective gimmick. Birds unflap their wings. A crashed car un-flips. Drops collect into waves absorbing off a ship’s hull. Kenneth Branagh’s Russian accent becomes, somehow, worse. At a pivotal moment, for reasons I cannot explain, an inverted bazooka un-explodes a building’s foundation while a forwards bazooka blows up the roof. Robert Pattinson watches it happen. That’s Christopher Nolan for you: Baffling Bazookas, Batman!
Tenet’s reissue is the bonus level in its director’s current awards season. Even in 2020’s void, the film’s meh response and bleh returns were career hiccups. Then Nolan made a three-hour movie about [checks notes] nuclear physics that grossed [checks notes] Christ. Oppenheimer is better in every obvious way. But it’s not mindblowing to suggest the famous scientist felt weird about his bomb. I saw Oppenheimer, nodded along, then stopped thinking about it. Whereas I obsess about the bullet.
The bullet. Terrorists attack an opera house in Tenet’s opening minute. John David Washington arrives, playing a man the credits call Protagonist. The attack is a cover to rescue his fellow CIA agent. It’s a confusing, catastrophic operation. Innocents die. The extraction fails. When Protagonist tries to gather up explosives, a cop stops him. Protagonist looks down at a seat, sees a hole, sees a bullet shoot out of the closing hole through the cop’s shoulder into a mystery man’s gun.
The gun, we learn, fired backwards in time. So the bullet has been in the seat for…awhile? Is the auditorium’s custodial staff so inept they missed a gaping bullethole? This is the Nolan I don’t like, a big-on-thematics armchair general too lofty for small details. In Tenet, unfortunately, character traits are small details. There are four heist-style setpieces in the first half. No one in any crew has special skills, they all just have all the skills. Later developments depend on a sudden private army with infinite resources, real Attack of the Clones stuff. Washington is boring. Elizabeth Debicki’s distressed wife gets only painful dialogue. Nolan keeps casting Branagh, wish he wouldn’t. Pattinson steals the movie by smirking.
Hey. Reverse bullets are splendid nonsense. I adore the plane crash, the hijacked cargo freighter sloooooowly meandering toward a building. Catamarans do look better in IMAX. Aaron-Taylor Johnson, sometimes my kryptonite, makes the phrase “Temporal Pincer” sound boss. Branagh threatens to fill a man’s cut throat with amputated testicles. Pattinson says one building is “bungee jumpable.” Forget the heady reputation. Tenet is a goof.
Nolan loves cinemas, loves celluloid, doesn’t reach immediately for CGI. There’s a texture to his filmmaking, even when everyone wears gray and exposition gets whispered behind masks under industrial sound effects. In a final battle, armies move opposite time directions through ruins. Impossible to track who’s where or what’s when. The scene fails basic coherence. Sheer chronoschismatic commitment wins me over. Stupid, sure, but in four dimensions.
Nolan’s paradox: He’s an analog director who only works with a digital-age screenwriter who is himself. So Tenet’s script buries visceral wonder beneath teases, winks, twists, delayed information. Let me embarrass myself trying to spoil everything. People in a climate-blasted future hate the past. They want to kill us because we are killing them. They ally across time with a present-day Russian oligarch to destroy the world. An organization called Tenet fights back. Stopping the Russian is Protagonist’s first Tenet mission. He saves the world, then spends years (decades, lifetimes?) living back and forth across the same timeline. He will, someday long past, create Tenet.
2014’s Interstellar also revealed its confused hero was receiving directions from his future self, with additional interference from unseen humans in a further timeline. With Tenet’s ping-pong plot, was Nolan dramatizing his own repetition? Much of Protagonist’s future will carry him backwards. His rise to power shapes an origin story. Tease out the implications, though, and he seems imprisoned, doomed to befriend the man he’s already watched die. Like the protagonists of Memento and Inception, he traps himself in his own maze.
Cool, man! Cooler if there was literally anything particular about Protagonist, any feeling he was losing something exiting time’s regular flow. At the risk of offending rich kids, Washington only looks comfortable on the boats. IMAX can’t turn a bland performance good, nor reveal the poetry in bad dialogue. I liked the movie more this time, but it still left me cold. True believers worship Nolan as a magus. Tenet feels more like a clown getting you lost in a hall of mirrors.
I love one bit of arcana, though. Protagonist ends the prologue swallowing a suicide pill. When he wakes up in a hospital, his CIA handler says: “Welcome to the afterlife.” The actor is Martin Donovan, also the partner Al Pacino killed in Nolan’s own Insomnia. One dead man welcoming another? The implication makes you giggle. Tenet really could be Hell.