Tenet (2020) | Film Review

To keep everything squarely in Christopher Nolan Land, let’s pretend you’re Batman. Essentially you are an unstoppable force investigating a mysterious foe and his impending siege of Gotham (aka mankind) as a whole. Everywhere you turn lies another confounding riddle that you must decipher – many times forgoing all common sense and tossing logic to the wind – in order to achieve your ultimate goal of saving the city. Along the way, Rachel Dawes gets hooked into our villain’s crosshairs and complicates your master plan of rescuing Gotham. With the assistance of Alfred and Lucius Fox, you take on this devious mastermind with a sadistic accent. By the end, you’re still not sure what the hell just happened or how exactly we got here, but Batman sure did kick a lot of ass and take many names along the way. That, my friends, is Tenet in laymen’s terms.

Half of the joy of Tenet is from unraveling the mysteries behind the film, so I will keep story points very rudimentary, and therefore this review much sleeker than the 2 hours and 30 minutes runtime. The Protagonist (John David Washington) is an agent who takes a cyanide capsule – which turns out to be a ruse – after an operation goes south, rather than turn on his government, which wins him favor with a secret organization in need of such fierce loyalty.

This is where The Protagonist learns about inversion; the ability to essentially rewind time and possibly save the world from destroying itself in the past, or from the future to the past, or is the past the future? Where the hell am I, where is he, where are you? The concept is fascinating and hilariously convoluted – brace yourself for exposition as clear as a Yoda TED Talk – yet ultimately clicks as we wade into the final act. Inversion is time travel for people who love to pine on about the complications and philosophies of the topic. Like Christopher Nolan, I imagine.

Along the way, The Protagonist partners up with Neil (Robert Pattinson, ready and willing for a Batman of his own) for a new assignment of time-foolery. Together they use Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a tired cliché of a tortured wife vying for vengeance, to target her husband, a nefarious dealer of inverted materials, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), before he uses his knowledge of inversion to destroy the civilized world.

Christopher Nolan has proudly proclaimed his admiration for the James Bond franchise in the past (or was it the future?), and Tenet shines through as a Bond film fully embracing the mind of Nolan himself. John David Washington hits the ground running with his roguish charm, yet Nolan gives little thought to establishing his character – or any other – as much more than a handily capable badass who can pick up complicated inversion techniques in seconds and should have no issue saving the world from a maniacal supervillain. You know, like James Bond.

The time travel aesthetic is a clever touch and may infuriate viewers as they attempt to grapple with the complexities of it, but it does blend into the environment and emerge as logical fiction when the film rolls to eventual conclusion. The sound mixing does the audience no favors though, as often times the bellowing score – which is fantastic otherwise – drowns out necessary exposition that we desperately need to completely embrace the story at play here. Tenet is a prime example of the potential for closed captioning screenings.

In terms of Christopher Nolan’s desire to get Tenet in front of audiences at movie theaters as their first must-see event since the pandemic, yes, this film absolutely fits. Cinematic is not a heavy enough word to describe Tenet, as each and every scene is lovingly staged, choreographed, and shot. Tenet is bombastic, intense, bewildering, thrilling, at times downright amazing, and at other times elaborately and unnecessarily complex.

You may love it, hate it, overthink it, underthink it, chastise it, analyze it, or possibly even throw your popcorn at the screen out of sheer confusion, but there’s no denying: Tenet is Christopher Nolan going “Full Nolan”, and his vision is tailor-made for the big screen. I’m not spoiling anything, but this is intelligently written, wonderfully composed, expertly shot, and even at 2.5 hours paced fairly appropriately.

THIS is why we go to movies. Maybe Christopher Nolan will save cinema after all.