Tenet Review

If you didn't get the news, theaters are now open in many places around the world and new movies have started to sneak their way into theaters. And while the first couple movies I've reviews since the reopening, "Unhinged" and "The New Mutants," have felt more like sacrificial lambs thrown into the fire, "Tenet" feels like the first real movie in theaters. Or, rather, the first big movie that's taking a risk by being released. I can guarantee you that every studio is closely monitoring the progress of "Tenet" right now to see if it can actually earn money at a time when not all theaters are open yet and those that are open are working at a limited capacity with lots of restrictions in place. And even if theaters didn't have these restrictions, are people ready to come back to theaters? So many questions surrounding this release that will set a precedent going forward. With Warner Bros. themselves also being next up to bat with "Wonder Woman 1984" in early October, are they going to stay put there? What about the likes of "Black Widow," "Soul" and "No Time to Die" in November? All of that will depend on how "Tenet" performs this month. And if you feel safe enough to go out and support it, "Tenet" definitely has my stamp of approval as a movie that deserves to be seen.

You might think that of course this movie has my stamp of approval. It's a Christopher Nolan movie! Unless you've been around the block for a bit. While I genuinely love Nolan as a filmmaker, as shown by me naming "Inception" as my top film of the 2010s, he's been on a tad bit of a losing streak since "Inception." While "The Dark Knight" is also my favorite superhero movie, "The Dark Knight Rises" gets a bit worse every time I watch it. "Interstellar" and "Dunkirk" weren't that great, either. "Interstellar" had a solid first two acts, but falls apart in the final act. And "Dunkirk" was a nice idea for about 30 minutes, but then I got really bored. But if you're a filmmaker and those three movies are the worst that you've done, I'd say you're still doing a pretty good job. Even the best slip up every once in a while. With "Tenet," I was really hoping that it would be the movie to bring him back to top-notch filmmaking. And while I would initially say that it accomplished that, there's also a whole lot to process with this movie. Like many of Nolan's movies, it's something that requires repeat viewings to fully understand. And I've only seen it once. So I have to give the disclosure that I don't yet feel qualified to give it a perfect analysis, nor am I sure when I'm going to be at that point.

What is the movie about? Well, that's the other difficult thing. First off, this is the type of movie where it's best to know as little as possible going in. So even writing a review is a tricky. It's the type of movie where I tell you that it's good, so go and see and we'll discuss afterwards. And I totally recommend that. I'm going to keep things as vague and spoiler-free as I can. But it might be best to just close this and come back and read after you've seen the movie. The other reason why it's a difficult thing to describe is because the plot itself so layered and complex. The most simple way to put is that one timeline is going backwards and another timeline is going forwards. And certain people are trying to stop a certain thing from happening before the world goes kaboom. If you've seen the trailers, you've seen examples of this. They are shooting a gun, but the bullet unshoots and goes back into the gun or they're driving down the road and the car in front of them car rolls around and uncrashes. Why is all of this happening? Well, they spend the whole first half of the movie dumping scene after scene of exposition on you. Most of it bounced right off my brain and into oblivion. I want to go back and watch it, but with subtitles so I can do better at remembering. 

The reason why I had a hard time remembering everything that they were saying was partly due to a thing that a lot of people have brought up in their reviews. The sound mixing is a bit off on this one. They'll be talking in a room and suddenly the score starts coming on, signifying that something important is being said or something is about to happen, but the score goes a bit too loud so that you literally don't know what is being said. You want to rewind it and listen closer, but you're in a theater, so you can't. But since the sound design has caused you to miss that part of the conversation, when things get back to normal, your brain just wanders off because you feel like you just walked in during the middle of a conversation where the first part that you missed was vital to what is being said. And yeah, that's a problem. But the other issue here is that I think my brain just wasn't prepared. I tried to pay attention, but it's also like when you're in a lecture and your professor gets so carried away with some tangent or concept that is just really beyond your ability to be able to understand. So your mind wanders for two seconds and that immediate disconnect derails the whole thing. You no longer have the ability to catch up, so you give up and stop trying, which leads to a really rough lecture.

