Movie Review - Tenet (2020)

[Dave Gray]

Tenet (2020)

Premise: A mysterious special agent is approached with a mission to combat a terrorist from the future that appears to influence "inverted" objects that move backwards through time.

Rating: Incredible, but also incredibly Nolan, both in its positives and negatives.

This is a tough movie to describe in one sentence.  It essentially functions as a time travel story, where you're not really sure what you're looking at most of the time, but slowly as the story unfolds things start to make sense.  But unlike Back to the Future, where the time travel rules and ramifications are pretty straight-forward, Tenet is closer to something like Primer, where trying to iron out all the messy details can make your brain hurt.

This movie is the best kind of confusing.  Don't watch it with your phone out.  Turn off the lights, turn on the subtitles, and set aside 2 1/2 hours to really commit to the premise.  I think it can be understood in layers.  The basic premise, even if you don't follow closely and understand it, it enjoyable enough for the stellar action sequences alone.  Largely practical fight scenes, where half of the elements are moving backwards in time while others are moving forward -- if nothing else -- are awesome to look at.  It's hard to understand how any of this was filmed or edited, but it looks really cool.  There's another level, one that just works really well for how I watch films, where Nolan lays out little clues.  For better or worse, nothing is an accident.  Every time something is shown or mentioned that doesn't directly tie to what's going on, make a note in your brain, because it will come back later.  If you're like me, you will start to unravel the story along the way, and I find that process rewarding.  Then, if you really care to delve in and make your brain swell, there is a lot to make you think about after it's over -- ramifications of the way the time travel works -- if you were to really break it down and diagram the movie, does it really make sense?  I think it does, but like Primer, you kinda gotta take their word for it.

The negative (and even that is debatable) is that Nolan isn't concerned with certain things.  And in this film, one of those things is character.  The protagonist doesn't even have a name.  In fact, knowing little about the characters is integral to the story functioning.  If they know too much about themselves or each other, they risk screwing up the timeline.  Because of that, it makes exposition clunky.  There's a mother who loves her son and you know it only because she keeps saying it.  The movie is too dense with time-travel intricacy and all of these crazy visual ideas, that it isn't about to slow down to show loving family moments.  Tenet, the concept, is the star of this story.  And that works for me, but it's fair to recognize that it might not for others.

Nolan has a unique storytelling style that works for me.  It's more important that you feel what he's going for rather than it actually making to the most logical sense for the way the story would unfold.  This isn't new.  This happens in Interstellar quite a bit, as well.  Nolan picks a theme or message and it's more important that what you're experiencing connects with that message, than it connecting.

Pros: Unique, realistic-looking, mind-bending action -- a rewarding, if complicated look at time-travel we've never seen.
Cons: The movie leaves a blank slate for characters and how the rules of the universe work.

If you like Nolan, specifically Interstellar and Inception, there's a lot to love about Tenet.

[Phishfan]

I almost watched this the other night but wasn't sure. I'm probably going to check it out this weekend at some point.