Tenet Review: Christopher Nolan’s action movie is like a sound math test

“Try not to understand it. Feel it, ”says a scientist earlier in the anonymous main character of John David Washington Tenet, as she teaches him how to use time-reversed objects. Her advice may be a metatextual line from Nolan, making the audience prime: Tenet examines not only time-reversed objects, but other time-related technology, in a narrative so rapid that viewers may have brain neurisms if they try to fully understand them all.

Tenet is technically not time-to travel film, in that the characters do not move from one moment to the next by “traveling” there. But it certainly contains enough devices that move with the passage of time, because communication from the future is made possible by inversion of time – a fact that does not become abundantly clear in the trailers. The trailers focus on the visually cool tricks of inversion – objects and people moving backwards – but this fictional science creates a blazing array of effects, which take a lot of time to digest, as well as various characters in the call film. It tells when the film’s own characters can not fully understand what’s going on, because the story logistics are so difficult. Tenet made Establishment seem like a direct action thriller in comparison.

Nolan fully understands his strengths in making those thrillers. Tenet is at its best in the first third, as it takes pleasure in its own homage to James Bond, through witticisms about British snobbery and tight men. Unfortunately, this humor does not go through because the commitment of the film escalates. Washington begins as a CIA employee who fails in his mission to rescue a senior American during a terrorist attack on an opera house in Ukraine. After taking a suicide pill, he wakes up to Martin Donovan gently informing him that the mission was a loyalty test (he passed) and that the palindromic word “Tenet” is now his new code word and mission. Washington hires a cheerful British intelligence agent, Neil (Robert Pattinson) to help him locate the materials needed for the inverted bullets used in the murder. They travel from an arms dealer in India, Priya (Dimple Kapadia), to another arms dealer in Russia, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who blackmailed his wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) to stay in their unhappy marriage, and that ‘ t ban has to time reversal.

Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon / Warner Bros.

Washington and Neil try to free Kat and her children from Sator’s abusive grip, while also preventing him from securing a weapon that could start a time-reversed nuclear holocaust. Their efforts include some spectacular scenery, one of which is a heist in a free port, in which a mysterious turnstile spits a masked assailant in the back. Another sequence includes a spectacular car crash and multiple time-reversing cars moving backwards. A third has two teams of armed ops moving in opposite directions in time, all trying to figure out what exactly is going to happen in the future so they can prevent Sator from ending the world. These may sound like spoilers, but all of this description covers maybe a tenth of what actually happens Tenet. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It is impossible to understand most of what is happening Tenet by watching the movie. Concerned that the mechanics of time inversion could bring me up, I unraveled the second law of thermodynamics so that I could focus on the plot instead of science. (This was a waste of time.) I watched the movie twice in one day, hoping a second look would help my understanding. I later read a detailed plot synopsis, and was surprised at his description of multiple plot points that I certainly would have interpreted differently. Even after reading the synopsis multiple times, I’m not sure I could ever explain Tenet in clear detail.

You have to and do not have to understand a time version to make sense Tenet. Even if you had a master’s degree in physics, like Neil, you would probably struggle to follow the plot. “Try to keep going,” Washington smoothly tells his British partner as he explains the science. This is another meta-joke by Nolan, but it’s also trolling, because the director was able to make a few very different production choices to diminish the audience’s knowledge. Sure, the fast-moving story, that from one location to another and from one point to another time, often without notice, is one thing. Understanding who is reversed, when, and how it affects other characters is another.

But there is another reason Tenet is incomprehensible, and that falls on one of Nolan’s great motives as well as on his time-oriented science-fiction premise: so much of the film’s dialogue is incomprehensible. Inverted characters need oxygen masks, due to the nature of inverted molecules. Characters talk every now and then while masked (a relative phenomenon, like the pandemic continues), but their conversation is musty, just like Tom Hardy’s inevitable mask Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon / Warner Bros.

If masks do not prevent the character dialogue, another Nolan motif does it instead: thunderous sound design. Helicopters, crashing planes, swaying boats, and other machines surround the characters in cacophony. The flourishing score of Ludwig Göransson also gets in the way. The sound mix makes some of the dialogue pretty moot. For a film, this is complicated, where each line counts for understanding the film’s dense plot mechanics, and with Nolan’s various scenes and disposable characters including written only for explicit exposure, it’s a straightforward narrative to tell the story. to make his characters heard.

As the scientist Washington advises, “Try not to understand it. Feel it, ”it’s like he calls Nolan’s Interstellar, a film also governed by a very conceptual scientific understanding of time. Interstellar is also close to scientific mumbo-jumbo, but it has an emotionally moving core. The only source of emotional connection in Tenet is Kat’s character arc, with her age-old desire to save her son from her abused husband. But that dramatic storyline is but a small subplot, only designed to serve the larger scheme of the time-reversed nuclear holocaust. In the scene where Washington, Neil and Kat realize that Sator has plans to destroy humanity, Kat yells at her son. It is an absurd, desperate attempt to weave into an emotional motif.

As it turns out, “Try not to understand it, feel it” is mixed advice. Viewers cannot fully understand Tenet‘s dialogue, and they’ll probably have the same problem when trying on the wounded plot. But there is also not much to feel, which makes the experience feel more like a math exam than an enchanting action movie. Some viewers may enjoy the Sisyphean task of watching and re-watching to make the film make full sense. Others will scratch our heads, trying not only to figure out what’s going on on the screen at any given moment, but also why we need to take care of one of the characters. It is up to viewers to decide if they enjoy the tight story puzzle that Nolan has created for them to unravel.

Tenet currently running exclusively in theaters worldwide.