Movie Review: Tenet

Tenet

Director: Christopher Nolan

Starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Dimple Kapadia, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, Himesh Patel

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 150 minutes

“Don’t try to understand it, just feel it,” says Clémence Poésy, who plays a cool-headed scientist in Christopher Nolan’s newest film Tenet. While this may have just been one of the lines from the film, it seems that Nolan is giving that advice to the audience members as well. The movie tries to tell us to enjoy the journey through a “twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real-time” and go with our instincts rather than worrying about all the complexities and mechanics of the film’s central idea.

After delaying the film release in theaters three times due to COVID-19, Tenet has finally been released in cinemas, and people are wondering whether or not this film will save the cinema industry. With more than five years to write the screenplay and more than ten years to complete the film’s vision and execution, Nolan’s new espionage sci-fi thriller film once again confuses its audience with its mind-bending and challenging concept. Nolan brings new faces to the screen with its ambitious premise and exciting concepts related to time inversion with the same dazzling visuals and clever concept ideas.

In essence, the plot of Tenet is set up like most spy movies where the bad guy wants to destroy the world, and the hero needs to prevent him from destroying it. Without spoiling too much, the film begins with an action sequence of John David Washington’s character, who is literally called “the Protagonist.” He goes on a mission to recover a type of metallic substance called Plutonium.

Since then, he gets assigned to a new mission to save the world with his right-hand man Neil (Robert Pattinson) and armed with a single word: Tenet. He goes to different places all across the globe meeting different people including Priya (Dimple Kapadia), an Indian arms dealer, Sir Michael Crosby (Michael Cane), who plays a classy English gentleman, and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), an estranged wife of a Russian oligarch, all so that he can reach out to Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) to find out who he is working for and prevent World War III.

Tenet is very much like Nolan’s previous films. In fact, Tenet seems to be the most “Nolanesque” out of all of his movies. Even though the director is well-known for using time as the main theme and narrative device, the way he manipulates and constructs time in his movies can get genuinely confusing to many viewers. With the director’s deep love of diagrams, palindrome, and physics 101 theories, his films always seem like a mystery puzzle for cinephiles to solve. When Pattinson asks, “Does your head hurt yet?”, the more you try to connect the dots between each of the events, the more it makes it confusing.

As mentioned above, Nolan takes all of his previous film’s main elements and cleverly infuses them into the movie. Viewers can see the uncanny resemblance between Inception and Tenet in how the characters dress, and several dialogue-heavy scenes taking place in the streets were very similar to each other. Regarding this similarity, Washington even says that Tenet is “Inception’s in-law “and that “they’re related by marriage.” Furthermore, it also reminded me of Memento with its backward timeline.

If possible, people should watch this in the theaters for two reasons. The first reason is the action sequences and the fact that most of the scenes did not contain CGIs. When finding out that all of the fight scenes, highway scenes, and explosion effects were mostly done without the help of computer-generated effects, it shows how much time and effort the entire cast and crew invested in creating a beautiful masterpiece. Specifically, in one particular scene, when Washington is fighting against his assailant in reverse, it establishes an oddly unsettling effect and something that has never been experienced in the cinemas. Moreover, the sound composer of the film Ludwig Göransson creates thumping soundtracks that keep us laser-focused to the screen and transports us to a different world. Travis Scott, who features in one of the soundtracks called “The Plan,” says, “[it] sounds like a brain-liquefying trip through time and space.”

Considering that Nolan tries to use the same actors he has worked with over the years, I was first surprised to hear that Washington would be the main character because he used to be a football player and does not have that much experience in the acting industry. However, he captivates the audience with his natural charisma. He is stylish, slick, and physical. Combined with Pattinson’s English charm and wit, Pattinson is one of the best things about the movie. He brings a bit of humor and levity, and when he is offscreen, something feels missing and less entertaining.

Unlike his other movies, Tenet seems to focus less when it comes to characterization. Out of all of Nolan’s films, Interstellar seemed to finally be the movie that focused on character depth and development. Unfortunately, the character motivations seem a bit too safe and plot-oriented. While the film tells us to enjoy the ride, it can make audiences feel lost and uninvolved. It is clear that the complicated concepts and ideas are being explained, but we rarely hear them. It seems as if Nolan deliberately tried to puzzle the viewers, and the camera frequently moves too distractingly to understand what is happening on screen.

In the end, just like his other movies, Tenet is a movie that needs multiple viewings to connect the dots and provide some level of clarity to the viewers. With Nolan’s dedication and expert craftsmanship shown throughout the film, it seems that he doesn’t want the viewers to get bogged down with all the details, but instead enjoy the ride. This film deserves to be seen on the big screen as the expert filmmaking action sequences, soundtracks, and mind-boggling concept of time inversion proves that  Nolan is one of the best modern auteur directors of our time.