I usually like Christopher Nolan. I like puzzle-box plots. I like any story that plays around with the nature of memory, or our experience of time. Nolan’s movies all have puzzle box plots and most of them play around with the nature of memory or our experience of time. I’ve heard some people dismiss Nolan as a director whose movies aren’t smart so much as they make audiences feel smart and… if so, I guess that’s me. Because I usually really like Nolan.
But I hated Tenet. Nolan tends to favor plot over character—you’re watching to find out what happens, not so much to spend time with the characters. The more I write, the more I feel like this is the wrong choice, even though a good puzzle-box can be incredibly fun.
Anyway. Nolan tends to favor plot over character and he’s made it work in the past. But his earlier movies featured characters who were sketchy, sure, but those sketches were vivid and compelling. The characters in Tenet are mostly cyphers. If our main character, Protagonist, has a home or a family or a hobby, we never find out about it. He’s not from anywhere; he doesn’t have worries or cares that do not pertain to the plot. I mean, his name alone is a signal that exists to serve this story.
So what about the story, then? Is it an exciting puzzle? Is it a fun adventure? Eh. I’d say no. But let’s break this into two parts: the goal and the conceit.
The Goal: The goal of the movie is actually really simple: seize the Macguffin before the Bad Guy does. If the Bad Guy gets the Macguffin, the results will be catastrophic. Described vaguely but repeatedly as ‘worse than a nuclear bomb’, or the start of ‘WWIII’. When asked to clarify, no further information is forthcoming. Still, a simple and clear objective: get the Macguffin, stop WWIII.
The thing about “stop WWIII” or “get the Macguffin before the bad guy does,” as plot drivers is that while they’re great at creating forward momentum, giving the characters an excuse to make plans and do things, they’re not actually interesting. They’re just a delivery system for things like amazing characters or snappy dialogue or clever cat-and-mouse antics.
Tenet does not deliver any of those things. It mostly delivers spectacle. Every step toward this Macguffin requires a lot of spectacle.
You could call Tenet a heist movie, since it contains at least three heists, but that would be an insult to heist movies. The fun of a heist movie relies on extravagant table-setting: introducing characters whose expertise will be challenged by the heist, watching them plan their approach, and then seeing how those plans play out. Inception is actually really good at this. Tenet is not. At best, our main characters mention the goal of a heist (“We’ll break into X in order to achieve Y”) before jumping to the action. The scenarios are complicated, both because they involve intricate plans and because they’re usually foiled in some way, requiring the characters to react on the fly. Proper set-up could have made these sequences easier to follow and quite neat; instead they’re incomprehensible.
So it’s just spectacle. Watch the plane blow up. Watch the bomb go off. That sort of thing. If you like watching things blow up, great. if you don’t… Tenet is probably not the movie for you. And that’s the sad truth.
The Conceit: The central conceit of Tenet is time inversion. There’s some science mumbo-jumbo attached but the end result is that objects and people can be made to move backwards through time. At first, it seems like time inversion tech is in very short supply—like there are maybe a handful of unspent inverted bullets in the world, assorted debris mostly used for scientific research. By the end, entire subplots and whole battles depend on ‘temporal pincer movements’ where half the combatants are moving forward through time and half of them are moving backwards. Eventually we’re tracking two Protagonists, one moving forward through time and one backwards, and it is not easy to tell them apart. They look the same, sound the same, have the same priorities and attitudes.
I believe that ‘time inversion’ could have been really cool. I believe this because there are a couple of moments where it actually is cool. There’s a character, very nearly the only female character in the movie, who is a pure damsel in distress. She exists solely to make bad decisions and inspire others to make bad decisions. But she has the best time inversion setup + payoff in the movie. There’s another one involving Robert Pattinson’s character that’s really well set up, too.
But for the most part, ‘time inversion’ is frustrating nonsense. Various characters in suits and labcoats keep telling us that time inversion is a huge danger but they can’t explain why. Meanwhile, the movie is constantly showing us that inversion is an endless and escalating logistical nightmare.
Worst of all, the concept is not at all intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive. It is very hard to process; my mind constantly wanted to reject the inverted scenarios on the screen. I had to wrestle my own brain into submission in order to follow the action. It was a constant struggle. And the movie does not help, even though it could! The action is so fast, it’s so poorly explained, the visual signposting is so rudimentary and frustrating.
It was a struggle to watch and it had no rewards. No payoff, no denouement. It’s a very simple story with very poorly drawn characters and the conceit is simply not well-enough realized to carry the rest.
Also: God of War. I played the most recent God of War game. I understand all the praise; it’s well done. It’s a coherent story with great characters and a strong emotional arc. The scenery is gorgeous and fantastical. It makes sense and it’s fun to play. But, in the end, not for me. No hard feelings or critique, just not my thing.