“Tenet” is the post-“Prestige” era Christopher Nolan formula distilled down to its purest essence to date – both for better and worse. Starting in media res and not just demanding but requiring multiple viewings, here we have yet another cold and convoluted puzzle box interested in overloading senses and challenging minds with its utterly confident technical virtuosity and a plot structure that folds in on itself in complicated ways. No doubt Redditors will spend weeks if not months mapping out the various character timelines to reveal the story is actually some form of inverted Mobius strip or hypercube that puts the character-specific time jumping shenanigans of the first seasons of “Westworld” and “The Witcher” to shame.
Here Nolan offers us another contemporary set thriller with a sci-fi concept, this time borrowing story beats and tropes from classic Bond films and integrating them with a time inversion/reversed entropy element that will feel fairly familiar to anyone whose sci-fi exposure goes beyond “Star Wars” and Kubrick. Basically if you know the difference between a grandfather paradox and a bootstrap paradox, or at least have some basic “Star Trek” or “Doctor Who” TV watching under your belt, you won’t even blink at the technobabble. If not, it’s best explained as a hybrid of his “Memento” and “Inception” gimmicks and you’ll probably have fun considering the possibilities of what happens when effect precedes cause.
Full props to Nolan for keeping the exposition fairly simple in this regard, rarely getting bogged down in explaining the basics of temporal mechanics and quantum physics, opting instead to convey it visually as much as possible. It’s not the ‘what’ of time inversion that’s a spoiler here, which explains why Warners is happy to give it away in the trailers and TV spots. Instead it is the mechanics of it within this screen universe, and the often roundabout ways it figures back into the plot that could spoil – and for that reason I will keep the details very basic in this review.
Is it confusing? Absolutely and deliberately so. Even at 150 minutes, the film is edited to an utterly ruthless degree that not a minute of it feels unplanned. Like Ludwig Goransson’s Zimmer-like and often overbearing score with tracks that are no doubt as much a palindrome as the title, deliberate withholding of key information is the name of the game here. However the obfuscation is beyond nakedly apparent and into the realm of condescending to the point that it mostly just breeds frustration if not annoyance – not helped by a sense of unearned gravitas throughout proceedings.
There’s little humor to be had here aside from one or two character moments with those, for once, coming off as natural as opposed to something that Nolan let a script polisher sneak in. If you’re highly anal about tonal consistency you will love the utter self-seriousness and pretentious dialogue full of foreboding yet vague portents all delivered with stone faces, but you will also find that the glum evasiveness gets tiresome quickly.
Unlike “Inception” where dreaming is essential to the plot throughout, here time inversion is often pushed into the background in the first two acts in favor of a more straightforward and uninteresting old school spy drama. How willing you are to overlook the script deficiencies will depend upon how much you otherwise respond to its cinematic style – beautiful wide shots, the screen is often filled with lush locations and even lusher menswear (Washington’s plum dinner suit is tops), along with all the usual character archetypes of that particular sub-genre. There’s an aggressive heavily accented baddie (Kenneth Branagh), a sympathetic criminal’s moll who needs saving (Elizabeth Debicki), and a roguish ally (Robert Pattinson) whose mainly there to help out our fairly anonymous protagonist (John David Washington).
The cast are solid talents, but all struggle to breath life into a film already overstuffed and whittled down to the point of leaving no time for any natural humanity to flow though it. Washington is likeable enough but he’s a cipher – always just there to react or push the story along without any real development whatsoever beyond polite manners and occasionally behaving like a 1990s Keanu Reeves (there’s a few “woohs”). The man has reams of natural charisma that helps, but even he struggles with the stilted dialogue Nolan throws at him.
Branagh’s Russian oligarch prick is essentially a copy and paste job of his Russian oligarch prick from the woeful “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”. A thicc-er than usual Aaron Taylor-Johnson shows up in heavy beard in a mostly “I’m here as backup for this action sequence” capacity and doesn’t offer much beyond potential dream fuel for bear fans. Clemence Posey as this film’s ‘Q’ quite literally delivers her lines with no expression or emotion whatsoever beyond a monotone weariness, while Martin Donovan and Michael Caine offer up more natural single scene cameos to help move the story along.
Nolan’s issues with female characters carry over to Debicki who is a male character motivator with no dimension other than an all too often repeated love for a son barely in the film. One of the great modern young actresses out there, she does what she can with a very underdone part and gives it more emotional weight than it ever likely had on page. Most of the enjoyment comes from Pattinson as a stand-in for a slightly more James Bond-ian version of Nolan himself. Milking every scene be it with a delightfully cheeky affected British accent different from his own, or showing a surprising knack for action and gunplay sequences, he’s a reassuring presence even if it marks an unremarkable addition to his impressive resume.
Of course it’s a Nolan film which means people come for the action and on that front it’s mostly pretty good. It’s here the temporal inversion trick most often comes into play and where the bottomless bank accounts of major studios allow the work to have fun with it in ways small screen and indie genre fare tackling this stuff can’t afford to do so. The simpler these action setups the better, an early brawl in a kitchen using utensils at hand is a real belter.
More elaborate ones involving an airport and a freeway are pulled off with all the regular finesse you’d expect – even as the inversion element robs events of true consequences. Far less effective is a massive “Call of Duty”-like battle royale that dominates the film’s back half, nameless figures help or hinder depending upon their direction in the time stream. It’s the point where even those who’ve been able to follow so far will likely lose grasp of the four-dimensional action geography and have to just hang on.
It’s all very busy, pulled of with such filmmaking brio that there’s no time for a respite or to digest everything thrown at you. Things aren’t helped by the film’s sound mix which exacerbates Nolan’s tendency to drown out crucial dialogue with subwoofer pulses so deeply throbbing as to induce climax or labor. Yes it was an issue with “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk” as well but here, in a film where dialogue is more vital, it becomes an issue when quiet exchanges in sedate dinner scenes are drowned out by the kind of noises one shouldn’t hear outside of a sewerage treatment plant.
The flawed characters and often refreshing genre subversion that defined Nolan’s first decade of filmmaking evolved into terser, more conservative affairs in his second – the ambition shifting from the page to the production itself, the needs of the story and characters losing importance to an ever growing obsession with the practical above all else. His past few films have offered beautiful structures built on grand scales, efforts defined by both tonal austerity and minimal use of digital assistance, even as they came at the cost of sidelining or simplifying his own characters to the point of serving as little more than props.
“Tenet” is the logical end result of that second phase. There’s no new ground broken here, Nolan doubles down on what he knows works for him and jettisons paying any lip service to what he has been criticised for in the past – forced attempts at humor, sexuality and pathos. The result is both a greatest hits package and his ultimate puzzle box, one of rich structural complexity and ambition told with energy and economy but one lacking any real engagement beyond that of a cryptic crossword. Mostly it’s just exhausting.