HAVE NO FEAR, THERE BE NO SPOILERS HERE.
Early in Tenet, there is a moment when a research scientist, played by Clémence Poésy, is trying to explain the movie’s new reality. It involves an idea called “inversion,” which is a way for characters to manipulate time and warp the world, in order to achieve their goals, both noble and sinister. After a while, she tells John David Washington’s Protagonist: “Don’t try to understand it. Just feel it.”
She might as well have been speaking to us.
See it. Feel it. Believe it. Try too hard to work out the dialectics of what’s happening on screen and you’ll miss too much. Just allow the movie to wash over you. Enjoy it. Trust that all of it just works. That is all you need to know before watching Tenet for the first time.
You will, however, immediately want to watch it again. And then, maybe once more.
The first time we watch a Christopher Nolan movie is always an emotional encounter. More so now, under these extraordinary circumstances, as we cautiously step back into cinemas for that communal moviegoing experience. As we once again get excited by the prospect of having the sound and spectacle of a Hollywood blockbuster unveil itself before us. As we’re rudely reminded of just how shitty it is watching Netflix on our phones, on cramped screens that make us crosseyed, with tacky, tatty sound that’s too often drowned out by the drone of the refrigerator.
The second viewing is more of an intellectual endeavour. This is when we’re watching closely, paying attention to minor details, and trying to work out the logic and the logistics of everything that is happening on screen.
It is only in that third viewing that we’re finally able to unclench our brains and truly embrace the film for what is.
Tenet isn’t a movie about time travel. It isn’t about multiverses or grandfather paradoxes. It is a movie that deals with time and the different ways it can function and be perceived. But even that is merely the setting. The film itself is Christopher Nolan’s pretzeled take on the spy genre. He loves James Bond and we’ve seen shades of his obsession manifest itself as various set pieces in his previous movies. In Bruce Wayne’s excursion to Hong Kong in The Dark Knight. In that snowbound climax to Inception. Tenet is his first, full-on, spy thriller, where men in sharp suits deal with end of the world scenarios.
But where’s the fun in making yet another Bond movie? Especially for someone who has made a career out of subverting every genre he takes on. Nolan’s boredom with convention is apparent. And despite constantly returning to the same themes in his movies – time, memory, the obsessions of men – he has always approached them in dramatically different ways. Tenet, might just be his most hostile effort.
Nothing in this movie is easy. The dialogue is frequently obscured. There is confusion as to where and “when” the characters are. The concept that drives the movie is rooted in such sciencey science that it requires an actual physics lesson in order to comprehend. Where Inception and Interstellar were littered with characters explaining the movie to one another, almost none of what is going on is spelled out in this movie.
Because Tenet requires more than just your attention. It wants you to exert yourself. To not just be a passive consumer of entertainment, but to enthusiastically engage with it. Which is a rare expectation in Hollywood. More so from a mainstream, high octane, globetrotting adventure.
This is a movie that earns your trust. It does so by way of the care and attention that went into the crafting of every scene. Nothing is out of place. Nothing feels accidental. The dialogue and the direction, the cinematography and the soundtrack, every moment is produced to within an inch of its life, in order to give you the most picture perfect experience.
It goes without saying that none of this would work if not for John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh. In lesser hands, this material, in all of its arduous ambiguity, would have undoubtedly fallen flat. The four of them, however, are so confident and convincing, that they are the perfect shepherds for this journey.
As critics, we try our best to draw upon whatever knowledge and experience we have when reviewing a filmmaker’s work. We compare and contrast. We cite sources of inspiration and point out moments of homage. We throw around invented adjectives, “Lynchian,” “Hitchcockian,” “Spilelbergian,” terms that have become surrogate for anything we wish to describe as “good” or “innovative.”
It is, however, a methodology that I can’t always rely on when it comes to reviewing a Christopher Nolan movie. He is distinctive, not just because he draws upon his own body of work, but also because everything he does is challenging. For both the critic and the audience at large. He is one of the few directors who is able to seamlessly blend art house concepts with high octane action, without sacrificing any of his intellectual ambitions at the altar of mass appeal. His movies are, in and of themselves, “Nolanesque.”
I couldn’t spoil this movie even if I wanted to. Yes, every aspect of Tenet has been shrouded in secrecy, but it isn’t because there is some big Keyser Söze twist at the end that makes it work. This is a movie about reveals, reversals, and revelations. All of them earned. All of them in service of the story that it’s trying to tell.
This is also movie that can only exist in this form. This is a story that can only be told in this way. It doesn’t work as a novel, or as a comic book, or as a television series. The breathtaking pageantry of Tenet, the craft, the imagination, the visual ingenuity, is everything that cinema was made for.
Tenet is a movie that was made for going to the movies. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. It is the shot in the arm that cinemas need. A spectacle that reminds us what moviegoing is, and can, and should be. We’ve spent the last six months living and laughing and crying by ourselves. And Tenet is the collective cultural engagement that we’ve all been yearning for.
Tenet
150 minutes
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh
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