Tenet has a lot to offer moviegoers, whether it's your first Christopher Nolan film or
your eleventh. It's big, bold, but it's also flawed. There's a lot to recommend in this
ambitious movie, but even its biggest fans would admit there's a few things that could
be done better.
Like many filmmakers, Christopher Nolan seems to have a list of favorite actors to fall
back on when starting pre-production on a new project. We can only hope Robert Pattinson
gets added to Nolan's first-look list, because he rules in this movie.
"You want to crash a plane?"
"Well not from the air, don't be so dramatic."
Pattinson's character, Neil, has a particularly difficult part to play in this film, as he
has a lifelong friendship with John David Washington's Protagonist that the Protagonist
doesn't even know about until the end. Pattinson maintains that façade with ease and artistry,
but throws in little bits of emotion here and there to portray Neil's inner conflict
as he tries to repress his natural inclination to be the Protagonist's friend in their more
casual conversations. It all helps the audience to understand that relationship in its totality
later on.
He's a little goofy and fun, too, sometimes appearing in scenes with a loose tie and rumpled
appearance when he doesn't need to be putting on airs for anybody, or aiming for humor and
charmingly missing the mark. His performance adds a much-appreciated spark to the film,
bucking Nolan's tendency to write emotionally sterile characters for twisty narratives that
use people like pieces in a sophisticated game.
It's been mentioned many times before, but Christopher Nolan's fondness for big, booming
scores, a tradition Tenet lives up to admirably, has a tendency to get in the way of something
very important to just about every movie. Specifically, dialogue.
"Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?"
This has been an issue that's been noted in several Nolan movies, but it's especially
frustrating in Tenet, which can come off as confusing even when the dialogue is crystal
clear. To keep track of a movie's story, goals, and character motivations, the audience generally
needs to hear what people onscreen are actually saying, not just get the gist.
In that respect, the audio mixing in Tenet leaves something to be desired, especially
given that Nolan opted to have characters wear masks in multiple scenes while delivering
what would seem to be extremely important lines of dialogue.
"Did you follow any of that?"
It's extra-frustrating that the difficult-to-discern dialogue is reportedly intentional, this is
not the product of a subpar sound design team. Considering that Nolan has consistently insisted
that Tenet should be seen as a theatrical experience, it's hard not to appreciate his
interest in dialing that experience to the maximum level with intense bass and all-encompassing
surround sound very few homes can recreate. But when all of that noise keeps you from
hearing the movie, it robs the film of substance, and leaves a sense of hollow spectacle.
Fortunately, the issue is something that can be easily fixed for the eventual home release,
if Nolan and Warner Bros. choose to, anyway. Here's hoping the filmmaker and his mixing
team take the hint that's been swirling around the internet since Tenet first hit theaters.
"Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?"
"Don't nobody understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, man."
Tenet has a pretty unambiguously happy ending, which might surprise longtime fans of the
director who've spent countless hours discussing the philosophical and moral ambiguities of
some of his other works. That's a big accomplishment for a movie so interested in the complexities
of time, and the manipulation of time to change the outcomes of events. In a world where many
characters good and bad have access to temporal reset buttons, Nolan made the heroes' actions
matter, building toward a victory that seems like it will stick.
That's partly accomplished by his selectively doling out information about the plot and
how it works. The time travel mechanics matter when they need to, but the movie is willing
to shrug its shoulders at a lot of the nitty-gritty elements to avoid making an already confusing
movie into something hopelessly-head-spinning.
"It's a brilliantly calculated, precise, controlled, amazing story that's also completely out of
control."
Just as the Protagonist has to learn to feel instead of think his way through the challenges
faced in Tenet, Nolan seemed to approach the Tenet screenplay in a similar way, encouraging
viewers to feel their way through a complicated story without bogging things down with excessive
details, for the most part.
"Don't try to understand it. Feel it."
Elizabeth Debicki as Kat, Andrei Sator's wife, does a magnificent job in her role. The trouble
is that the role is, well, written a bit thin. Her entire motivation is boiled down to "wife
and mother," and that doesn't really cut it for giving women their due in cinema anymore.
On top of that, she's a battered wife, too, which is a trope that's viewed less favorably
than ever in the post-"Me Too" landscape. This isn't a fundamental flaw, necessarily;
it's neither the first nor the last time we'll see this old character type on screen, and
to Nolan's credit, Kat's journey through the film isn't just about being saved by a man,
and she isn't a reward for the Protagonist as a romantic interest at the end, either.
Instead, she conquers her oppressor through the power of her own will and finally grasps
control of her own life.
That's good, great, even. But it's all predicated on doing it for her child, and her motivation
as a mother finally transcending her fear as an emotionally battered and physically
abused wife. It's not necessarily a harmful stereotype, it's just boring and well-trodden
territory in a movie that has way bigger ideas going on elsewhere.
One of the reasons audiences go to Christopher Nolan movies is to see extremely cool visual
effects, and boy, does Tenet ever deliver. The filmmaker set that bar extremely high
with blockbusters like Inception and Interstellar, and this film clears that bar. Even if you
happened to watch the movie on mute for some reason, it's a worthwhile experience purely
on a visual level.
The fight choreography in particular is a stroke of genius, because no amount of editing
can give you the viscerally impactful look these scenes achieve without tons of training.
