Review of Christopher Nolan's Tenet Film

Tenet by Christopher Nolan, on a structural and conceptual level, is a big-budget Memento. Both stories are told both backward and forwards. In Nolan’s second feature film, he differentiates the timeline, moving forward in time as black-and-white scenes, and the reverse chronology as color. The scenes culminate in the climax and transition from black and white to color when the revelation near the end of the film’s runtime is the chronological start of the movie.

Are you confused yet? Tenet takes this concept of moving both forward and backward through time and cuts them together in the same sequence, creating a controlled "entropy" that works most of the time. When it doesn’t, it’s usually because the viewer misunderstands the setup and the dialogue in those scenes not loud enough to hear, let alone comprehend.

In his previous film, Dunkirk, Nolan’s dialogue is barely audible and here it’s even worse, because, unlike his WWII period piece, Tenet has a story that arguably requires you to understand the dialogue. That’s not to say the movie is bad because of poorly mixed dialogue. Oddly enough, you understand just enough to realize what’s happening on-screen and are in awe at the same time. However, trying to explain this movie to someone will make the person describing it sound crazy. Spoiling this movie is impossible because the motivation and reasons behind actions are unknown either through inaudible or mumbled dialogue or until the end of the movie.

Most of what you need to know about the film happens at the end, which is why this is Memento on a bigger budget. Both this movie and Nolan’s second feature-length film share that surreal visual style in common. For Memento, the opening scene where the camera rolls in reverse tells the audience this is a non-linear movie and it’s moving backward in time. For Tenet, the action scenes are breathtaking and are essentially Nolan giving fans more of the rotating hallway fight scene in Inception and giving them both quantity and quality for those types of scenes.

The idea of fighting someone who knows your every move because they’re from the future and know how you hit and/or dodge their attack is like something out of a fantasy novel. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy and the magical item called Atium that allows people to see into a person’s future for a short period so they can counter their opponent’s moves doesn’t work when one fighter has none to use. Overthinking the "how" will only lead to more confusion. The action scenes in Tenet are the same thing. The issue in both the second Mistborn book and Tenet is the paradoxical nature of how magic or technology works.

While “Tenet” addresses common unanswerable questions like the grandfather paradox, the disproportional amount of time spent on contradictory theories of physics like quantum theory and relativity make the viewer scratch their head and constantly wonder what Nolan is trying to articulate. The problem persists even after a second viewing and you come out learning more in some areas, but also less than the first time, and in areas, you thought you understood. The movie itself is a paradox and demands an IMAX screen on first viewing. Otherwise, the impact of certain moments loses its luster.

In terms of immersion, the first viewing made me walk out of the theater contemplating every action I took since the movie ended. It blew my mind the same old films from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did for people living then. If you've watched Limitless from 2011, you'll know the feeling. Imagine that multiplied by 5. Looking at this as a writer would their story's revisions is perhaps the best piece of advice a person can give. Take it one pass at a time, focusing on only one thing. Some people hate doing homework, but those people aren’t fans of Nolan's work and target audience.

4 /5 Stars