Review: Tenet (2020)
Tenet is as complex and intricate as it is exciting, sure to be a fun night out for many and might even live up to the speculator’s bets that it will be a shot in the arm of an ailing film industry. The film isn’t without its fair share of issues both technical and narrative-based, though, and its absence of character, failures in the sound department and an over-indulgence in practical effects keep the film from being as engaging and truly exciting as it could be. What we’re left with is slightly shallow roller-coaster ride that can be incredibly frustrating if you try to piece things together whilst the car’s still moving.
Tenet is the latest mind-bending blockbuster to come from British-American director Christopher Nolan and a film many have tipped as the one to replenish cinemas across the globe back to their former strength, post-lockdown. Written solely by Nolan, without the aid of his brother Jonathan who has helped cowrite a number of Nolan’s past projects, the film is an exhilarating if confusing and ultimately frustrating experience. We follow the unnamed Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, as he embarks on a new mission to combat incursions from individuals sent from the future to travel backwards in time with the help of a ‘entropy-inversing’ technology.
The most notable thing about Tenet and one of its most talked about features is its sheer narrative complexity. It was inevitable that it would be, really, isn’t it? Frequent viewers of Nolan or even just those who recall his name and the projects it’s been attached to will recognise his infatuation with complex narrative structures and the concept of time in some of his most recent films – the odd manipulation in Dunkirk (2017), for one, the emotional use of time-dilation in Interstellar (2014), for another – from a mile away. Leading up to its release, Tenet was paraded about and generally stamped as being perhaps Nolan’s grandest and most time-obsessed piece to date. After an number of attempts to explain the general premise through sections of oft-hard-to-hear exposition (more on this later) and neat demonstrations, the film kicks things up a gear, throwing more and more elaborate set-pieces of action at us, all hinging on this core mechanic of time-inversion; you’ve most likely seen a trailer involving one man moving backwards in time fighting the Washington’s Protagonist moving forward.
But as much as the film urges you to just ‘feel it,’ there’s always a part of you that is struggling to make sense of everything going on on the screen in front of you. With each set-piece and action sequence a layer of complexity is added, whether it’s through an increase in the number of participants or the equipment involved, things just keep getting bigger and more bombastic and as this occurs a kind of frustration grows. A frustrated feeling that if you could just please have a moment to really think everything through, you might understand things better, but alas, the very moment you start to wonder whether what you’re watching actually makes any kind of sense, the starter pistol explodes once more and you’re off again. Slowly it starts to become apparent that Nolan really doesn’t wish for anyone to peak behind the curtain for that long. It has always felt as though Nolan is more of a magician than a typical filmmaker, dealing most primarily with illusion (probably not helped by the subject matter of The Prestige (2006)) and Tenet, seemingly Nolan’s longest and most strained exercise in sheer misdirection to date, feels as though it has pushed his ambition beyond his abilities.
Compounding this restlessness felt throughout the film, the soundtrack, though a refreshing change from Hans Zimmer’s admittedly brilliant if a little played out ticking scores and an interesting accompaniment to Nolan’s characteristically slick directing sensibilities, is ever-present. Early on, there are some examples of quieter moments but, increasingly throughout, scenes in which not a lot is actually going on are overlaid with these throbbing bass-lines, demanding that you find them enthralling on some level. To top this off, the culmination of this omnipresent thrumming and the film’s odd sound mix just results in a headache. A much talked about aspect of the film is the fact that the dialogue – in some of the most crucial expository and plot-progressing moments – is near impossible to discern through the forest of diegetic and non-diegetic noise. Though I do not wish to harp on a point already well made elsewhere, I will say that from the very first sequence, dialogue is treated as a blink and you’ll miss it nicety and nothing more. It appears that Nolan thinks that if the stoic-Mr-Protagonist-man is moving with enough purpose in his stride, we won’t actually care that we have no idea why he’s going that way in the first place.
All these technical issues seem to be solved by repeated viewings (and maybe also by being a little more quick-witted than I.) Don’t get it the first time? Give it another shot on the next go-around. With this being said, although repeated viewings being an antidote to the poor communication of a narrative is a pretty outrageous philosophy to hold, repeated watches does actually aid in dredging up the rest of the film’s issues.
