2020 Reviews – Tenet

So many people grade their movies out of ten, and how many absolutely adored this picture? Did they give it a perfect score? Did they ten-it? Did… they… TEN-et?

Horrible jokes aside (I’m sorry, I saw low hanging fruit and I picked it. I’m weak), Inception is by far one of my best experiences in a cinema – it was date night, I’d had a complicated day at the job I worked, and we went into Inception on a packed opening night knowing absolutely nothing about it but Leonardo Di Caprio. I don’t know about everyone else, but I felt cinema changed that night; I had a much deeper appreciation anyway, because Inception is legendary. From Tenet’s trailers (which I actually tried to avoid), Tenet seems the most Inception-y movie since Inception. Chris Nolan is back with another movie I anticipate will aim to warp our brains. Factor in the long long wait we’ve had here in Victoria to see this movie due to COVID restrictions, and I’m literally overflowing with desire.

Upon being recruited for a special assignment aligned with the CIA, our Protagonist (John David Washington) tracks down the man who holds information on items with ‘inverted’ entropy; which are essentially, objects sent back in time that act in opposition to our laws of cause and effect. The powers that be fear that this technology could cause an apocalyptic size catastrophe, to be feared greater than nuclear holocaust…. To write anything more would be to spoil the movie. And I’m about to write more, so you have been prepared.

If I’m to be super negative, Tenet is a convoluted James Bond film with a reversal gimmick, that ends with time-travel done just as effectively as in Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban. With more due respect, the action is flawless, and appreciating the mechanisms behind what is actually in play I’m sure will pay off on subsequent viewings. There’s a bit of a Shyamalan-effect happening with Christopher Nolan here, where I’ve been expecting a twist and a bigger dramatic payoff than the sturdy one that is actually provided. The way the movie is laid out, nothing is truly unexpected because the ‘inverse revelations’ are playing out in front of our eyes. The awe comes from how technically impressive the movie is in being put together. I love the scale of the opening scene in the opera house and the tension it brings, along with the final scenes and that they drove a plane into a hanger vault! That’s not to mention, the mind-warping brilliance of the inversion that takes place throughout the entire movie, mastered most of all during the fight scene we eventually see from dual points of view. That being said, I call it a Bond film, because it also has, the bombastic villain, and the girl stuck between the undercover spy and the mission. There’s a large chunk of the movie where the reverse affect isn’t a factor, and where Washington’s character is only out to trace where it comes from. I love a good James Bond movie, so that’s not the problem, but at one point I did think that if this was a James Bond movie it would get roasted for being too extreme. There were moments of exposition, when the Protagonist is jumping from one information source to another, that I couldn’t follow what was going on; that could be on me, and it could also be the complexity of the subject matter. Or it could be that this movie is actually difficult to follow. And that’s the thing – Nolan is going to deliver world-class action; we know that and that’s a given, but usually the story matches it, like in Inception and the Batman films. On a first viewing, I’m not sure that Tenet does.

A frailty is that John David Washington is no Leonardo Di Caprio, and I felt a lack of connection to the characters until the very end, when the Protagonist and Neil (Robert Pattison) admit they’re now friends. Kenneth Branagh never disappears into the thick Russian accent he is putting on, and you’d think he might, considering he’s already been a Russian baddie in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Elizabeth Debicki is a terrific exception and nearly steals every scene she is in for me, perhaps simply because her character is the easiest to understand. And man, she is tall; extremely talented too, don’t get me wrong, but don’t let that distract you from the fact that she is damn tall. Right now, Tenet has made me appreciate Dunkirk more, just from the point of view that it is also technically outstanding, but it feels uniquely its own film; Tenet is a spyish thriller like Inception, and helms an internal logic like Interstellar and Memento – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Lastly, a small question on taste; I just wonder if anyone else found the final war scenario a little tacky since its sole objective was to create a spectacle. Especially following war movies like 1917 and Hacksaw Ridge, not to mention older television shows like Band of Brothers, that are so harrowing in their depiction of how repulsive and frightening real war is. I suppose Starship Troopers had stylised war scenes, and so many other movies do too, but I’ve never felt an issue before. I won’t overthink it, but it did occur to me.

I reckon if you haven’t seen any of Christopher Nolan’s other work, and you’ve got a propensity for problem solving, then you will love this movie. For me, maybe there’s only so many gratuitous bongs within a dramatic score I can hear before I’m taken back to yesteryear. I want to love Tenet, but I like it, and I like it because it’s Nolan but I don’t like it enough for how excellently it is made. It’s complicated. I sound as topsy-turvy as John David Washington on the Tenet poster. Not a perfect score from me today, but a TENtative 3.5 with the admission that I’ll probably come to appreciate this movie more in the future. Tenet is still vital viewing for 2020 so get seeing it.

3.5