Film review: Tenet

Christopher Nolan loves to play with time. The movie that he burst onto the scene with, Memento, was a movie that was told from end to beginning. Inception dealt with dream worlds where people could live lifetimes inside of hours of sleep. Interstellar has elements of time travel and gravitational time dilation due to black holes. Dunkirk weaved three threads of story told at different lengths to culminate together as a narrative climax. It should come as no surprise, then, that his latest film, Tenet, is perhaps his most intricately involved with the matter of time and our journey through it.

Tenet features a Protagonist (John David Washington), a special ops soldier who is never given a name and who becomes involved in a fighting a war against the future. Someone in the future is sending objects back in time with reversed entropy, so the objects move backwards in time instead of forward, which the film calls time inversion. A Russian oligarch, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), is the man in the present that the future is using to wage their cold war that is rapidly escalating. Charged with trying to prevent World War III, the Protagonist uses Sator’s estranged wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), to get close to Sator, retrieve a weapon he is building, and thwart his plans. In doing so, he enlist the help of several spy world types, including Neil (Robert Pattinson), a handler who becomes his right-hand man.

Setting aside the elements of time inversion, Tenet is a fairly straightforward spy thriller. I do not know if Nolan has ever been approached about making a James Bond film, but this is arguably his James Bond movie. It hits a lot of the same storyline beats that are familiar to the Bond franchise. As a spy, the Protagonist is on the trail of a mega-wealthy oligarch with diabolical plans that jeopardize the world. He becomes entangled with a woman who is in a relationship with the villain. He gets into a fight with the villain’s henchmen. He’s trying to retrieve a weapon that has fallen into the wrong hands.

The one thing I really respect about Christopher Nolan as a writer and director is that he does not condescend to his audience; he makes the biggest and boldest blockbusters, but he does not spoon-feed the viewer. When you watch a Nolan film, you must pay attention to everything. Making a film that involves an intricate element like time inversion makes for a complicated viewing experience. It would be easy to get lost in the minutiae or to lose the thread entirely. If you pay attention, there are clues in the movie to serve a guideposts to help you through it. This is a common theme in a lot of movie that involve time manipulation, including Nolan’s Interstellar; when some moments are left unexplained or unresolved, you can expect them to be revisited later in the film, similar to the bookshelf in Murph’s room when Cooper says goodbye.

In Tenet, one of these scenes is in the aftermath of crashing a plane into a highly guarded facility and they encounter two heavily masked people at a futuristic device called a Turnstile that allowed people to be inverted in time. A prolonged hand-to-hand fight takes place between the Protagonist and this person who is moving backward in time; the fight is revisited later in the film from a different perspective, serving as a visual palindrome. A car chase in the film also has the same structural elements.

Palindromes, it turns out, can be something of a cipher for understanding the action in this film. Palindromes, of course, are words/numbers/objects that look the same forwards and backwards. In fact, the film derives it title from a famous, ancient palindrome called the Sator Square, a two-dimensional palindrome of five Latin words:

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

All five of these words find their way into Tenet: Tenet is the name of the film, Sator is the antagonist, the opening scene is at an opera house, Kat is linked to an art forger named Arepo, and the building the plane is driven into is operated by Rotas Security. The scenes mentioned earlier work as palindromes in their own way, and the climax of the film shows a “temporal pincer attack” where two sets of forces engage a target, one going forward in time and the other going backward through time. It is fascinating to wonder about how they filmed a lot of this; the visual creativity on display is a delight, I was chuckling to myself with glee at what I was seeing happen on screen on more than a few occasions.

Nolan is a very hands-on director in post-production, so everything in this film is in there for a reason. As much as he deserves praise for the complexity and spectacle of so much of his films, there are aspects I can’t help but be critical of because I know that they are intentional choices. This movie is excessively loud and the score, once again composed by Hans Zimmer, had me immediately recalling my theater experience with Interstellar, where it was difficult to hear dialogue over the score or the loudness of the action. In the right moments, it can help make for an immersive experience, like in Dunkirk; done too much, though, it can be distracting and take you out of the movie if you’re constantly asking yourself, “What did he just say?

In many ways, it is fitting that Tenet is the first big film that is released as theaters around the world begin to open back up, as Nolan is on an almost personal crusade to save the movie theater experience from dying. I’ve referenced it throughout, but Tenet reminds me a lot of Interstellar. Neither film will be considered Nolan’s masterpiece and they have their flaws, but I still appreciate the ambition and the scale of it all. I’d still rather watch this than most of what passes for blockbuster movies these days. And maybe a future viewing, perhaps in a home theater setting with subtitles and smaller speakers, will alter my assessment of this movie. Time will tell.