One, and likely the most notable from even the first time you watch Tenet, is its lack of character. Though I only touched on it briefly before, the main protagonist of the film is indeed named The Protagonist and he’s about as spotless a canvas as the name might suggest. We learn nothing of the character’s past and barely anything about he feels about everything going on around him. Perhaps the closest thing to relationship is how he treats Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat – the estranged wife of the mysterious Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branaugh) – and even then, we don’t know why he does what he does for her. Maybe it’s guilt? Maybe it’s general empathy? Who knows? And the blandness doesn’t stop there. Neil (Robert Pattinson) a British operative aiding the Protagonist in his mission, is perhaps the most infuriating character to watch. At several points, specks of charisma and intrigue float to the surface for us to nibble on; the first signs of a friendship, the inkling that Neil knows more than he’s letting on. And yet that’s all we have, the promise of a meal never to be wheeled out. Kat herself is potentially the most emotive of the main players, but even then, her feelings are so narratively calculated that it’s hard to buy into what Debicki’s selling. Kat comes to the fore only because it’s clear the narrative needed a wild card in a deck full of the same grey suit. This – where a female character, often the wife of a main player, is depicted as the only feeling person in the world and often the uncontrollable and unpredictable object coming between the protagonists and victory – is a bit of a problematic theme in and of itself and is present in much of Nolan’s work but deserves elaboration and investigation elsewhere in its own arena.
This is all to say though, that there’s nothing in Tenet to latch onto. Aside from the abstract sense that the end of the world is probably bad and some potential emotional associations relating to what so many of the characters describe as the new ‘Cold War,’ there’s nothing to care about. I get the sense that I should care, it’s exciting, but pure excitement can only be stretched so far into the territory of genuine engagement. During the initial sequence many, myself included, will have their hopes raised by the thrilling pace and clear proficiency on display. We intuitively respond to the characters we’re immediately following as the ones we should root for and we do, but beyond this sequence, we’re coasting on this initial inertia. There’s nothing there to keep us attached to the Protagonist beyond that very sense that we’re supposed to be attached to him. A friend described Tenet and Nolan’s films in a broader sense as exercises in the plot driving character and I couldn’t agree more. Tenet is potentially the greatest example of this sentiment in recent history. The mechanics of the film are the draw. The spectacle of the magic trick Nolan is demonstrating is the draw and once this spectacle wears off, I don’t think there’s much more to it.
This discussion of character must inevitably lead us onto a degree of speculation and theorising, however; What does happen when step back and look at everything? why did Nolan name his Protagonist as such? Before we enter this territory that I must warn will involve spoilers, though, I’d like to quickly address one more technical aspect. Tenet is a film mostly, if not entirely filmed practically, meaning that at most of the crucial moments, it’s unlikely you’re seeing anything but the real deal – plane crashing into a building? Yep. Characters moving backwards in time as the world moves forward? You bet. Characters moving forward as the entire world move back? Sure. However, this isn’t to say that this technique and philosophy necessarily works every time it’s employed. Practical effects are a tool just as CGI is. It is admirable that Nolan is so dedicated to recreating everything in camera but it is not a task inherently conducive to anything but a challenge. One area in which this is made apparent is in the way some of the time inversing is shot. It is clear that one of the tricks used to achieve the effect of one thing looking like it’s moving forwards in time whilst everything around it moves backwards is that the movement of the singular object or person has its movement faked and acted out as moving backwards. What I mean to say is that if a character is running forwards as the world is moving backwards, it is likely that the look of running backwards in time is mimicked, rehearsed to look real, then shot. This movement is then reversed such that it looks like the opposite is occurring. The actor imitates what it looks like to run backwards in time and the footage is reversed, achieving the effect practically. However, this is a very difficult thing to pull off and at several points the difficulty is made apparent, things do look weird and it is fairly distracting.
Now, there is one key area I would like to discuss that requires the spoiling of plot points and I do recommend seeing the film with fresh eyes the first time to really see what I’m talking about above. What I would like to now get at is what the film is for and why it might be constructed the way it is. If the characters are non-existent and the film is mainly spectacle, is there nothing else to it all? I think it would be unfair to say no.
