When I first saw the trailers for director Christoper Nolan’s Tenet, I wanted to see it because, well, I am a big fan of Nolan’s work. However, then the pandemic hit and Nolan took a particularly tone deaf stance on the movie. Nolan is a big proponent of seeing movies on big screens, he films his movies to be seen in that format, and he really didn’t want to see his work go to streaming or pay per view like so many other movies that actually saw release in 2020. That’s entirely understandable. What was less understandable was why he didn’t seem to ever suggest holding back on releasing the movie at all until the pandemic was over. It seemed like he really wanted his movie to come out in theaters at a time when a highly infectious disease was still making the rounds. And even if the chances of actually dying of COVID are low, I and many others didn’t think seeing anyone’s movie was worth that risk. So, essentially, I vowed to wait until it was somewhere when I could see it without either paying for some kind of rental or pirating it because while I will on occasion pay for a rental, I absolutely won’t pirate.
Then Tenet hit HBO Max on May 1st and here we are.
A nameless agent of some kind referred to in the movie as “the Protagonist” if anything (John David Washington) finds himself recruited to join the mysterious organization Tenet after passing a test of courage when a rescue raid on a Ukranian opera house goes south. It seems there is a technology in the world, possibly built in the future, that can cause people and objects to be “inverted” or to travel backwards in time at the same rate something normally travels forward. That means things like bullets shoot into guns instead of out of them. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s the basics. Apparently, a rogue Russian oligarch (Kenneth Brannagh) is up to something involving inverted bullets and who knows what else,
If I say much more than that, and even that is pushing it, I think I might be giving too much away. A movie like Tenet works best if the audience doesn’t quite know what’s going on before watching it.
As a director, Christopher Nolan’s greatest strength is, arguably, the structuring of his movies. Many of his films have what I think of as the “Nolan ending”. That would be when a character has a monologue going over the themes of the movie in some fashion, the music swells, and a montage of scenes shows where all the different characters that survived to the end of the movie, effectively wrapping up everything that happened and often ending with one memorable shot. Think the spinning top in Inception never quite tipping over or that scared soldier looking up at the end of Dunkirk after he finishes reading Churchill’s speech. There a rather fantastic technical prowess to everything Nolan does. It allows him to take on some truly experimental work like the different timelines of the aforementioned Dunkirk or the backwards plotting of Memento. That is certainly the case with Tenet, and given how time sometimes works in reverse, how Nolan gets around the confusion that could cause is well done.
That said, there was a part of me that, while accepting that Nolan’s technical skills are on fine display here, also felt the experience left me rather cold. It was like Nolan was simply displaying his craftsmanship without really building much of any of his characters. Washington in particular, though a gifted actor, is basically just a generic good guy here with Brannagh as a snarling villain, Robert Pattinson as a loyal partner and sidekick, and Elizabeth Debicki as something of a victim to Brannagh’s mind-games and a concerned mother, but not much else. Maybe this was something to be seen on the big screen, and the movie’s structuring is the same excellent work that Nolan is known for, but as for the rest of the movie, it mostly seemed to be Nolan doing stuff just to be clever with a group of cipher characters. For that, as much as I found the movie engrossing, I couldn’t say the same for the characters in it, and that can be something of a problem.
Grade: B-
0 Comments