Mechanics of Character and Time Travel: My Review of Tenet

It feels crazy to be doing a fresh review. The last review I did was Birds of Prey, which also happened to be the last movie I saw in a theatre. That feels like a lifetime ago. Since my last big review was in February, it felt almost necessary to write something up on Tenet once I finally got the chance to watch it. But, now that I’ve seen it, Tenet feels like a hard movie to talk about substantially. Not because I had trouble understanding it, or because I hated it or anything. In fact, it’s because Tenet isn’t any of those things that I have difficulty talking about it.

Nolan's movies only get prettier over time.

Let’s go back.

The year is 2020, and everything’s gone to hell. As theatres close up in response to COVID-19, the 2020 slate of movies vanishes, pushing back months, or even a full year. Among the last to budge is Christopher Nolan’s most recent entry, Tenet. Following the heels of the more straight-forward Dunkirk, Tenet promises to be a spiritual successor to Nolan’s cerebral claim-to-fame Inception. There’s a lot of room for excitement, but Nolan’s insistence on forcing the movie into theatres brings trepidation. This unease doubles when the people who are able to see the movie come out with reports that it’s incoherent and soulless. Hearing these reviews, I begin to fear that Nolan is falling into patterns he began digging with The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar; movies that are certainly cinematic and are bursting at the seams with their scope, but often forget their characters along the way. I talk to several friends who go out to watch the movie, and to my surprise, they all seem to like it! But it all seems like a mixed ‘this was really fun, but I’m not fully sure what happened.’ All in all, the movie seems divisive, and I decide I don’t need Nolan’s beloved theatre experience. I’ll wait for Blu-Ray.

Pattinson is to Nolan as Saoirse Ronan is to Greta Gerwig.

So, now I have the Blu-Ray, and I’ve seen the movie. Which side of this sharp divide did I fall on?

See, that’s the thing. I feel very much in the middle.

In short, Tenet is great, actually? Despite all the accusations I’d seen of the characters being flat and humourless, John David Washington was so much fun as the lead. He oozed a sort of stylish charisma that made clear how much Nolan wanted this to be his Bond movie. A dry wit almost on par with Inception runs through the film. Washington’s partnership with Robert Pattinson’s character is especially electric and drives much of the soul of this movie. Their characters are a joy to watch, and my biggest request coming out of the movie is that I wish they had more time for their relationship to really develop. It’s something to keep an eye out for on my eventual rewatch.

God forbid we get to the point where Nolan starts including Madonna/Mary stereotypes.

Elizabeth Debicki, unfortunately, gets the short end of the stick. While Debicki is classy and stylish as always, she feels very much burdened with the weight of playing a woman written by Nolan. The comparisons with Inception continue; that movie’s emotional resonance is tied primarily to Cobb reconciling with his wife’s death and secondarily with Fischer reconciling with his father. Debicki’s relationship with mildly over-the-top villain Kenneth Branagh is, I think, expected to be a major push of the film – but it never quite lands? Firstly, Debicki’s entire character is reduced to that of an abused mother figure. Nolan has upgraded from dead wife tropes to mothering tropes; eventually, he’ll write a fully-fledged woman. Debicki does her absolute best with a limiting script, but it’s hard when the characters are facing the end of all human life and she has to add “and my son!” because we forgot that he was part of that equation, I suppose. She is rarely allowed to contribute to the plot, instead, her personal (and entirely justified) goals often disrupt the goals of Washington and Pattinson. Instead, she mostly functions as a plot device until the end of the movie.

Seriously, every shot in this movie looks kinetic and cool. Nolan's visual style has come a long way.

So long as we’re talking about the characters, we might as well mention the fact that Washington’s character doesn’t have a name. All the promo material refers to him as The Protagonist, which isn’t really a codename as much as it is a colourful metaphor he exclusively uses with one character. Why exactly does Nolan refrain from giving his, uh, protagonist an actual name? Really, your guess is as good as mine. I think of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, a movie where nearly everyone uses codenames – but part of the joy of Baby Driver is that there’s enough subtext and worldbuilding that you can largely piece together real names for most of those characters. From what I’ve gathered, Nolan offers no such subtext; in fact, we know relatively little about Washington’s character except that he was CIA before being pulled into the world of Tenet. I don’t think we particularly need a full background, but not even giving your lead a name seems fairly silly. The best I can surmise is Nolan’s obsession with making stories about the creative process (a theme I talk about in my previous Nolan article) is coming to some sort of head with a character explicitly referred to as The Protagonist. But Tenet is more about fate and free-will than it is about storytelling? Unless assuming the role of Protagonist is a comment on shirking of destiny…

I love this imagery but someone please explain the mechanics of the inverted bullets. Was this window installed with a bullet in it? Does it matter? Probably not.

With that in mind, let’s address themes. Tenet, if you didn’t already know, is a movie ostensibly about time travel. Specifically, it explores cause and effect, and the hypothetical idea of ‘inverting’ objects so that they flow backwards in time. If someone is shooting an inverted gun, it appears as if they are not firing the gun but rather catching the bullets. So on, so forth. As a movie about the mechanics of time travel, it is inevitably concerned with the concept of free will vs. determinism. That just seems to be the end result of any time travel movie that wants you to care about the details. Through Tenet, we see objects, vehicles, and eventually, people who are inverted; moving from our future, into our present, and then proceeding into our past. If this is possible, surely this means our future is fixed? The question is naturally raised if one can change what appears to be set in stone; are we destined to repeat events as predicted?

More Nolan car chases, please.