I've delved through some YouTube comments of reviews or other internet discussions where a lot of people said that this ruined the experience for them. I don't want to conclude that off of just one showing. Just because I didn't understand the professor's lecture, doesn't make it a bad lecture. Or maybe my neighbor was talking too loud and I didn't hear part of it. That's also not the professor's fault. But with this analogy, the professor has the lecture recorded and posted online. I can go do my homework and maybe take a practice test, then go back and listen to the lecture again and perhaps it'll make a lot more sense. And that's my thoughts with "Tenet." I feel like there's some excellent stuff in here that could make this one of the most mindblowing movies I've ever seen. "Could" being the key word here. I just don't know. But I got enough out of it the first time around that I feel like a second viewing... or a third... or a fourth... or a fifth... or a sixth... is really going to cause something to connect and that will be the ultimate viewing experience. This is not a new thing for Nolan. He likes to challenge his audience and not babysit them or hold their hands to guide them to where he wants them to go. I really appreciate that. The result is a movie that keeps on giving. 

But for a first viewing experience, it's really challenging. They'll be talking and talking and talking and talking. Then we'll jump to the next scene where they start talking and talking and talking and talking. And then they'll start talking and walking and talking and talking. Then a thing happens, and I was like, oh that's cool. But then they'll start talking and talking and talking and talking. By this point, my brain has been on brain overload and starts shutting down. Suddenly I panic because I feel like I missed part of the movie. And then a lot of things start happening and I'm like, crap. I failed because I have no idea why they are doing these things that they are doing. And then I got really nervous because the thoughts arose in my brain that I might walk away from this movie being disappointed. And I can't handle the online pressure of having to write another less than stellar review of a Christopher Nolan film. But then we finally arrive to "the moment." Characters are making decisions and these decisions start impacting things from the past. Suddenly my mouth is gaping wide open and I'm being thoroughly entertained by these things and really having my mind blown by these fascinating concepts that Nolan has decided to throw together into one film.

And if you're reading this review without having actually seen this movie, this might be the strangest review you've read from me because I just spent paragraphs talking about a whole lot of nothing and it probably hasn't helped you much. But it is what it is. When I saw the movie Monday, my initial post on Facebook was that this is the most Nolany film I've ever seen. The man has spent two decades now perfecting his craft and this is where he decided to take everything he's ever done and create this big, epic piece of art that combines everything he's learned and experimented with. And if you think "Inception" or "The Prestige" were complex and difficult to understand, "Tenet" makes those movies look like an episode of "Sesame Street." There are so many moving pieces and intricate parts with layers and layers detailed concepts and a look at time that I've not seen before. Now this doesn't necessarily make the movie better than his previous work. But it definitely is his most complex film. It's his most detailed and intricate work of art that feels like he's been building to for his whole career. As you can tell, it's a giant puzzle that I feel I've only scratched the surface on. I'm excited at the idea of being to continue to learn new things from it for years to come.

Again, I don't want to get too caught up in any negatives here until I've had a chance to digest it a bit more and explore it's world again, but I think that one thing that might hold it back a touch is its slight disconnect with the characters and their motivations behind everything. This feels like a movie that gets so caught up with its high concepts and technical marvels that it kinda forgets about some of the filmmaking basics such as characters. I mean there's a lot of them, but John David Washington is the lead role and they didn't even bother to give him a name. He's just "the protagonist" on the cast list. You don't really get to know who he is or some of the struggles he's going through. He's just a vehicle to move these concepts forward. And he meets Robert Pattinson at some point. He's actually given a name. But we don't know much about him, either. They begin a strong friendship and their characters go interesting places. But I don't feel there's much emotional depth to them in comparison to Leo's character in "Inception" or all the deep, rich themes between Batman, Joker, and Harvey Dent in "The Dark Knight." And because of this, neither of them is given the opportunity to really shine like they have in recent films, even though both of them do a solid job. 

The main conflict comes more with the main girl they meet along the way, played by Elizabeth Debicki. It's her husband, played by Kenneth Branagh, that is the antagonist of the film and there's some emotion there. But when the supporting characters have more emotional depth than either of the main characters, that might be a slight problem. But I don't want to get too caught up on that. The real star of this movie are these high concepts that he builds. Messing around with the timeline is Nolan's specialty with movies like "The Prestige," "Inception," "Memento" and even his last two movies, "Interstellar" and "Dunkirk." And the idea here in "Tenet" with one timeline going forwards and the other going backwards is genuinely fascinating. And I want to get into it more, but that part I don't want to touch too much because it's the last act of the film that really shines here and even suggesting that makes me feel like I've said too much. Maybe this is a movie that I will revisit at some point on this blog. I don't know yet. But I definitely am excited to revisit this movie itself. A grade seems a bit foolish to give because that's definitely going to change, but a tentative 9/10 seems right, with the potential of it being in the top half of my Nolan rankings.