Tenet (2020)

Rewatched 2/25/24 (theater)

Best part of this was the Dune sneak preview. So much desert power.

It’s unbelievable that Christopher Nolan could follow this up with such a mature, direct, well-rounded, well-shot movie like Oppenheimer. Tenet comes off as messy, dumb, childish, but with that same self-seriousness that when done wrong will drive one crazy. It’s all wrong here.

Everyone is an ultra-serious exposition mechanism. There is legitimately just a handful of minutes in this movie that even come close to character development. 99% of the runtime is sent running in circles both literally and in each and every painstakingly-contrived conversation.

It actually starts off promising enough. Great sound design on the gunshots and well-enough-established stakes with some sort of ulteriorly-motivated terrorist act putting a sizable amount of innocent lives at risk. We’re introduced to a backwards bullet but just quickly. It’s the right amount. Then the rest of the movie happens.

Even the most interesting of ideas are drowned out in constant, quickly-tired jargon that is all quite obviously bullshit after 10 minutes and/or they are left to die in the hands of a director who cannot always shoot action scenes with gusto. Seriously the final setpiece in this film is a complete joke. I don’t know if it was Nolan giving up or if he’s just that bad at this, but watching random guys I don’t know or care about fire machine guns into random spaces never ONCE seeing a a bad guy or anything is just super unengaging. Any goodwill built up from the beautiful landscape work is immediately lost amidst a myriad of lackluster camera and choreography choices.

There’s an early sequence where the villain’s thugs attempt to beat up our main character and it actually works. Similarly to the opera, it’s a good, well-choreographed fight with creative hooks and beats and a camera in the right place other than a PG-13 cheese grater censoring. And then a similarly fun but brief dinner scene with the villain—both scenes recall the Bond movies of old’s tension and cadence.

And then there are the other action scenes. The bungie jump has 3 seconds of excitement with the actual bungie jump and then it’s over. Blink and you miss what amounts to a false promise, silent fart of a set piece. The dual hallway fights that bookend the movie have a similar problem of lackluster imagination. They take place inside a truly small, bare area that allows for no creative staging, weapons, etc. And the reveal is quite obvious, I remember even thinking so the first time. Plus who cares if you never actually get a chance to identify with the characters. 

And the boat race? Not only is it random but it doesn’t focus for long enough to be kinetic— and Kat pushing her husband off just to be saved is both clumsy and irritating. He is saved one minute later so it is of little consequence, and when it should be (to her via him being angry with her), it’s nullified by her threatening him which could be seen as character development but is instead just JDW being “around.” If there was some other convoluted motive for why he didn’t hurt her, I missed it. I would probably hurt someone if they pushed me off of a moving boat, if we’re being honest here. It’s just awkward and unnecessary to include that whole element on that sailboat.

I can’t remember Pattinson’s name in this one and JDW’s character doesn’t even have a name. That’s perfectly fine as long as you give them some character beats or backstory or humanity or, hell, even some more fun co-players to bounce off of. But everyone is flat and solely spews out exposition. We learn nothing about anyone outside of Kat whose storyline is a bore with Debicki acting opposite a truly horrendous Kenneth Branagh acting his way towards a Razzie. He’s the funniest part of this awful time-splitting time at the movies.

Back to the set pieces—and more on that late-game assault on the base scene. This final “battle” is such a loss. Scale—massive, massive scale—wasted on a frustrating refusal to show any coherence in the gunplay. Everyone is running around spraying machine guns and things are blowing up but not a single shot lasts long enough to see the reactions to any of this.

Actions in an action scene are only as good as their reactions or effects on the subjects. And there is nothing going on in this sequence to suggest that anyone is shooting at anything or anyone real. We see just a handful of bad guys…it’s bizarre and feels like someone forgot to do their job and edit them in. One of those scenes that really takes you out of a movie. I am not sure if it was budgetary or bad action filmmaking or both.

And as the movie tries to wrap itself up with various time-travel tropes such as Pattinson’s death loop, his being old friends with JDW, and Kat seeing herself dive off the boat, it really just makes for a jumble of “who cares” moments. We never learned anything about these characters and in Kat’s case, we never even saw a closeup of her son or learned why she actually cares for him. A few scenes with him would have been manipulative but nice. Nolan’s parent/child relationships in his movies are even weaker than his writing of female characters.

That’s all I have to say—this is more attention than I would like to give to a movie I dislike so much.

2.75/10