The moment within the story about which the most questions arise occurs at two points within the narrative. This moment is the fight at the Freeport between the Protagonist and an inverted Antagonist (as the Protagonist hilariously describes them.) Later on, it is revealed that this Antagonist is actually the Protagonist, who has been forced to return to the Freeport to use the Turnstile present there to return himself back to his normal entropy. On second viewing, or perhaps even the first, the question arises: why are the two fighting each-other in the first place? At first, things seem reasonable in that the Protagonist is being ambushed. He’s fighting to defend his life. From the other end of things, though, the Protagonist also appears to be being attacked and aggressed upon by the earlier version of himself, who is just then finishing the fight and moving backwards. So why, then, are they actually fighting? It’s a little mind-bending because the fight appears to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The two have to fight each-other. The Protagonist must be present for the fight to start no matter which way you look at the sequence. This raises a greater point about the entire narrative, though. Why is it anything taking place in the first place if everything must be as it is in order to occur? What is the inciting incident in a closed loop?
Between the two bookends of this Freeport fight, Ives (a surprise appearance from Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an officer in the apparent military wing of the Tenet organisation – an organisation from the future attempting to stop the incursions from the Antagonists, also from the future – tells the Protagonist that he can’t enter the Turnstiles without an inversed version of himself doing the same on the other side, otherwise he would be trapped in an inversed reality and this seems like a disappointing answer. Sure, there may be repercussions for him personally, but what about the rest of the narrative? If a character were to opt out of the loop, wherein they trade places with the inversed versions of themselves through the Turnstiles, what would happen to the rest of the narrative? If the Protagonist refused to go through the Turnstiles when he did, would he no longer be present for the fight in the Freeport? Would the fight in the Freeport have ever taken place? This is the logic problem referred to as the Grandfather Paradox frequently pointed out in the film itself. Yet no solution is ever provided. Time and time again, alterations of Neil’s final few words are expressed to both characters in the story and us, the audience: ‘what’s happened is happened, it’s an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, it’s not an excuse for doing nothing.’ Neil and the Protagonist are working for the good guys who are working to prevent the collapse of time and erasure of their narratives, the fact that their narratives still exist seems to hint that they win but this doesn’t mean they can’t go through with things. They need to keep progressing through things in order for them to stay the way they are and they need to suppress the information received from the future to avoid diversions. They need to stay on the railroad tracks. Everything is determined.
But there appears to be a point being made beyond this expression of determinism. Why is the Protagonist named the way he is? It is implied that the Protagonist must progress through the narrative in order for the narrative to exist. We don’t know much about the Tenet organisation itself other than what is described and so our assumption is that Priya runs things, but it is revealed that there is one above her – the Protagonist himself – he is always in control and he is always the thrust of what we see. Nolan is suggesting that the Protagonist must always be the driving force and the underlying mechanic of the narrative. It appears to be a potent comment on stories and narratives in general, about watching films multiple times even, but it seems more of an ironic indictment of Nolan’s own style of filmmaking than anything else given its context. Nolan’s films are neat, closed loops unto themselves. Everything must happen the way it does and the reason it does so is because Nolan is the god of his worlds. But Nolan is suggesting above that the Protagonist must be the god of the narrative, driving things to be the way they are.
One of these statements must be correct: the Protagonist drives the story or the storyteller drives the story. If we look at the blank slate that is the Protagonist as a character, if we consider how far the narrative drives the characters as we did so earlier, we are forced to conclude that the former is true. The Protagonist drives things in Tenet but he himself is simply an expression of Nolan’s desire to comment on narratives. The Tenet organisation simply functions to maintain the narrative’s existence and the Protagonist works to further the goals of the organisation. Nolan has designed the narrative to make a point. The logical thing to do next would be to design characters that make certain decisions based on their own personalities and desires – to effectively reverse engineer them – but Nolan shirks this responsibility by removing character from the equation entirely, opting instead to paint two-dimensional, abstract representations of characters. Nolan’s overall point loses its potency because of this, it falls on its face. Nolan’s latest feat of illusion is attempting to pass off a fatalistic world as a deterministic one and he doesn’t succeed.