Movie Review: Stop Thinking About 'Tenet'

Once you accept that Tenet is no deeper than your average Fast and the Furious movie, it becomes very easy to enjoy. The perception that director Christopher Nolan has created around his movies such as Interstellar and Inception is that they are more than merely blockbuster entertainment. Instead, many have been led to believe that Nolan has big, high-minded ideas in his movies that require note-taking and homework.

Tenet has a similar perception surrounding it due to the strange and often confusing plot involving moving backwards in time, literally. The plot features bullets that travel back into guns and cars that move backwards in time while also literally going backwards and soldiers who appear to be running off the battlefield but are, in fact, running onto the battlefield. Yeah, it’s weird but, it’s not as complicated as it seems if you just stop trying to figure it all out.

Tenet stars John David Washington as the unnamed ‘Protagonist.’ He’s a CIA operative who is killed during an operation only to find that the operation was a test for him. Our hero passed the test by willingly taking his own life to prevent terrorists from getting information about his team. Waking up, our unnamed hero finds out that he’s now part of a secret government organization that is loosely affiliated with world governments to try and save the world.

Information is kept to a minimum but soon the Protagonist learns that there is a terrorist named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who has uncovered a portal to the future that he is using to enrich himself and bring back weapons from the future to the past. These weapons work in reverse time, they are inverted. This means a bullet from an inverted gun is a bullet that was already fired that goes back into the gun. It makes a wound from one of these bullets nearly impossible to survive.

The Protagonist isn’t alone, as he investigates, he meets Neil (Robert Pattinson) who becomes his partner and knows more than he lets on about all that is happening. Why he keeps from telling The Protagonist pieces of information is actually really clever, he’s concerned that if he tells the truth, it may cause our hero to act differently when the future scenario begins to unfold. Tenet plays with time travel and physics in ways that are a lot of fun, if you don’t spend any time thinking about it.

Again, that is the key to the appeal of Tenet, don’t think about it. Shut off the logical part of your brain and just enjoy the spectacle on display. Tenet really does hold together very well if you aren’t spending time trying to follow how it all works. Give yourself over to the energy and excitement of the action of Tenet and you will enjoy it. Tenet is packed with exciting action scenes from the first minute all the way to a satisfying conclusion.

Arguably, the most talked about scene in Tenet is the most spectacular. It involves a high speed heist straight out of a Fast and the Furious movie. It involves trucks and timing and ridiculous amounts of good luck. Then the inverted cars start showing up and bullet holes appear and disappear when a gun is fired and cause and effect blur into nonsense and cars blow up and it’s just awesome fun, if you don’t think too hard.

Think of Tenet like a high end version of The Fast and the Furious, minus Vin Diesel and The Rock, and you have a sense of how to enjoy Tenet. This is an action movie, a blockbuster of practical special effects, stunts and sheer, visual spectacle. Taken as such, with your brain turned off, Tenet is exhilarating fun. If you’re going to spend your time doing homework or nitpicking about physics and time travel, you might want to skip Tenet.

Tenet arrived on Blu-Ray, DVD and Streaming Rental Services on December 15th, 2020.