Tenet

Okay then.

Uh-huh.

Coulda been a wow, at least on one level. 

Christopher Nolan, you have certainly made my first trip to the cinema since early January a memorable one, with a mind-blowing film that kept me riveted for two and a half hours. Some would say (and do say) that this is the perfect way to et back into the cinema seat after such a long break. And maybe I would agree iff only the film had made even a little bit of sense. And if only the sound wasn’t so poorly done that neither Walter nor I could understand more than about 80% of the dialogue.

Yeah, Walter and I headed back to the cinema yesterday to watch Nolan’s big blockbuster, Tenet. The reviews were mixed, with half of the critics giving Tenet some absurdly generous four or five-star reviews. I can only assume that the overwhelming nature of Tenet (one reviewer said you “must be entertained by the overwhelming nonsense of it all”) left these critics in a state of shock, where only the fact that they had watched a riveting spectacle on the large screen for the first time in months was important. Based on that criteria, Tenet does indeed deserve the highest praise. And maybe I was “entertained” but I cannot endorse nonsense - just doesn’t work for me.

It’s true that Tenet is precisely the right kind of film to watch when you haven’t been to the cinema for a while, with eye-popping special effects, gorgeous locations, a good score and endless action done with Nolan’s characteristic brilliance.

Unfortunately, I expected more, especially as I found the endless action very tedious (I just don’t like action). From Nolan, I expect a challenging film that doesn’t talk down to the audience, and Tenet certainly was that. But as difficult as Nolan’s previous films have been to understand, I was able, at least after a second viewing, to follow their stories. Films like Memento, Interstellar and Inception are among my all-time favourites. But Tenet isn’t going to come close, because neither Walter nor I could follow the story at all. And when I tried to find a synopsis online, I couldn’t find a single one that made any more sense than the film.

So I won’t try to summarize the plot. I’ll just say that it involves a secret agent (John David Washington) trying to prevent World War III, a war in which the enemy is from the future and believes it can wipe out the past and still live on. That alone stretches the grey cells, but when the concept of inverted entropy is introduced, involving objects moving backwards through time, the plot gets out of hand very quickly. The unnamed secret agent gets the help of a mysterious fellow named Neil (Robert Pattinson) and does business with some very wealthy arms dealers who know too much (e.g. Priya, played by Dimple Kapadia), and then there’s Kenneth Branagh as Andrei Sator, the Russian baddie. Some critics have cringed at Branagh’s accent, but I thought he gave an excellent relatively-understated performance. Playing his wife, Kat, a central figure in the plot, is Elizabeth Debicki.

The acting wasn’t exceptional but it was good enough. There were times when Washington was terrific and times when I wondered why he had been cast as a Bond-like secret agent. Pattinson and Debicki were particularly good. The dialogue, when it can be understood, is also quite good, but, like the acting, a little uneven.

The main problem with Tenet is Nolan. I wrote a post about him back in July, 2010, because I was beginning to wonder whether I had overrated his films. Specifically, I was worried about Nolan’s tendency to give us contrived plots that stretched credulity too far (The Dark Knight is my favourite example, but all of his films are overly-contrived). As with Inception, Tenet is so impossibly convoluted and inherently contrived that it’s almost impossible to extract the individual  contrived moments. But, as I said, I eventually understood Inception’s plot and forgave Nolan for his contrivances. Perhaps someday my future self will watch Tenet for the second or third time and move backward through time to correct this post (in which case you probably aren’t reading this), but for now I am sticking with my initial assessment: Tenet is definitely one step too far for Mr. Nolan - I don’t believe it is possible to make sense of it and I think it was a mistake for Nolan to try. I also hated all that nonstop action and the film’s general lack of heart. So I can’t give Tenet more than **+. My mug is down.

To all you action lovers: Sorry about that. I do, in fact, recommend this film to folks like you.