I’ve been watching HBO’s Watchmen show, so naturally, Dr. Manhattan from the original Watchmen comic comes to mind. The only really superpowered character in the comic, Dr. Manhattan exists concurrently throughout reality, experience all time and all moments at once. His compatriots plead with him to change the horrific events he sees, but as he says, “we’re all puppets […] I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.” Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and the short story it’s based on, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, take a similar approach. The alien heptapods that Earth encounters don’t view time linearly, and they view themselves almost like actors, acting out a script that is already determined for them. While to our Western sensibilities these approaches may seem fatalistic, when presented literarily, there’s always a quiet sense of beauty to them. They come with a serene understanding of our place in the broader world, the way we interact with everything around us.

These views are not the only ones that such stories present us, however. Rian Johnson’s Looper sees cause and effect as in a sort of mutable flux, where human action can break cycles of hurt and trauma. Back to the Future revels in the idea of human choice, showing that small changes can leave huge impacts. Steins;Gate has long been a favourite show of mine, a story where fate practically becomes the main antagonist as Rintaru Okabe struggles against the destined consequences of his actions. In these sorts of stories, human agency and perseverance are praised as the protagonists overcome the sheer weight of the future itself. Interestingly, these stories seem to almost always end with the declaration that time travel is a bad, bad thing and that humans were not meant to know their own destinies.

Nolan, I get the characters are a train yard, but we know they're ADRing their dialogue, you don't have to mix the trains so loud.

I guess a part of why Tenet feels weird to me is that it hardly seems to want to pick a side. I think it has a side that it falls on, but only really in passing. It wants to raise the conversation, but it rarely wants to interact with it on a really meaningful level. In Memento, the inverted story structure works both to orient the audience in Leonard Shelby’s perspective, as well as to raise questions about the way we narrativize our lives and tell ourselves stories. It has multiple different voices and opinions that challenge and support that theme. But when Tenet asks questions of free will or fate, they rarely seem to rise above immediate plot concerns. The consequences of a non-linear lifestyle are paramount to the heart of Arrival, but The Protagonist is never really challenged with such consequences. The time mechanics serve to create cool set pieces more than they impact our characters and force them to change. They are text, never subtext.

To be clear, I do think Tenet falls to a particular side. Unfortunately, discussing that with any detail feels like a spoiler to me – another reason why it’s difficult to review this movie in any real depth. But the implications of the film’s choice are only really brought into consideration in the movie’s closing minutes. One character describes a sort of “faith in the mechanics of the universe” that still necessitates action, which is a really beautiful ideal but one that the movie leaves sadly unexplored. Perhaps I’m asking too much of this movie, but the majority of it feels like the long set-up of a set of really cool rules that only start to reach their potential as the movie is beginning to wrap up. I get that this movie left a lot of people bewildered, but asides from Nolan’s awful sound mixing, I was with it every step of the way and I kind of just wish there was more.

John David Washington is surprisingly a lot of fun in this movie and I hope he has a long and successful career.

In the end, I think that’s my biggest compliment and greatest critique of Tenet. I adore the worlds Nolan builds in his sci-fi outings; Inception, Interstellar, and now Tenet all feel huge and lived-in and have so much to offer. But while Inception feels like a satisfying outing in the world of dream theft, Tenet feels like it’s just warming up, like the 2.5-hour runtime is just there to explain the rules. And, again, those rules are very cool. Nolan’s action is at its best when it’s conceptually-driven; compare the spinning hallway fight in Inception with, well, the snowy shootouts in Inception. One is vastly superior. Tenet feels like Nolan taking that to its natural extreme; almost every fight in Tenet has some exciting concept behind it, and they almost all land. The number of times I said, aloud, in my empty house, “whoa, that’s so cool” in this movie may be more than I can count on my hands. At its best Tenet is slick and exhilarating, with interesting characters driving it forward. But I wish it were more. I wish it felt a little more realized and a little bit more cohesive. I wish Nolan would quit drowning out the dialogue so that people could better comprehend what is going on at any given moment. And I wish the editing in the first thirty minutes was a little less chaotic so that it didn’t feel like a fever dream whenever we switched scenes. Oh, and I really wish Elizabeth Debicki had more to chew on than vaguely outdated stereotypes.

But, all of that said, I genuinely enjoyed Tenet. I need to find a new set of adjectives because I can only say it’s ‘fun, slick, and cool’ so many times, but it really is all of those things. The action is all breath-taking, and when Nolan lets the cinematography breathe without trying to exposit everything to you, everything falls into place smoothly and satisfyingly. But the movie is bogged down by trying to explain itself and doing so inaudibly. It’s not that the plot is incoherent, as much as the dialogue itself is hard to hear. I wonder how much my experience was improved just by watching on a home television by myself with audio I could monitor as I saw fit. Early on, a character says, “don’t try to understand it, feel it.” Generally, I think this is a solid approach to Tenet, but one that Nolan doesn’t seem to fully trust given his insistence on exposition. Inception had a similar problem, but I think it was helped by the way it divided those roles – Cobb was the skilled dream technician and our POV protagonist, Arthur was his intelligent right-hand, and both were explaining dream share technology to Ariadne, who was new to that world. Here, all of those roles kind of fall to Washington, and to a lesser extent, Pattinson.

Seriously, what I would give for a Tenet sequel (?) with these two.

In the end, it all comes down to that Inception comparison. Tenet really is the spiritual successor in about every way. It inherits neat time shenanigans, a similarly fascinating world, and a colourful cast of characters. But it also inherits all of its problems. Tenet feels like the ‘most’ Christopher Nolan movie – it’s everything he’s done since The Dark Knight turned to 11. As such, it’s a great action-packed thrill ride, but possibly an empty one. To be honest, despite the length of this review, I didn’t mind. I think it’s great! But I can’t escape that notion that it could have been better, tighter, bigger. That there could have been just a little bit more.