You can almost see a Christopher Nolan film coming a mile away. The way he blocks his shots, the usage of practical effects over CGI, the grand mystery of what the hell his films are even about until you've finally seen them, and, as the most recognizable part of his brand, the high-concept narrative for him to drape blockbuster shenanigans over. Christopher Nolan is one of those few filmmakers who has managed to carve out a niche as an American Auteur With A Budget, a rare breed post-90s. One of the things most people look forward to with his films is being able to see money actually spent on something original rather than an adaptation of one thing or another. It is an exclusive club, one with very few if any modern directors in it. Whenever a filmmaker like Nolan, or Tarantino, or Fincher makes a film, it tends to feel like an event. Christopher Nolan, more so than those other two, really likes to play the ambiguity game with his film's plots. In a way he is a lot like J.J. Abrams, preferring trailers to tease and to be an experience and for a film's plot to be a relative unknown until you have your ticket in hand. And, much as many will probably dislike this, Nolan is a lot more like Abrams than he is Fincher.
Christopher Nolan wants to challenge his audience to keep up with him. He wants to propose a mechanical concept, an idea of how something works for which he has built a plot around, usually bathing you in exposition for the first half hour or so until you're swimming in so much information it can be easily misunderstood as "intelligent". That isn't quite the slight it sounds: it isn't that Nolan's films aren't smart, it is that the way his films go about explaining themselves isn't particularly smart.
Tenet's plot has been called confusing and complicated, dense and challenging, but this is a bit seeing the forest for the trees. Tenet plays out in a confusing, complicated way, but the plot is actually incredibly simple. For all intents and purposes, Tenet is really just a second-rate James Bond film with a kink. You've got a bad guy hellbent on destroying the world (with less motivation than one would find in a Bond flick), and a group of secret agents practicing espionage to thwart him and figure out his grand plan. The trick with a Christopher Nolan film is that the plot isn't really what anyone goes to see his movies for. The main character, called just Protagonist, is little more than a suit and the occasional witty comment. The conflict is, ostensibly, to thwart the bad guy, but a majority of the film's running time revolves around explaining and then showing (with great flair) the mechanic Nolan really wants to sell you on. Nolan's films are event films, they are a trick. The Prestige was a damning film he should have never made, because it basically outs him as the magician he is. There is a lot of slight-of-hand in Tenet, but next to zero substance.
And that isn't all bad. After all, one can find enjoyment in a well done action film with interesting set pieces and concept, but Tenet is all concept, to a headache inducing degree. Many will tout the complexity of this film's concept, about how intelligent you need to be to grasp it, but the truth of the matter is the concept isn't all that complicated, it is just how Nolan decided to explain it to us. The first hour or so is a rush of scenes and quick dialogue exchanges, interlaced with explanations and exposition.
Below are mild spoilers, but I will not give away the ending. Nolan obviously intended you to figure all of this out by watching the film, so make the decision as you see fit.
The trick to Tenet is that some objects are found to act in reverse time. If you see a bullet on a table that has been "inverted", so long as you will drop the bullet, it should come flying off the table and into your hand. At least, that is how it is first explained to us, confusingly. More accurately, there is a human-made radioactive substance that can invert objects and people to move backwards in time instead of forwards. If you were inverted, the whole world would look to be going in reverse. If you saw someone inverted, it would look like only that person was going in reverse. It takes about a full hour or longer before this concept has been explained to you, with Nolan preferring to drop elements of the concept out of context with lengthy suppositions from characters as to how this all works. This element, it turns out, was sent back in time so that no one in the future could destroy the past with it (which does not make any sense, as they can destroy the past in the past which is literally the plot of this film). The element can be constructed into something confusingly called the Algorithm, which apparently does the actual destroying. The Algorithm was sent to nine different locations in the past, and our antagonist is after the final piece.
Between the quick paced scenes and the way this concept is explained to us, understanding what is going on in the first hour or so is quite a lot of work. It is completely possible without straining yourself too hard, but it will still come with quite a lot of effort. The effort itself isn't really the problem, it is more the inefficiency of the effort and the lack of payoff once you do understand what is going on. There are some truly cool action scenes throughout - just about the only saving grace, really - but the plot boils down to cliche once you look at the beats of the story and not the trickery. And that trickery is particularly frustrating, revealing its mechanical complexity in the most confusing way possible. The first half hour is spent wondering how and why someone made bullets that go in reverse time. There really isn't a reason for it, frankly. There is a slight explanation that would spoil too much for my liking, something that also explains slightly why someone sent the Algorithm back in time as well. Perhaps one day I will do a more thorough review spoiling the ending of this film, but until then suffice to say I didn't like it or its implications. If it isn't too much of a spoiler, think "closed time loop".
Christopher Nolan has a talent for most aspects of film, but writing has never been one of them. Sometimes he strikes the right balance between movie magic, interesting characters, and substantial plot (usually when his brother co-writes), but more often than not they are roller coaster rides designed to look intelligent rather than be intelligent. I'd love to see Christopher Nolan direct a movie he doesn't really want to film, something not written by him but still with a talented scribe behind it. As it is, Nolan is M. Night Shyamalan for the college bound.
6.0
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