If I had been writing reviews when Inception was released, I could just repost that review now with some nouns changed. Much like with Inception, Christopher Nolan has crafted a clever film with astounding visuals and concepts that are highbrow for a mega-budget Hollywood film. Also much like Inception, Tenet is a bit too far up its own ass and is more interested in presenting the audience with an intellectual exercise than entertainment. Watching Tenet is like chatting with a really smart person that is nice enough, but you wish that they would just lighten the fuck up and have a drink.
I’m guessing that there are already many pages written trying to explain the plot of Tenet, so I’m not going to bother with details. As for broad strokes, people in the future have decided that they need to destroy civilization in the present, for what I assume to be reasons. To do this, they have hidden pieces of a device in the past (our present) that, when assembled, will destroy the world. They recruit a Russian Bond villain (played by Kenneth Branagh) to assemble the device and its up to a couple of soldiers or something (played by John David Washington and Robert Pattinson) and the Bond villain’s wife (played by Elizabeth Debicki) to use time travel to stop the apocalypse in the most convoluted way possible. Think if the events of Back to the Future Parts 1 &2 were being shown concurrently in one film and you are in the ballpark of the basic structure here, just without the humor. Also, our main character’s name is Protagonist. Because that’s clever.
As Inception dealt with dreams, Tenet deals with time travel and reverse entropy (which basically means that something is moving backward in time). As you might expect from a Nolan movie on that subject, the film is both beautiful and challenging. The effects are incredible and present the effects of time travel in ways that I don’t recall seeing before. The plot has so many layers that I imagine students will be dissecting it and creating new interpretations for many years to come. The film also centers around a concept that has been at the center of Nolan’s work for decades, that of a circular plot in which the end is also the beginning. This idea is pivotal to Tenet, Memento and Interstellar and also exists in more symbolic form in the Dark Knight trilogy, seemingly making it an obsession for Nolan. One could make a literary comparison to James Joyce and, just as many English professors will begin to vigorously masturbate at the mere mention of Finnegan’s Wake, many film fans declare Nolan’s entire filmography to be brilliant for these reasons. Also, James Joyce is trash. You don’t understand Finnegan’s Wake, nobody does, so don’t fucking lie to me.
Anyway, the problem is that, for all of its intended brilliance, Tenet forgets to include things like entertaining characters and dialogue. Although the actors (especially Pattinson and Debicki) try their damndest to inject some personality into the proceedings, the script doesn’t give them much to work with. Tenet treats its plot as an equation that needs to be balanced in various different ways, and the characters are just the figures that need to be properly manipulated to make this happen. They have no personality; they are just pawns that must be in the right place at the right time in order for the plot to (mostly) logically proceed. There are no memorable characters or dialogue here, just soulless mechanics.
I also need to talk about something that may not seem important, but holy shit did it piss me off: the audio mix in this movie is fucking abysmal. Maybe the plot would have been easier to follow if I could ever understand what the fuck anybody is saying. There are entire scenes in this movie when I couldn’t understand a single line of dialogue because the ambient noise is set to the same volume as the actors, not to mention the soundtrack (which, much like Inception, is just jarring noises set to a timer). If people are talking on a busy street, I couldn’t hear them over the traffic. There is an early scene on a boat that seemed important, but fuck if I know because all I heard was waves. Towards the end, the villain gives his big villain speech on a phone. At least I think that’s what he was doing, I couldn’t make out a word between the background noise and Branagh’s Russian accent. He looked menacing, but he may have been ordering a pizza. How the fuck do you spend so much time meticulously plotting this script and you forget to mix the fucking sound in post? That’s just goddamn inexcusable. I have considered that the problem was my theater’s audio settings, but the trailers sounded fine.
Tenet is a clever spectacle of a film that lacks a soul. Its concepts and effects will likely keep you entertained, and a bit confused, but you won’t remember the characters or be quoting any lines after you leave the theater. At the risk of sounding unsophisticated, one could fine many of the same themes in Back to the Future Part 2 and have a better time in the process. And Doc is awesome.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenet_(film)#/media/File:Tenet_movie_poster.jpg
