72-hours after seeing Tenet, I'm approximately 72% of the way to pinning down each of its temporal gear shifts, and making sense of how they fit into the story's labyrinthine whole. If you're keen to see Christopher Nolan's latest brain teaser with zero knowledge of what's coming your way, then you may want to skip this write-up, but if there's ever been a film where it's worth having a slight toehold on what's coming your way, it's this one, and there isn't anything below that isn't already in the trailers.
After passing a brutal test, our protagonist (literally styled in the credits as The Protagonist, and played with buckets of suave by John David Washington) is semi-inducted into the titular organisation. What's Tenet's role? To trace back (/forward?) inverted objects that have come from our (potential?) future, and which may herald the end of the world (and universe?) as we know it.
The introduction of inverted objects, which you can only affect if you can envision altering them in the future, rather than in the present, is head scrambling all on its own. So when the film starts throwing inverted people into the mix, you have two choices, go with it, and feel your way through the time shifts with your gut, or give up. This is neatly summed up by Clémence Poésy (offering up some Basil Exposition), who stops just short of staring down the barrel of the camera when she tells Washington: "Don't try to understand it, feel it."
From here the film dives head long into a world of espionage, picking up characters and complicated histories left, right and centre: we learn about the villain of the piece, Andrei Sator (a very OTT Kenneth Branagh), and his wife (an archly vulnerable Elizabeth Debicki); Washington's team gains a member or two (including the eminently watchable Robert Pattinson); and Michael Caine pops up to steal the film with a single scene. Complicating matters, there are plenty of characters that are referred to but that we never meet, and yet we still have to place them and everyone else's relationships to one another within a complex chronology of past, present, future, second present inverted/reverted, and more. If all of that sounds hard to grasp, then I've done my job, because in the moment its like trying to keep a hold of a David Lynch fever dream.
Inexplicably, Nolan and his sound design team clearly came to the conclusion that all of the above was much too easy to track, so large tracts of dialogue are lost to the blast of jet engines, crashing waves, explosions, or (a la Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises) good ol' face mask garbling, as one person or another shout-blusters through their face mask, allowing us to grasp three out of every 10 words.
Despite all of the hurdles the film places in our way - in an apparent attempt to reduce our enjoyment and appreciate it only on a coldly practical level - it's somehow still enthralling. As an action film its almost unique, with Inception being its only closest relative, and that film now feels breezily straightforward in comparison. When Tenet's temporal complexities click into place and make a degree of sense (at least on a gut level), like during a forwards/backwards car chase, it's genuinely a marvel. But just as you start to get a feel for its dizzying plotting, it throws another barrel load of names, MacGuffins and spy shenanigans your way, and doesn't wait to see whether you'll drown in them or not.
I will be rewatching it, but I suspect the revisit will highlight just how lacking the film is on a human and emotional level. Ultimately, I suspect it will be remembered as a summation of Nolan's lifelong predilection with timey-wimey-ness, and which can be summed up with Michael Caine like-fashion: 'Time. It's a funny old thing, ain't it?'
It's either a 7 out of 10 thanks to its structural brilliance or a 4 out of 10 because the whole damn thing may be meaningless. Right now, I'm honestly not sure which...
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