It's September 1st and the summer movie season has finally started. I suppose that tells you everything you need to know about this year, definitely the strangest one that's occurred while I've been alive anyway. And the first, big movie out of the gate after movie theaters closed for six months is pretty fitting for these times we find ourselves in since Tenet is dark, weird, bizarre, and plays with reality and time in ways that feel apt for our current situation. I'm sure more than once you've stopped what you were doing this year to ponder the absurdity and profoundness of 2020. Is this all really going on? I can't believe that this is actually happening. Often it feels like a waking nightmare, like the world has shifted in certain senses and suddenly everything we thought we knew is wrong. Tenet is probably also a perfect fit for these dire times since the hero has to breathe through a mask to survive for much of the film. But the big question is: if a perfectly apt film for our current world is in theaters, will anyone actually venture out to go and see it? I'm not the only one wondering that.
When the pandemic hit, many forecasted the end times for pretty much everything; movie theaters, restaurants, classrooms, handshakes. So far, none of that has come to pass, although probably the same gloomy predictions were made back in 1918, too, yet we all know about the Roaring 20's that followed that last global pandemic which should give one a beacon of hope to cling onto. Movie theaters did close around here, in the Philly suburbs, for six months, until they recently began to open two weeks ago at the end of August when Russel Crowe's revenge picture, Unhinged, was the first to open in movie theaters since March. In Philly, movie theaters aren't allowed to open until September 8th, so they're missing out on the big premiere's of Unhinged, the poor man's X-Men flick, The New Mutants, and now Tenet.
Tenet was always one of the big films on the 2020 calendar, even though postponed films yet to open like Black Widow and Wonder Woman 1984 probably would have dwarfed it's box office. The reason is that Christopher Nolan wrote and directed Tenet, and every movie he makes these days is a mega big deal and mega big event. There aren't many directors like that anymore. Spielberg, Tarantino, and Scorsese are kind of the last of that dying breed, as the big money maker movies and big event movies of the last few years have all been superhero films that aren't exactly promoted by the writers/directors behind them. Nolan is also unique in that his films aren't just silly, entertaining popcorn movies...he makes movies that philosophy professors could probably write books about.
Making "smart" big-budget Hollywood blockbusters is obviously a hard road to travel on, and Nolan certainly has had his ups and downs in his career. His Batman trilogy was more realistic than comic book, which meant, at least for me, the most successful one was the one that felt most like a comic book (Batman Begins). Inception was wild but didn't entirely work, whereas Interstellar was way too silly to even bother taking serious. Nolan's best film will probably always be Dunkirk, simply because he threw out all of the metaphysics jargon and philosophical tendencies and just made a gorgeous war picture. Tenet seems to be Nolan at his purest form. It's a film featuring Nolan's greatest hits: a huge budget (over $200 million), a "too smart for school" script, playing with time, a real world feel without green screens or a plethora of CGI, and characters so cool and sterile in their mood and mannerisms that they seem to have dropped out of a Calvin Klein fashion spread.
As for the plot...supposedly when the three main stars, Denzel Washington's son, Edward from Twilight, and Elizabeth Debicki (from Steve McQueen's Widows), first read the script they had to be locked in a room so the script didn't get stolen and leaked. After seeing the film, I'm baffled that they even bothered to do this. I couldn't even explain the plot to you and I just watched the movie. The easiest way to describe Tenet is to say...what if Christopher Nolan was hired to make the next Mission: Impossible film? He'd make something like this. You could probably easily summarize the film by saying that it's a hero like James Bond or Ethan Hunte battling a supervillain that gets his hand on a time traveling device. Now that's in lament's terms. What goes on in this film isn't exactly time travel, it's that a device was created that can make things go backwards, meaning things like bullets, cars, people, smoke (Nolan definitely loves shots of swirling smoke drifting backwards from huge plumes dwindling down to nothing). And sure, by the end of this, when a huge army is walking backwards in a desert war zone, it is fairly silly (and it would make an amusing SNL sketch...but even that'd be tricky to get just right). And while the big common denunciation of the film is that it's ultimately confusing, I think because it's overtly complicated is one of the reasons why it works so well. When the main character, John David Washington, goes through a machine to become "inverted" and enters this new, strange world where he's living backwards, it definitely gives you a visceral thrill of watching a movie that not's only exciting but also fresh, bold, and new. And that same feeling pulses throughout this film while most films are usually just by-the-numbers and typical. This is an excellent film that might make more sense after you saw it a hundred times, or might actually be something that if you watched it a lot you'd just be able to spot all of the ludicrous plot holes.
While the film is confusing (also, as has been noted across the internet, terrible in the dialogue sound department...but the amazing music score kind of makes up for that a bit), the best thing the film has going for it are the big set pieces. It looks like Nolan bankrupted a studio making this film. He bought an actual Boeing 747 just to crash it. He built a city in the desert out by Palm Springs to stage a war. He actually got thousands of extras to play dead in an opera house. And when you pay $15 bucks to get off your ass and go to the movies and forget about Netflix, you kind of want to see something big and bold and epic...and Tenet is definitely a big, bold, epic movie that you don't see too often.
As for the drawbacks, John David Washington proves yet again he's a terrible actor (he was also terrible in BlacKKKlansman...he acts like he's reading cue cards). It's also true that Elizabeth Debicki and him have zero chemistry together, although Robert Pattinson shows why he's one of the best actors working these days (and has one hell of an agent, as his track record making good movies post-Twilight has been impeccable), and Kenneth Branagh does good work as the vile villain.
Tenet is not perfect, but it's super engaging, even if you're lost in the woods for long stretches of it. Seemingly every time a character turns a corner something unique and creative occurs, and Nolan and crew have done an amazing job at producing such a cool and realistic looking mind-bending, adrenaline-rush of a film.
After six months of not going to the movies, and three months of missing out on the usual summer movie season we all love, it was great to finally go back. If movies this wild and grandiose and labyrinthine and intriguing keep coming out, I kind of doubt the movie theater experience will ever die. ***1/2
