Tenet Was Made for an Audience of One: Christopher Nolan

After six months locked out of movie theaters, Tenet made the triumphant return. Even before the pandemic forced theaters to shutter, Christopher Nolan’s latest, time-bending epic was shaping up to be an event of epic proportions. When release dates begun to get pushed back, Tenet became a symbol of the theater system poised to bounce back just as soon as it was safe enough. It’s a big budget, high action movie with huge names attached to it, it’s everything attached to big theater releases. 

It also highlights everything wrong with theaters. 

I had not been to a movie theater in six months, I had almost forgotten the experience. And to be fair, the experience was nowhere near what I remember. At 7 pm on a Friday night, the halls were nearly empty. Concessions was shut down, and though the movie had nearly sold out, it was only about ⅓ full. There was no excited buzz around the trailers, no ritualistic passing of popcorn, no shared gasps at the plot twists. 

There were harsh lighting changes that made my eyes hurt. There were moments too loud or too quiet when I couldn’t tell what was going on. The insanely noisy nature of the movie had me, a native English speaker, questioning how well I really understood the language. I realized about one third through the movie that I actually had no idea what they were trying to achieve, and would’ve loved a rewind button. The pacing of the movie never really lets up, it’s always into the next fight or daring escape before the previous one is over, and a pause button would’ve really improved the digestion of the film. 

When you have a career as long and prolific as Christopher Nolan, you earn a certain amount of rights. You no longer have to justify your style, it is assumed to be expected under your name. You can get away with not saying as much because audiences learn to read the tone of your voice. You are allowed to presume that fans who have stuck by you for so long have the same taste in movies as you do. 

Christopher Nolan, whose two decade career has amassed over $4.9 Billion dollars at the box office, is well aware of these rights that he has, and Tenet takes full advantage of them. 

Another director who has these rights, knows it, and recently put them to the test, is the patron saint of film bros everywhere, Quentin Tarantino with 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And he used his privilege to create a drawn out compilation of things that he really likes: 1969, cowboy movies, gratuitous violence, and young women’s bare feet. 

Christopher Nolan has taken a similar route: he shoved all of his favorite things into a movie, pushed the blender, and hoped that it would come out alright. Whether he succeeded is up to how closely the tastes of the individual viewer line up with Nolan’s. If you love background noise, deafening score, and crucial dialogue all drowning each other out at the same time, impossible to understand timelines (emphasis on time, de-emphasis on line), unnecessary Michael Caine appearances, unfunny one liners, delicately choreographed fight scenes, and endless practical effects, you will adore this film. 

I don’t know anything about the personal life about Christopher Nolan. I can guess that he likes time, and big explosions. But from Tenet, I can take a pretty confident guess on what his favorite movies are: James Bond, Fight Club, and Casablanca. 

John David Washington’s Bond-esque nameless CIA agent is less smooth than 007. He’s perhaps a better fighter, and definitely more moral, but he somehow finds a way to be a less rounded character than the caricature clearly designed so that every Mid-midlife-crisis man can project their fantasies of being a secret agent. The mission that is intended to drive the movie is vague, and no revelation is satisfying because it is impossible to grasp the full scope of what that means. Some strange chemical equations are given in order to force the audience to suspend a certain amount of disbelief in how various weapons work, but they refuse to answer enough questions, and so it just becomes frustrating. The villains are cartoony, with no rationalization for why they behave the way they do, leading to a thin climax. I could not give you plot or emotional rationalization for at least half of the things that happen.

The references to Fight Club and Casablanca are less obvious (except for when they’re literally quoting the movies), but they do run like loose threads throughout. It has the attitude of a film student paying homage to his favorite directors, but leaning entirely too hard on those feelings, relying on shared appreciation to do the heavy lifting rather than building his own environment.

The characters are attempting to stop the end of the world (how the end of the world is coming please don’t ask me because I still do not understand). In a long, walking, expository scene, they explain that the entire population will die, including Elizabeth Debicki’s precious son. And my first reaction was, so what? The characters immediately begin to make a plan on how to stop this. They push everything to the brink attempting to stop something worse than nuclear holocaust. All the meanwhile, I still couldn’t understand the stakes. 

After six straight months of the world ending without a movie theater to escape to, this premonition of a quick and brutal blast doesn’t scare me. With the pandemic still out of control, with apocalyptic fires tearing across the west coast, with human rights abuses in China, and with the threat of fascism at home, it’s going to take a little more than the end of the world to get audiences to care. 

There is also the glaring issue of the women in this movie. There are two. Three if you count a random General who explains the rules of the world for a couple seconds. But I don’t really, so there’s two. There’s Clemence Posey’s scientist, who explains, or attempts to explain, how a bullet is able to move backwards in time. This scene, and her character, exists solely to tell the audience what is going on, and though it is a cardinal violation of the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule, it still manages to not say anything that sticks. Your other brand of woman is Elizabeth Debecki’s Kat, a woman trapped by her abusive husband who keeps her by threatening to separate her from her son. She somehow manages to be a version of Diane Kruger’s character in National Treasure with less personality. She is treated as a damsel in distress, a human punching bag, and an unstable crybaby whose individual ambition does not exist outside wanting to protect her son, which she must state over and over because the son himself barely appears in the film. 

There may also be some implied romance between her and John David Washington’s character, who I will continue to refer to by this rather long monomer because he has no real name, but that relationship falls flat. The only semblance of romance, or even any kind of human element, is the relationship between JDW and Robert Pattinson’s Neil, an unspecified agent who accompanies JDW on his journey’s and is held up by the knowledge that he is not that different from the actual Robert Pattinson, who is a certifiable human disaster. And let’s just be clear, there is next to no romantic attraction between them, but the longing for any kind of humanity amongst the chemistry and doomsaying is strong enough that it mirages this possibility. 

The entire first half of this movie is frustrating and boring, but then the midpoint hits, the timeline flips, and it’s- honestly still pretty frustrating and boring, but with some satisfying bits of clicking into place that, though at the time exciting, could easily be achieved in a time travel themed episode of Black Mirror. 

In summary, Tenet is a frustrating, overlong, self-indulgent compilation of things that Christopher Nolan likes held up only by the charisma of its actors (not to be confused with its flat charisma-less characters) and plenty of practical effects shot in reverse.