Tenet – Review

Tenet

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Runtime: 150 minutes

Perhaps more than any other contemporary Hollywood figure working today, Christopher Nolan is a profoundly philosophical filmmaker. Across a prolific and highly successful career—one spanning two decades, ten feature films, numerous writing and producing credits, alongside Academy Award nominations and wins— Nolan’s works often probe the nature of reality by asking profound ontological and epistemological questions: What is the purpose of being? How do we know what we know? And what is the purpose of existence?

In interrogating his filmography, it’s easy to see that at their core Nolan’s films are intimately concerned with how our perceptions of time and space influence the impact of visual storytelling. Memento and The Prestige utilised distortions of memory and the power of self-deception to disrupt ideas of selfhood. Interstellar explored the far reaches of humanity’s search for salvation, while Inception turned to dream dilation to navigate the unconscious labyrinth of the human mind. The Dark Knight trilogy wrestled with the notion of sacrifice in the pursuit of truth and justice, and Dunkirk—the idiosyncratic outlier in Nolan’s oeuvre—provided raw immersion in destructive accounts of senseless pain and loss. Tenet, Nolan’s newest big-budget blockbuster, is the director’s most overt foray yet into the exploration of time as a narrative agent unto itself.

But what is time exactly? Is it the ticking of a clock? The sequence of events stretching from the past to the present and indefinitely into the future? Is it a physical component of our corporeal reality? An emergent phenomenon we use to measure and understand change? Or, as some leading theorists now suggest, is it merely an illusion altogether? While pre-release details of the Tenet’s plot were left deliberately scarce, and engaging teaser trailers suggested a spiritual successor to the slick aesthetics of Inception’s stunt-driven sci-fi spectacle, a few of Nolan’s recent comments hinted at the film’s “physics lesson” underpinnings.* Now, to be clear, Tenet has nothing to do with time travel in the traditional sense. Instead, the hard science at the heart of the film focuses on theories of entropy and ‘inversion’.

The film follows ‘the Protagonist’ (John David Washington), a former CIA operative who, in foiling a terrorist plot and risking certain death, is mysteriously brought back to life to work for an elusive shadow organisation known only as Tenet. Briefed on the imminent threat of World War III breaking out thanks to an ongoing “temporal Cold War,” Washington’s character is then given a crash course in using ‘time inversion’ with all the subtle utility of a video game tutorial. By finding a way to reverse or ‘invert’ the entropy of closed systems—say like objects or people—agents can reverse the ‘arrow of time’ relative to them, allowing them to effectively perceive objects, people, and events as they move ‘backwards’ through time. Clues to this mind-bending concept can be found in the Tenet’s curious title (and its now-retracted promotional iconography), which features a Latin noun for holding a principle or belief and doubles as a palindrome (a sequence of characters or numbers which reads the same backward as forward).

It’s this narrative device that allows Tenet to combine three of Nolan’s common threads: a trippy sci-fi premise; characters imbued with neo-noir style and mystique; and edge-of-your-seat action grounded in international intrigue, espionage, and spy thrills ripped straight from the Bond franchise. Along the way, Washington’s Protagonist encounters Neil (Robert Pattinson), a roguish fixer and temporal sidekick, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a troubled art dealer, estranged wife and reluctant femme fatale, and Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian oligarch whose Faustian bargain with the future threatens humanity across the timeline.

Visually, Tenet is Nolan’s most ambitious and audacious film to date. The globetrotting action whisks the audience between gritty urban settings, lavish foreign locales, and unwieldy action set-pieces, all rendered in glorious wide shots composed with the help of cinematographer and Nolan regular Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Dunkirk, Ad Astra). The director has also boasted about the strength of the film’s practical effects work, lauding the fact that Tenet has only 300 VFX shots. Just what kind of feat this represents becomes immediately apparent in the film’s second act turn at roughly the midpoint of the 150-minute runtime. The full implications of time inversion are made manifest through Nolan’s trademark hard-on for non-linear storytelling, a decision which completely recontextualises the previous events of the film and throws the audience into processing overdrive. (Let’s just say that editor Jennifer Lame (Midsommar, Marriage Story) is likely to be a shoo-in for a Best Film Editing Oscar nod.)

Where the film stumbles, however, is in the emotional pull of its story and characterisation. A criticism that’s often levelled at Nolan as an auteur, particularly with his later works, is his emphasis on spectacle at the expense of character. And while Inception and Interstellar have minor pain points in this regard (does love really transcend time and space?), Dunkirk almost acts as an affirmation and refutation of this line of argument, where the gripping desires of the film’s characters for safety and human connection are dwarfed by the immense scale and cruelty of warfare.

In Tenet, the problem is precisely the opposite. Washington’s Protagonist appears to be driven to save the world by an inscrutable sense of arbitrary altruism; it’s not that we as viewers come to question his methods or motives for doing so, but the script gives us very little understanding as to why he does. On-screen, we see a brief emotional connection to Kat that’s hinted at, along with the desire to protect her and her son from Andrei’s wrath; however, there’s little tension developed between them, and their relationship is, for the most part, romantically inert. Where Nolan’s films are overtly rational and deterministic in their approach, often being aggressively mechanical in utilising certain plot devices, Tenet spends more time revelling in the visual spectacle of an inverted world than establishing the stakes of what that would actually entail. While it appears to be every bit as visually complex and arresting as Inception or Interstellar, there’s a noticeable lack of emotional pay-off or resonance by the third act conclusion.

That said, in a time when the fate of the Hollywood blockbuster and the viability of cinema as an enterprise altogether is being put into question, Tenet is every bit a must-see theatre experience. The scope of the film is utterly relentless, clearly made with big screens and booming speakers in mind. While it might not be Nolan’s best film, it is absolutely worth seeing once if not twice for the sake of posterity—that is, if you have the time.

*[Insert “physics lesson” here: The physicals laws that describe systems, such as motion and gravity, are considered to be time-symmetric. If you were to reverse the direction of time, then those same laws can still be used to describe events in that system. Entropy is a measure of the number of possible arrangements or states of atoms in any given system; low entropy equals fewer states, and high entropy equals more states. In this sense, entropy is a measure of uncertainty or randomness in a given system, often loosely characterised as states moving from ‘order to disorder’. However, entropy is one of the few physical processes that appears not to be time-symmetric. According to the second law of thermodynamics, it takes work to make the entropy of a system smaller. Without doing work, entropy cannot become smaller; therefore, at the macroscopic level, everything slowly goes to disorder (high entropy). This is commonly referred to as the ‘Arrow of Time’.]

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