“Tenet” (2020) is Too Creative for Its Own Good (Part I of II)

5.5/10

The question you need to ask with a movie like “Tenet” (2020) is: for whom was this made?

Maybe it was for director and writer Christopher Nolan, who has established enough pedigree that a studio will shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for a personal vanity project. Or maybe it was for movie aficionados, who will keep on coming back to connect the dots (whether the dots are intended to be connected or not).

Regardless, it surely wasn’t for an everyday movie goer looking for a decent escape for two and a half hours, because this movie is completely–and intentionally–nonsensical on its first viewing.

The film opens with a scene in Kiev, where dozens of people dressed in black have flooded into an opera house armed with machine-guns. Even if you’re paying close attention, you’ll quickly lose track of what’s going on because the film makes clear there is a set of people with different motives who have mixed into the group.

Three minutes in you’re already confused, but Nolan hammers home that this movie is intentionally a puzzle. You know this because he leaves a close-up shot that will be etched in your memory. In fact, in the next two hours, he’ll throw in a bunch of other puzzle pieces, often through random insertion of scenes that seem like dreams, flashbacks or flash forwards.

The term “flash forward” is appropriate, because this movie is about manipulation of time, a topic Nolan is infatuated with. He first did it in “Memento” (2000), and then with “Inception” (2010) and “Interstellar” (2014).

But in “Tenet” he’s outdone even himself. The set-up of the film involves a technology that allows a thing or a person to be “inverted” in time, in the same space as where time is moving forward. A scientist provides explanation of how this all works to Protagonist (John David Washington), but she advises “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

That’s also good advice for the audience, who has the benefit of seeing it all play out on screen yet still won’t understand. In scene after scene, one set of people are moving forward in time and another are moving backwards while simultaneously the surroundings are moving forward and/or backwards. There’s so much going on in a single shot it’s impossible to follow.

(continues to Part II)