'Tenet': Let's do the time warp again
You guys didn't want a 'Lisa Frankenstein' review so you're getting this instead
‘Tenet’ is many things. A Christopher Nolan blockbuster released smack-dab in the middle of our first Pandemic summer. The bridge between, for all intents and purposes, two of his World War II movies. A heady sci-fi action-thriller. A feast for the eyes. A soup of auditory confusion for the ears. A name. A palindrome.
I HATED ‘Tenet’ when it was first released, truly hated it. Here’s what I posted on Letterboxd.com:
So when friend of the ‘Stack Darren Franich (also fellow ‘Stacker himself, who you can all follow at The Draftland Scene) asked if I’d care to see the recent ‘Tenet’ re-release on 70mm IMAX… it was not an immediate yes. Actively re-expose myself to trauma? That can’t be to anyone’s mental health benefit.
Still, I’m a longtime advocate of revisiting shit that annoys the living hell out of you. Whatever’s gotten under your skin… I mean that’s worth examining, right? It moved you in some way1. It is not without some artistic thought that you arrived at the experience you had, however unpleasant! And so, much like John David Washington’s Protagonist, I agreed to something I couldn’t possibly know in the moment might change my perspective forever.
You’ve already seen my barn-burning, two-likes Letterboxd review but it feels instructive to tell you more of what I didn’t like about ‘Tenet’ the first time I saw it. To wit:
The sound design
The performances
The hypocrisy of a movie telling me to “just feel it” when in fact I definitely needed to think it
The way it retroactively made ‘Westworld’ seem human by comparison, which in the battle of the Nolan brothers for “least access to human emotion” is truly an impressive feat
That first ding, I’m forced to admit, was amplified by the fact that I was watching ‘Tenet’ at a (COVID-friendly) drive-in movie theater through the radio of a 2010 Honda Fit. Nolan’s already wonky sound engineering never stood a chance! The rest are opinions I arrived at honestly, though years of filmmaker canonization probably had my H8r engine roaring at full-tilt. I wanted to dislike ‘Tenet’, it’s true, and I did.
CUT TO: a rainy afternoon at the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theater, nearly four years later. Robert Pattinson and John David Washington are sharing their time-displaced, kinda homoerotic ‘Casablanca’ ending. I’m sitting in my seat smiling. I no longer hate ‘Tenet’.
Love would be a strong word for a movie that, charitably, only just attempts to depict the chemical process we call “emotional response.” But I think I finally get ‘Tenet’, a movie that is ultimately way dumber than I thought it was, and for the better.
Here’s the main thing you need to understand about ‘Tenet’: it’s a whole movie built around how cool it would be to see shit go backwards. That’s it. Every set piece, every character, every line of dialogue either works in service of that idea or takes a backseat to it. I’m possibly taking something I once heard on a podcast as sacrosanct here, but I believe Nolan’s gone on record as saying he first had the idea for this movie when he was a kid. Viewed through that lens, EVERYTHING in ‘Tenet’ makes more sense. Little boys love smashing cars together (✅), they love making up nonsense words (✅), they love pretending they’re into girls when in fact all they want to do is bro down (✅✅✅). This is not a movie for quantum physicists; this is a movie for five-year-olds rough-housing in a sandbox.
Actually, let’s go even further: ‘Tenet’ is just classier ‘Kingsman’. HEAR ME OUT! A well-funded multi-national organization, spiritually if not actually based in the UK, enlists a non-traditional young agent to join their ranks and foil a possibly world-ending plot. They get him a well-tailored suit. Crucially, they talk about how important the quality of one’s suit is. Michael Caine enjoys some sort of senior role in the organization; he doesn’t leave his chair. Our young agent learns the ins and outs of spycraft in a world more complicated than he or we could have understood, eventually facing off against a villain with a silly accent and averting global disaster.
I’m being glib. But I’m also trying to make a point, I think, namely that Nolan is just as capable of fellow Brit Matthew Vaughn2 at going big and goofy, however little we reverent directorial devotees care to admit he can, or does. Have we forgotten ‘The Prestige’, and Hugh Jackman using Tesla magick to clone himself before every performance, all so he could best his life-long magic rival? Have we forgotten Leo screaming “MAAAALLLLL JESUS CHRIST!!” at his just-suicided wife (Mal) in ‘Inception’? Have we forgotten, like, BANE?
Nolan may look like the most self-serious oarsman on the Eton crew team, but really he’s just a mischievous scamp who wants to impress you with his cool new movie trick. Bullet go backwards! Darren echoes as much as in his own review:
Reverse bullets are splendid nonsense. I adore the plane crash, the hijacked cargo freighter sloooooowly meandering toward a building. Catamarans do look better in IMAX. Aaron-Taylor Johnson, sometimes my kryptonite, makes the phrase “Temporal Pincer” sound boss. Branagh threatens to fill a man’s cut throat with amputated testicles. Pattinson says one building is “bungee jumpable.” Forget the heady reputation. Tenet is a goof.
Another movie this unexpectedly draws to mind (and also one I struggled with on first watch): ‘Inherent Vice’. The main critique of PT Anderson’s 2014 Pynchon adaptation was… it didn’t make any sense. The mystery, I mean. Clues amounted to nothing. Doc Sportello meandered through a hazy post- Summer of Love Los Angeles with little intention, a Yogi Bear stoner led by his nose to the next high. What was it all for? Call this a cop-out but… vibes, man. Once you accept the actual plot of the movie as just a vibes delivery system, that’s when you know the shit is hitting.
Read every Reddit thread, every Vox explainer for ‘Tenet’ and not only will none of them actually make sense, none of them will uncover some deeper truth about the movie which, again, is a 150 minute meditation on how cool it is to watch shit go backwards. That doctor in that one scene who’s ultimately not important was right — you DO just have to “feel it,” all of it. Asking why Kenneth Branagh wants to end the world (an explanation garbled through sound design that, even in 70mm IMAX, still might as well be radio static), or why fire creates ice under inverted conditions, but not every time — you might as well be asking why Elizabeth Debicki is so tall. She just is!
Maybe it’s getting older3, maybe it’s too many years spent in the MCU trenches, but more than ever these days I find myself drawn to — Harry Styles voice — myoovies, ones that for whatever their flaws (and rest assured ‘Tenet’ has many! Like, I’m sorry, “I need to save my son” here is a stakes non-starter), maintain a steadfast devotion to justifying their projection onto a screen. They don’t even have to be big (though ‘Tenet’, and of course ‘Oppenheimer’, are), just… excited to exist? Eager to share something? It’s what I think I’ve gotten wrong about Nolan in the past, but won’t let his tailored suits distract me from in the future. Or maybe I will, only to invert time and try again.
“even if it was to the toilet!” says Henning the Insult Comic Dog
whose latest film ‘Argylle’, had Bryce Dallas Howard figure skating over a room-wide oil slick as she PG-13 machine-gunned 75 to 100 henchmen
I’ll be 30 this year!