FILM REVIEW
TENET
Dir: Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan's Tenet feels like a spiritual successor to Inception, his 2010 action film also based around distorting the rules of perceived reality. Unfortunately, where Inception's success was based on the clarity and surefootedness with which it handled its potentially baffling premise, Tenet feels fatally insecure about the mechanics of its time-manipulation gimmick. It is at odds with itself, telling audiences on one hand not to think too hard about it while on the other over-explaining every superfluous detail. Nolan's best films are those whose ideas are conveyed evocatively enough to overcome shortcomings in plotting and character: Tenet is all plot, all the time, having to cover its shortcomings with seemingly deliberate obfuscation rather than thematic depth.
In the absence of that depth, the overfamiliarity of Nolan's toy box is exposed. Almost everything that he offers up here has been done better in his previous films, from the twisty narrative (despite the incoherence of the storytelling, it's not difficult to anticipate the reveals that Nolan tries to use to disguise messiness as cleverness) to the fetishisation of masculine symbolism and nods to the James Bond canon: where Inception played an entire sequence in homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, here Goldfinger, A View To A Kill and Licence To Kill (also referenced in Dark Knight Rises) are all given cursory glances.
As is becoming an unfortunate trend in our Netflix-inflected age of binge-watching, Tenet's over-arcing plot is simple but bloated to the extreme with pointless busywork dragging out its journey from point A to point B. John David Washington plays the unnamed protagonist (or rather, an unnamed protagonist who seems to be named Protagonist) recruited into a secret organisation and tasked with finding the source of and preventing an apocalyptic event whose debris is travelling back in time. Within that are countless diversions and complications, all of which feel like the time-wasting they are.
Two significant portions of the film are dedicated to Protagonist trying to curry favour with, and later save, the villain's wife. Despite these sequences' minimal impact on moving the plot forward, this might have been excusable were there were a reason for him to care so much about her or if the characters were anything more than pencil sketches. Unfortunately, the familiar criticism of Nolan's characters is very much in force here: these are less people than shells, mechanical tools in service of the film's Big Idea rather than the other way around. Inception used its gimmick to tell a story about the main character overcoming self-destructive trauma. Tenet's protagonist is unnamed for a reason: he exists as a placeholder, his sole function to gawp at Nolan's time-bending shenanigans. Washington can only hint at a charisma forcibly restrained by his vacuous character.
That absence of emotional commitment turns one of the film's major subplots into an egregious misstep. The villain, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), is physically and mentally abusive to his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki). The violence in action films is fun because it is impersonal: there is no sense of trauma or genuine suffering. Tackling a personal form of violence like domestic abuse without being exploitative requires an assurance that what is being shown is essential to the story and the emotional trajectory of its characters. Here, the abuse is nothing but a means to an end, its cruelty communicated with sometimes uncomfortable specificity, as when Sator removes his belt and places his cufflinks in the holes with the intention of whipping Kat.
Despite Elizabeth Debicki's dignified performance, her character amounts to nothing more than 'abused wife', and she is only that much to serve an intermediary function in getting Protagonist together with the villain and establishing Sator's almost cartoonish level of nihilistic sadism. In contrast to the film's conspicuous bloodlessness, it feels like nastiness for its own sake, leaving an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
The story divergences revolving around action set-pieces are unsurprisingly more successful, although their episodic nature makes them feel less substantial than if they had been more naturally woven into a more developed story. This is a similar problem as afflicted the overrated Mission: Impossible - Fallout, although mercifully, Tenet's action scenes are more enjoyable for being made seemingly for the audience's benefit rather than masturbating the ego of the movie's star. The heavily-trailed scene involving a Boeing 747 is amusing, while a later sequence on a motorway is one of the film's highlights, albeit previously done more ambitiously and excitingly in The Matrix Reloaded.
Having both replayed in the opposite direction represents one of the few instances when the movie's time-bending premise makes genuinely enjoyable viewing rather than fodder for endless scenes of expository dialogue. These scenes would be tiresome enough on their own, but are made worse by myriad factors conspiring to make large portions of the dialogue blurred or inaudible. Sometimes it is Ludwig Goransson's obnoxious, ersatz-Zimmer score; sometimes it is the sound mix making diegetic sound too loud; sometimes it is the actors' accents or the masks they sometimes speak through (if you thought Bane was hard to understand...); often it is that these scenes are rushed, discarding even establishing shots (à la Batman vs Superman), with the actors delivering their lines at such pace that it is near-impossible to discern the relevant information from the clichés.
Obscurity can work when a film or TV show is telling its story through abstraction and asking audiences to interpret. The revival of Twin Peaks was wilfully indecipherable, yet a wonderful success because literal plotting was antithetical to the story David Lynch was telling. Tenet is entirely absent theme and character and relies entirely on plotting for audience engagement, making its confusion a source of frustration rather than mystery.
Tenet is Christopher Nolan making a bad imitation of a Christopher Nolan film, emphasizing the worst aspects of his work (empty characters, clumsy plotting, sterile aesthetics, style over substance, overly-bombastic scoring) and reducing many of his saving graces (evocative themes, cinematic visual storytelling, big ideas) into transparent distractions at best. Aside from Debicki, the actors are not given the material for their performances to rise above the functional: Pattinson has his moments, but is essentially replaying Tom Hardy's rakish British companion role from Inception. By the time the final action sequence rolls around and involves two sets of masked soldiers firing at nobody in particular on what looks like a near-empty army training base, it feels like the movie has finally given up trying to disguise its chronic lack of engaging original ideas.
There is an episode of the 1988 British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf called 'Backwards' which tackles many of the same ideas as Tenet. It does so in half an hour and climaxes with a bar-room 'unrumble' which both serves its comedic purposes and pays off lingering plot threads in a clearer and more satisfying way than Tenet ever manages. The key is that Red Dwarf recognises the silliness of its concept (two characters going forwards in a world in reverse) and steers into it. Tenet gives the impression that Nolan realised he couldn't make his gimmick work halfway through and tried to hide its shortcomings with extraneous detail and confusion. It is the sort of film some will excuse as needing multiple viewings, but despite a scattering of piecemeal pleasures, it is hard to imagine this is two-and-a-half hours anyone will want to return to. [ 4 ]
