Tenet (2020)

Let’s start with a highlight:
This was the first new movie I’d wanted to see that I was able to get from Redbox since… oh… about 67 months ago, in March 2020.
It was oddly comforting to get a new movie from that weird red rental machine.

***

I’m coming to the realization I’m not a fan of director Christopher Nolan.
I loved “Inception” (2010), but I thought “The Prestige” (2006) was pretentious. My dislike for “Interstellar” (2014) is no secret, and I’m sorry to report that “Tenet” (2020) suffered from some pretty impressive navel-gazing.

Time travel is not a new concept in science fiction. It’s been around for just about as long as the genre has, for good reason: it’s always fun to ponder ‘what could have been’ or ‘how could this be different’ or even ‘what would I do if I was the one time traveling?’
And unlike space travel, which I’ve discussed many times and has been thoroughly elaborated on over the decades to the point where I’m quite comfortable declaring “this is what future space travel should look like!” there is no such equivalent for time travel.
There are certainly some outstanding examples, and some not great ones, but because we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of skipping through the time stream, it’s impossible to say what it should and shouldn’t look like.

Which brings us to today’s movie: “Tenet.”

For starters, I very much got the feeling that Nolan just wanted to show a lot of things happening backwards, so he wrote a whole movie about it to get a studio to fund countless hours of B-roll footage: a ship’s wake compressing instead of expanding, shattered glass fitting back into place, cars un-flipping in the middle of the road, etc.
Entertaining visuals to be sure, but not exactly a good premise for a solid narrative structure.

The movie followed Protagonist (John David Washington), presumably a CIA agent, as he jet-set around the world to solve crimes. I think.
Somewhere during one of his operations, he was picked up to work an extra-special assignment, regarding “Tenet,” which was explained/shown by bullets that un-fired themselves from a gun. There was no jumping to points in time, simply running reality in forwards or backwards at the same speed.
The visual of an impact crater disappearing was cool, but then a scientist tried to “explain” it as “inverted radiation,” which didn’t make any sense at all.  From then on, anything traveling in reverse was simply called “inverted.” I’m not sure that was the best word for it, but I also can’t think of a better one.
The scientist also claimed that “from the bullet’s perspective, it’s still traveling forward,” which didn’t make any sense.
There was a lot of emphasis on inversion being used as a weapon, which I grasp as a concept, but that’s not actually what the movie focused on, so as characters brought it up repeatedly, it felt like wasted screen time.

This movie is new enough that I won’t explain any more of the plot because I want you to have a fair chance to see this yourself, assuming my review hasn’t already tainted your opinion.
There are lots of time travel shenanigans, and it ultimately shared its core ideas with “Predestination” (2014), which I think did a better job with showing time travel as an uncontrollable concept.

Nolan also worked the screenplay for “Memento” (2000), where the story played forwards and backwards at the same time, then met in the middle.
Considering the relatively confusing first half of the movie, and the reveal that people with access to “the turnstiles” could then chose to go backwards through time, I expected the storyline to boomerang at the mid-point, and have the final scene be the first scene from a different perspective, which would have been an outstanding way to wrap everything up with a nice little bow.
I was wrong, that’s not the direction it took, and I think the movie was overall weaker for it.

Speaking of: “the turnstiles” didn’t make sense. They existed, somehow. Giant cement-and-steel contraptions that served one very specific purpose just existed at random locations around the globe; the locations of some made sense, and others were just… out there.
They were critical to the plot and how everyone did anything involving time travel, but they were too mysterious an object to just be there without explanation.
Who built them? Why? When? How could you know you could build one if you didn’t even know you could travel back in time?

I will give a positive here: the forward and backwards times were shown with red and blue indicators in various ways. Sometimes it was colored lighting, others it was clothing, etc. It was revealed surprisingly ham-fisted the first time but became a useful visual tool after that.

