SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Director Christopher Nolan's latest film is a mind bending action epic that warrants multiple viewings, if only to understand what the heck is going on.
"You wanna crash a plane?"
"Well, not from the air, don't be so dramatic!"
"How big a plane?"
"...now that part is a little dramatic."
It's as if Nolan wrote this as a cheeky (and not very subtle) boast of his command over the cinematic experience and the box office - and deservedly so. With Tenet, he continues a successful streak of delivering highly esoteric, original stories that can be embraced by a casual audience, and net big profits. Given his track record, it's no wonder the film industry looked to Nolan's latest blockbuster as a litmus test for audience willingness to come to theaters amid the global pandemic and as a lifeboat for theater chains worldwide.
His signature is the manipulation of time and its effect on how a story is told. For instance, playing the story of a man suffering from anterograde amnesia backwards from the end and forwards from the start in Memento helps us empathize with his anxiety about what he forgets, and reveal twists in his motives that makes us consider the nature and utility of memory long after the movie ends. Unlike Memento, where scenes are not played in accordance with their timeline, Tenet's experiment with time is more like in Inception and Interstellar, in that the passage of time itself is manipulated for the characters - here, the flow of time itself becomes an element of the story's science fiction world. Tenet really is a culmination of all of Nolan's filmography so far. It is evident given how many of his past cinematic elements (aside from his time bending antics) are part of this project: the broody and escalative musical phrases, the back and forth cuts between multiple scenes of conflict, the troublesome sound mix that obscures the dialogue, and of course, an action packed prologue.
The film begins as John David Washington's character is caught by a rival gang and swallows a cyanide pill to avoid giving his kidnappers the information they want. It turns out the cyanide pill was a fake. He is presumably rescued and then recruited for a secret mission only associated with a word: "tenet". He is never called by name in the film and is only referred to once by an equally cryptic name, "The Protagonist". Along the way he meets Neil, an associate of Tenet who helps him investigate the world ending threat. His trail leads to Russian billionaire Andrei Sator played by Kenneth Branagh, who can apparently communicate with the future and has something to do with this world ending event. Elizabeth Debicki plays Sator's wife Kat, who is trying to get out of her marriage while ensuring she can protect their son from the dangers of his father's business and the forces that try to stop him.
As in Dunkirk, we aren’t presented with fleshed backstories for characters in Tenet. Nolan has them operate more as plot devices, so we're somewhat emotionally detached from them and simply watch them work to advance the story, except when they are in physically stressful situations. Sator in particular is terrifying and feels dangerous. However his agenda, while understandable, doesn't reach a deeper level. Hence there is very little sense of dread as he gets closer to putting it into action. Also part of Nolan's cast are all-star actors in minor roles: his "lucky charm" Michael Caine, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Himesh Patel, Dimple Kapadia, and Clémence Poésy. Returning collaborators behind the scenes include cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, production designer Nathan Crowley and stunt coordinator George Cottle. A notable change is the switch from usual composer Hans Zimmer to Ludwig Görannson, whose score gives the world of Tenet a tactile feel via its equally operatic and techno-inspired tones. This talent results in an excellently executed and emotionally engaging piece of cinema. The time manipulating elements of this film lend to very creative and never-before-seen images that truly enthrall you on the big screen, from antagonists throwing reverse punches at each other to fragments of concrete spontaneously stitching themselves back into a building before an implosion, the film's use of backward and forward motion simultaneously has an undeniable wow factor.
Though not essential, Nolan's films tend to postulate a "moral of the story". In Inception it was the irrelevance of the nature of your conscious reality if it suits you. In Memento, it was "we may lie to ourselves to give ourselves purpose." I'm not sure there is one in Tenet though; the non-linear and multi-temporal nature of the story doesn't make it seem there is a profound philosophical truth at its centre, just a story about people doing what their narrative demands of them to save the world - but I'd be happy to watch it again just to figure out if there is something I can learn. Among all his films, Nolan seems to do the least work in Tenet of explaining the high concept science fiction behind its world. To help The Protagonist understand the consequences of time inversion, Neil employs the 'grandfather paradox' to explain how looking at cause and effect is meaningless; both have happened and will always be happening. However their conversation switches gears so quickly you barely have the time to process its relevance to the film.
This brings me to the negatives which somewhat hamper the show. Though I've grown up in an international environment, I sometimes have trouble parsing foreign accents within digital media (especially the British and Russian accents in this case), when they speak quickly. So you can imagine my mental strain parsing speech either muffled by a mask, or buried under loud explosions and an at-times busy score. When we have many people wearing full face masks and talking while in action, you never know who is conveying what information and lose track of the scene.
But Nolan doesn't seem to care. In fact it seems he encourages it, having deliberately made the sound mix overwhelmingly loud for three of his films now. This seems to be his attempt to train audiences to "feel" the intensity of cinematic light and sound rather than trying to engage with the film on a cerebral level. If this is his goal I'm unsure how successful he'll be. The complex and esoteric nature of his films demands that audiences understand the dialogue given how exposition-heavy it tends to be to communicate those high-concept ideas.
Fortunately I can say I understood more than half of the plot lines in the film at the very least. Even so, I think Nolan's plea ("don't try to understand it, feel it") isn't something most people can heed. Given the labyrinthine nature of the story, it was natural for me to attempt to stitch together all of the non-linear elements of the film in my head first. I still need to understand what the characters did before trying to understand why they did it, and this will take a few more viewings. But this isn't necessarily a negative if you like poring through a film's secrets and solving it's puzzles.
Tenet is part of a crop of novelistic cinema in that it lends to multiple characters and storylines, allowing you to revisit the film and discover more each time. Though this may not be received well by everyone, the film’s groundbreaking action and narrative style is wildly entertaining, pioneering and made to be watched multiple times - which helps given the lack of new film releases that would give audiences something to chew on. I would highly recommend watching it in the theater, but it’s not the end of the world if you can’t.
Comments