Tenet (2020)

 Score: 3 / 5

There can be no denying that Christopher Nolan is a unique voice in the industry. For better or worse, he saved the Warner Bros./DC partnership and has revitalized cinematic noir for the twenty-first century. It's impossible to watch one of his movies and not instantly recognize his aesthetic, but his latest ultra-high-budget outing is a nearly perfect microcosm of a case study, showcasing why his visions are brilliant and often utterly inaccessible.

We begin with a SWAT siege on an opera house in Kiev. During the concert performance, our unnamed Protagonist (as identified in the credits) rescues an exposed spy and retrieves a bizarre-looking artifact. He is saved by a mysterious soldier before he is captured and tortured; after biting into his cyanide pill, he is resuscitated to learn that the pill was a fake, the mission was a test, and he passed. It really doesn't make much sense at this point, but it makes for a pulse-pounding opening sequence. Unfortunately, the movie makes less sense from here on.

The Protagonist, played by a beautifully dressed and skillfully underperformed John David Washington, is basically a stand-in for what we might imagine 007 to look and sound like under Nolan's directorial control. Suave and stoic, he infiltrates, races, fights, and of course shoots in his impeccably tailored suits. He travels around the world form Kiev to Mumbai, Tallinn to Oslo, meeting with powerful oligarchs and arms dealers while following his lead: a single word, "Tenet." He learns the shadowy organization has developed technology to reverse entropy, essentially "inverting" seemingly spontaneous, kinetic objects to travel backward through time.

Much like Nolan's last foray into theoretical physics, Interstellar, this movie manages to impress us with its Big Ideas but utterly fails to convey the science involved. Unlike that film, though, at least Tenet can boast of plenty of exciting action between the messily contrived, exposition-heavy scenes of dialogue. But for a movie that runs 150 minutes, you'd think Nolan could have included a concise, simplified description of just what the hell is happening. While the science of inverted movement is bizarre enough -- I mean, entropy itself is insanely complex -- Nolan further complicates it by allowing humans to invert themselves in time, and suddenly we have a particularly bizarre version of time travel in what is otherwise an already twisty spy thriller. He's basically showing off his dubious understanding of theoretical physics (he consulted with the same physicist on Interstellar) but in such a way that he doesn't let us in on his masturbatory fantasies. In fact, he lets one of his characters early on -- a scientist, no less, played by Clemence Poesy in a single scene -- tell the Protagonist, "Don't try to understand it; feel it." It's really a shame Nolan didn't take that advice, either.

The Protagonist learns that a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (played by a deliciously wicked Kenneth Branagh, doing his best Bond villain impression) supplies the inverted bullets that started this whole mess, and he attempts to infiltrate through Sator's wife. The art dealer Kat, played by a cool Elizabeth Debicki, is unfortunately as underwritten as she is transparent, and is easily the weakest element of the movie (again, a common criticism of Nolan's work, this one of female roles). In a truly mind-numbing series of dialogue, we learn that she is being blackmailed by the husband she loathes for selling him a forged painting. Instead of giving her a character, the movie gives Kat a son, whom Sator dangles as incentive for her to not simply leave. The Protagonist seemingly cares for Kat and his attempts to help rescue her result in a parallel plot that often intersects with the espionage/heist mess.

To discuss the plot any further will surely confuse me, so I'll leave that to the hordes of YouTube "explainers" who get off on that sort of thing. My takeaway here is that the plot often makes just enough sense if you just let it take you along for the ride, but the more I try to understand the physics the worse my comprehension fails me. This is Inception on steroids; at least that film had a fairly simply vertical structure of levels of artificial dreams. This film is a web of time-travel like we've never seen before and hopefully will never see again, draped in Nolan's slick style and carried along by a series of fabulously realized action scenes. Of course, many of these are also commonly criticized in his flicks, which boast high concept themes but rely heavily on car chases, heists, and hallway combat to entertain. There's really not much that's groundbreaking in those, despite his fans' loudest praises.

And, frankly, the film might make more sense upon a repeat viewing. Specifically one in which I can use closed captions. Ludwig Goransson's hypnotic, pulsing, drone of a score may be effective, but it is also deafeningly loud. The sound editing, too, often drowns out the voices of the cast in key scenes -- I'm thinking of the characters behind their breathing masks a la Bane (in The Dark Knight Rises) or Kenneth Branagh whispering into a walkie-talkie during the climax. Some might call this technique immersive, but struggling to hear took me out of the moment in ways that were, at that point, irreversible. An immersive experience like Dunkirk this most certainly is not.

Finally, and just because this is the kind of thing I'm interested in, I became aware of attempts at palindrome in the script in ways that I'm desperate to hear Nolan discuss. Not only is the back-and-forth visual dynamic key in the film -- in ways that sometimes occur in the same scene, or are visited later in the same scene from a different perspective -- but specific names reminded me of the Sator square, which the credits confirmed for me with the spelling of the villain's name:
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

I would love to know what the square means for Nolan, and if it helped serve as his inspiration. Actually, I'd just like to know what the hell this movie means to him, generally, because I'm just at a loss. You could discuss the briefly-mentioned impetus for the plot as climate change; you could discuss the problematic female lead; you could discuss the thematic implications of inverted time. Even the basic plot is sure to spark some bewildered after-screening discussion; my group stood in the parking lot and some fairly basic plot points were topics of some contention and consternation. Ultimately, there is too much going on in this movie to really make any concrete sense of, well, anything. Which is fine, for some viewers.

This viewer preferred to enjoy the vibrant chemistry between Washington and Robert Pattinson, and their incredible habiliments that were never less than impeccably ironed. My God.