Somewhere in the background of Protagonist’s adventures was “The Algorithm,” the macguffin that allowed the time travel to happen, which looked exactly like a crankshaft to a large engine, so it’s a shame that they went with such a 2020 buzzword.

It certainly seems like there should have been deleterious effects from a forward object interacting with an inverted object in any context, but that was completely glossed over, except for the times when the plot needed it to be an issue, then it was.

Robert Pattinson played secondary character “Neil,” and spent every single second of that role looking like he was in his 50s and actively giving up on life. As Pattinson is only a few years older than me, that means his look was a very specific choice by the costume and makeup department.
Not a good choice, just a choice.

Michael Caine was in this, for approximately five minutes, which I think is just part of Nolan’s base set of requirements for making movie.

The special effects were mostly good, which was an easy win as a majority of the “effects” were just scenes of things shown in reverse, so there’s not a lot of ways to screw that up.
There was a car chase that happened between one forward car and one inverted car that was lame to watch the first time, but visually entertaining the second time, though at one point a car flipped over and it looked atrociously fake.

The music was disappointing.
Anyone can immediately remember the ominous trombone “bwooooomp” from “Inception,” but there’s not a single part of the soundtrack to this that stuck in my mind.
I don’t think it was ever detracting, which is nice, but it wasn’t memorable either.
Considering Nolan’s luck with the outstanding soundtracks for “Inception” and “Interstellar,” and how much he crowed that “Tenet” was a must-see in theaters where the surround-sound is just as important as the massive screen, the weakness of the soundtrack is especially poignant.

And let’s talk about the script:

Protagonist had a habit of using quippy dialog far too much. Sometimes it was entertaining, but mostly it was just him making inopportune one-liners that made him sound incredibly tone-deaf to the context of what was happening around him. Technically what he said fit his various predicaments, but not well.

On multiple occasions, characters used variations of the lines “it’s need to know, and you don’t need to know” or “if you know too much it causes problems.” Which… no. If this were a movie about jumping through time, sure, as you wouldn’t want ‘past you’ to learn about the future; but as this was about which direction through time you were traveling, the constant holding of information came across as unnecessary and counterproductive.

There were also a lot of scenes of two characters having conversations cut across multiple locations.
The obvious implication is that they’ve been talking while walking, and that we the audience are simply hearing the relevant parts. However, as the conversations flow as if they’re all one block of dialog, it kinda makes it feel like we’re watching two people talk, stop mid-sentence, travel somewhere in complete silence, start talking again.
That’s a ‘bad audience’ trick and we’re not supposed to think about those montages that way, but now that I’ve pointed it out to you, try to watch a heist movie without thinking about the weird implications.

I shouldn’t have to turn to someone’s explanation of the movie to understand what I just watched, but I did.
While the word “Tenet” was repeated throughout the film, it was never explained, and constantly used in a context where “tenant” could have fit, so I was kind of under the impression it was a weird mispronunciation and somehow related to someone paying rent to live somewhere for most of the movie. Turns out it was explicitly about the major action scene at the end which… fine. Sure. Whatever.
Obviously “tenet” is a palindrome, and this movie was about the ability to move forward/backward in time, so thematically that fits, but there’s any number of other options they could have picked.
Frankly, “Go hang a salami I’m a lasagna hog” would have made just as much sense, though it wouldn’t have looked nearly as good on a movie poster.

I’m giving this a 2-Claw rating for being annoying.
I’ve seen “Inception” multiple times, and I’ve constantly found new details to gawk at, but when I saw it in theaters with my dad the first time, I wasn’t confused about the story or what was happening.
I spent a the first 75 minutes of this movie feeling lost; I’m pretty sure that if I watched it again, it would make more sense, but I shouldn’t have to. No movie should require repeat viewings to understand its core story.

Shame on Nolan for trying to push this into theaters during the late summer of 2020 during a global pandemic.
No movie is so important that you should endanger yourself to go see it, especially one as not-stellar as this.