For the sequence in the vault during which the Protagonist fights himself, John David
Washington and his stunt doubles would have to practice those sequences forward and backward,
which requires extraordinary discipline in planning and movement. And again, they did
it twice, from opposite perspectives. There's no other way to describe that but to just
say, "whoa."
You can also tell that most of the movie utilizes chiefly practical stunts, even the one that
shows an entire airplane ramming through a parking lot. A lot of the car stunts require
multiple takes from multiple angles, and car stunts are some of the most expensive to execute
in the industry. Warner Bros. needed to pony up another blank check for Nolan with Tenet,
and once again, he produced amazing results.
It's kind of a quibble, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Ives is a very entertaining character that
clearly had a deep backstory that the audience never gets to see. That oversight becomes
more of a problem when the movie ends with Ives in possession of the most important thing
in the whole story: the Algorithm. Nolan needed to leave a little more time for this character
to be explored, given his eventual significance to the plot and especially its conclusion.
Ives enters the story halfway through and quickly displays a level of practical knowledge
about inversion, and combat utilizing it, that quite possibly surpasses Neil's. He is
commander of what is obviously a very experienced combat team that specializes in temporal situations,
Time SEALs, basically. That kind of training doesn't just appear in a person's brain and
muscle memory one sunny afternoon.
This, too, is likely the kind of training the future Protagonist will eventually help
create, but even an acknowledgement that that's the case from Ives would have been prudent
for helping the audience understand and relate to this character. Without more to go on,
the movie ends with his whole deal being a big, compelling mystery. John David Washington
might be the Protagonist, but we wouldn't mind a closer look at this other important
hero's journey either.
The ultimate moral Tenet wants to impart is pretty wholesome and simple. The Protagonist
is The Protagonist in really literal terms, and his motivation is not all that separated
from the hero in your typical role-playing game: he grows into his own self-confidence
and acts with deep empathy to protect others, and when he falls short, he trusts his friends
to help him even when he can't anticipate what he'll need or when. Friendship, trust,
love, and killing God, turns out Tenet is just like Final Fantasy.
"So you want me to let someone else follow you into your fantasy."
Jokes aside, the emotional truth underlying the film is reflected most obviously in the
little catchphrase that begins popping up halfway through: Ignorance is their strength.
It sounds a little negative at first, but the point is a profound one, the characters
keeping information from one another proves the strength of their trust in and love for
each other.
Tenet's audio mixing definitely makes it more challenging to understand what's already a
complicated story, but this problem is compounded by the way the actors deliver dialogue throughout
the first half of the movie.
It feels rushed, though it doesn't really need to be, and there is a distinctly stilted
feel to the cast's delivery at first. Sometimes characters even talk over each other for no
apparent reason, there's no established need to hurry all that much at any point in the
first half of the movie. There's no benefit to having characters rattle off breathless,
run-on-sentences containing extremely complicated and nuanced theories of time and relativity
to make them sound intelligent. Unfortunately, that happens several times until the movie
seems to catch its breath and recoup after Kat is wounded and the action returns to Oslo.
What makes all this particularly upsetting is the fact that the first half includes very,
very critical exposition of how aspects of time travel works in the movie, it's information
that pays off much later, and even more importantly, it underscores how some people think inversion
works which isn't necessarily entirely correct, or how they're even lying to others about
how it works. You have to understand what the original lie was in order to truly benefit
from seeing the truth revealed. Tenet is smart, but there are times when it needs to slow
down and make it just a little easier for the audience to absorb everything it's seeing
and hearing.
The Tenet score ends up being a bit of a double-edged sword at the moments when it surges up and
over the dialogue, but on its own, it's excellent. Many a meme has been made riffing on Nolan's
love for big, subwoofer-busting film scores, and that tendency is definitely heard here,
but a new, fresh flourish has been added by the current hottest commodity in the film-composer
market: Ludwig Göransson.
The Oscar-winning composer of Black Panther and more recently The Mandalorian was tapped
to handle those duties for Tenet, and he put extra effort into the end result by including
his own kind of musical wordplay. It might take an extra screening or two to pick them
out, but at various points in the story, the music is played and then immediately inverted,
either by playing notes in reverse progression to mirror the previous phrase or actually
reversing the recording. It makes for a fascinating, and sometimes disorienting listening experience,
but one that tracks with the logic of the movie. In some instances, it even helps you
understand what's going on.
"Well I've seen too much."
"Well, we'll try and keep up."
Christopher Nolan's plots are historically convoluted, but if you're paying attention,
you can usually piece it together, and Tenet is no exception: In fact, the film makes several
fairly obvious efforts to explain itself in order to prevent the audience, and the Protagonist,
from getting too lost along the way. Maybe even a little bit too obvious, actually.
The Protagonist asks a lot of very direct questions that make sense, but they can also
feel like a screenwriter's checkpoint for the audience, as if to say, "You keeping up?
Great, let's move on."
This feels the most pointed at the very end, with Neil and the Protagonist's final exchange.
Half of it is a lovely emotional beat as the Protagonist realizes how important Neil is
to him and vice versa, but it also serves as a last-minute checklist of answers to explain
exactly what just happened, and it feels little clinical. In the long run, it's better to
do that than to err on the side of not explaining anything at all, but it just feels a little
unbalanced, tonally speaking.
Of course, this flaw, like all of Tenet's flaws, doesn't come anywhere close to sinking
the film as a great experience overall. They're just the kind of mistakes that will naturally
occur in any filmmaking process, even if you're Christopher Nolan.
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