Mark Reviews Movies: TENET

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 3, 2020

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has long been obsessed with time—how it's perceived, how it affects us, how one's actions or circumstances can change the way a person experiences it. Tenet, Nolan's latest, is very much about time—and very little about much else.

To be fair, the writer/director has devised a rather ingenious conceit, involving items that and, later, people who do and can move backward through time. After a lengthy period of vague explanations about the concept and a generic plot about a secretive group trying to stop the end of the world, Nolan eventually stops teasing us with the full possibilities of his central gimmick.

By that point, watching action sequences in which combatants and massive destruction move simultaneously forward and backward in time, we're impressed by Nolan's intricate staging and apparent dedication to following through on the internal logic of his core idea (As with anything involving time travel, we have to trust that only the obviously paradoxical elements are out of place, and one character insists that this isn't time travel—although it essentially is for all intents and purposes). We're also, though, left wondering what purpose, beyond the admittedly striking spectacle, any of this time trickery actually serves.

Throughout, we follow a man, known only as "the Protagonist" (John David Washington), who is part of some covert organization. After rescuing a man from an assault at an opera house, the Protagonist is captured and tortured.

He manages to take what he thinks is a suicide pill but, instead, awakens from a coma aboard a ship. There, he learns that the pill was only a test, and now, he has a new mission: to stop a man named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from bringing about the end of the world. The Protagonist receives some help from Neil (Robert Pattison), another member of the shadowy group fighting Andrei, and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), Andrei's long-suffering wife.

Those are the basics of the plot. The rest is a lot of exposition-dumping and information-gathering on a globe-trotting mission to find Andrei, figure out how he has obtained technology from the future, determine his plan for ending the world, and, obviously, stop him from executing it.

One at least imagines the basic story is something akin to that. Explaining the plot is difficult, primarily because Nolan's screenplay holds off on offering key information, in order to inject some mystery into a spy tale that's pretty routine on a fundamental level. It doesn't help that a good amount of the details remain unintelligible, thanks to sound effects and Ludwig Göransson's score (cleverly playing in reverse at times, as well) overwhelming some vital expository dialogue (Nolan's films usually have this issue with sound, but this is the first time it's a legitimate detriment to comprehending parts of the movie).

We might be able overlook the accidental or intentionally delayed gaps in this story, because the plot really doesn't matter in the end. The issues with this thinking, of course, involve how much time Nolan spends explaining the plot or spinning its wheels and how little these characters matter beyond being vessels for exposition (Consider some of the glorified cameos: Clémence Poésy as a scientist who establishes the reverse-time gimmick—without communicating it any logical way—and Michael Caine as one of the many people who point the Protagonist in an ambiguously correct direction toward his target).

Combine all of this with a story that, at its core, seems to exist as an excuse for Nolan to show off his technical prowess and his ability to choreograph action sequences that work both forward and in reverse, and everything surrounding the central gimmick comes across as an unnecessarily convoluted exercise in making the simple appear complex. Once we see through the charade, the plot and the characters reveal themselves as pretty hollow and dull.

The gimmick, at least, is neat. The most admirable quality of the "inverted time" action here is how Nolan begins by showing it in subtle ways and escalates it in incremental steps. The Protagonist fights an "inverted" opponent (following a most elaborate, destructive "distraction" of crashing a plane into a building), who seems to be doing some physically impossible moves—at least from the perspective of time moving forward. A car chase on a highway has a few vehicles perfectly driving in reverse.

The cleverest bit, though, is how, when certain characters become "inverted" themselves, everything about the seemingly impossible mechanics of these reversed maneuvers become clear. It's all a matter of perspective. In gradually revealing the action in reverse, Nolan shows his notable skill in choreographing in two temporal directions and his formal proficiency in pulling off these tricks, seemingly without the aid of visual effects (Certain movements of bodies and objects suggest much of this was pulled off "simply" by reversing the film).

Is there any meaning or bigger goal behind all of this trickery? Nolan is typically adept in allowing the spectacle to serve the story, but with Tenet, only the spectacle matters.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)

Buy the Script