‘Tenet’ Plays with Time – Spoiler Free Review
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet pushes the boundaries of time and cinema. Is it worth risking a theater trip, though?
This year’s (only) big theater release is another examination of time, an Inception on steroids that tells its narrative in disorienting overlapping circles.
Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel. Inversion.
Director and writer Christopher Nolan fought to get Tenet into theaters despite where we are in this stage of the pandemic. The movie eats up screen space, so if you feel safe venturing out, do so.
I rented a private theater with a few friends that had been quarantining to see it. We all wore masks and spaced out. I highly recommend rental if your local theater offers it. We all felt safe and the cost split was about the same as a regular ticket.
Tenet is Complex and Not Without Problems
Tenet is peak Nolan. That could be awesome or horrible depending on your opinion of the director.
Nolan brought in Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist that worked with the director on Interstellar. Thorne helped create the circles of time inversion, entropy, and annihilation and make sure they were plausible. That level of detail wasn’t in the rest of the story, however.
As with several of his other movies, Tenet feels lopsided. It has so much weight put into a complex core concept that characters are sacrificed. Some of the performances are a bit wooden, which is mainly due to Nolan’s directing. Kenneth Branagh has a huge range, but you’d never know it if this was the first time you’d seen him. John David Washington gives the most emotional performance of the cast and is the standout because of it.
via Warner Bros.
Along with its story issues, it has sound mix problems. There are sections of the movie with dialog that’s drowned out and unintelligible. This is becoming an issue industry-wide, so I can’t really pin this on Nolan in particular. If you wait for the home release so you can turn on subtitles, this won’t be an issue for you.
It is gorgeous, though. Nolan creates mind-bending action scenes that run both ways on the timeline simultaneously. Tenet takes the visual concepts of time in Inception and pushes into the concept of time even more. Time is the main character in this movie, and it gets plenty of screen time.
The story doesn’t stop moving and it’s challenging. You’ll be thinking about the layers of the story for days after you see it. I was never bored, maybe a little confused at times but never bored.
via Warner Bros.
Should I See It?
Tenet is worth seeing because it dares to exist without sacrificing its complexity, it’s a visual feast (Nolan continues to mix practical effects with digital by blowing up a real plane), and John David Washington’s performance is excellent. It’s not worth seeing if you like a lot of depth in your characters and attention to the human element. Writing people isn’t something Nolan is great at.
Challenge yourself and go see this difficult movie. It’s out in theaters now. I’m betting it’ll get a home release by the end of the year if you don’t feel safe.
