Old mate Christopher Nolan has yet again taken it upon himself to absolutely brain fuck unsuspecting cinemagoers (although perhaps we should all suspect it by now) by making us question everything we know about time, space and the unemotional characters that frequent his films in just a mere two and a half hours. In other words: I saw Tenet.
Following John David Washington who plays the Protagonist (zero points for character names), Tenet details the Protagonist’s mission through the manipulation of the direction of time in order to, uh… save the world. Not even that dramatic.
Watching Tenet in the cinema falls along the line of what Christopher Nolan ensured it would be when he insisted the film be released worldwide in the middle of a global pandemic: an experience. Here in Melbourne, Australia, cinemas are just beginning to open back up after months of lockdown and some of the tightest restrictions in the world, and boy was I excited to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers, funnelling popcorn into my gobble in between sips of a mega-sized Fanta. The film was loud and intense, it was complicated and exhilarating. It was action and adventure with threads of dystopian and science-fiction. But, quite frankly, it was ultimately really fucking confusing.
With accents from every corner of the globe, some of them unnecessarily thick (too much Russian mayo, Kenneth Branagh), and a musical score that although complemented the intensity of the film’s action, has possibly made me permanently hard of hearing, Nolan has really worked some cinema magic to make sure not a single audience member understands anything that is going on. Which, in a film that casually flirts with PhD-levels of physics and invents completely new ideas involving the bending of time, the dialogue, and the information that it communicates, is kind of important. What’s more is that Nolan, who has built a reputation as a filmmaker for his fearlessness in exploring notions of time and space that surpass the layperson’s comprehension, makes sure to bury much of his plot’s exposition in the words his characters throw at each other over the exponential volume of the film’s sound mix. And buried it is, because what the fuck is going on?
But perhaps I’m giving Nolan more credit than he deserves, because under all this talk of laws of physics and time and space and what not, I can’t help but wondering if Tenet is merely just an action film with magic tricks? A viewing of any of the blockbuster flicks that clutter Nolan’s filmography seem to beg the question that certainly needs to be asked after Tenet: is this smart, or does it just think it is?
If your audience needs to watch your film multiple times, with detailed readings of synopsises and tumbling down Reddit rabbit holes in between (as well has having a PhD in quantum physics) in order to understand the plot of your two-and-a-half-hour cock-fest of sexy Robert Pattisons and time-travelling John David Washingtons, then who is it, may I ask, that you suspect will be actually be able to enjoy the film?
That’s not to say I hated Tenet. And I certainly don’t hate Inception or Interstellar or any of the other of Nolan’s attempts at forcing his audience to think beyond the two-dimensionality of storytelling. But perhaps Nolan should channel less of his seemingly abundant brainpower into creating multi-dimensional realities, and more of it into creating multi-dimensional characters. With an excruciatingly complex plot, the only thing that could’ve saved Tenet were characters in which weren’t deemed empathetic merely because they were mothers/fathers/sons/daughters. Oh, a wee bit more of RobPatt wouldn’t’ve hurt.
2 outta 5 for you, Mr. Nolan.
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