Tenet

When it comes to movies leaving an impression on its audience, usually a director and writer would want to focus on two major elements in constructing the plot, characters, and dialogue: the what and the why. There’s obviously more to it than just that and a movie doesn’t always need to be explained to be enjoyed, but usually if a movie can capture these two elements down in an effective balance, it could throw out whatever crazy thing they could come up with and people would be willing to go along with it. Unfortunately, there have been directors and writers who care so much about WHAT they are showing off that they forget to focus on WHY any of it is being show off. Christopher Nolan, despite being a critical darling and having some good quality movies under his belt, has this problem in a lot of his films; having way too much talking and explaining overly complicated plots as oppose to creating interesting characters and connectable storylines. Even if they have been sprinkled throughout his good and bad movies, Tenet is easily the worst offender of this issue and is a movie that seems to carry none of his good qualities and all of his bad qualities. After being captured and tortured, a CIA agent simply known as ‘’The Protagonist’’ (played by John David Washington) discovers that instead of dying to his instructed cyanide pill, he’s been recruited to join an organisation known as ‘’Tenet’’. Being thrown into a world of espionage that might involve time travel connected towards a Russian oligarch called Sator (played by Kenneth Branagh), the race is on to find whatever it is that’s important to them at the time in order to stop the world from blowing up. Nolan has had his issues in the past, but this movie is the exact film to watch if you want to witness all the garbage cliches he can have in his movies. A terrible plot with no direction, care or flow, awfully bland characters with stiff acting and pathetic dialogue that is distractingly inhuman, and visuals and concepts that could be good if they weren’t just excuses to hide how little substance is actually in the product.

Going back to the argument established before, this movie has absolutely no sense of WHY, it only cares about WHAT. In this movie, you will find not a single character or even a single line of dialogue that isn’t used to spout pointless drivel that exists only to stretch out this ridiculous plot to an overly long extent. Trying to be a more grounded time travel movie doesn’t make up for the fact that it still feels like a gimmick within its own movie; what should be the main idea of the movie about time skipping and having the power to exist in multiple different periods at the same time from different perspectives is only a background element to this horribly boring CIA-style narrative involving counter-fit paintings and plutonium smuggling and its just ridiculously dull and uninteresting. Even the main idea of this movie doesn’t excuse how little it is used throughout because sci-fi has done this concept several times more interestingly in better thought-out movies previously (which have still managed to include character and heart as well). The movie could be confusing and non-linear, but it needs some semblance of an emotional crutch in order for people to get invested and this movie and this script (written by Nolan) doesn’t do that. There’s no character emotion, no development, no moments of reprisal, its just chess pieces moving across a broken chess board; characters will just do things without reasons, people will just appear and agree to things without introduction or a sense of discovery, and the movie cares so little about being a connectable movie that it literally waits until the last 30s of a two and a half hour movie to provide a sense of tension and a clear goal, but it comes a little too late. People spend so much time dissecting this movie trying to figure out what it means before they stop to realise that the movie never gave a reason for them to care in the first place, and Nolan was clearly more interested in the concept of dissecting a complicated film rather than directing his movie in a way that would allow his anyone outside of his hard-core fan base to get invested. The movie can say whatever it wants, it can have all the useless dialogue and complicated narrative directions it can eat, but it if doesn’t pay any mind to having the characters care or feel about what they’re doing, all of that will mean nothing. If the characters don’t know or care about what’s happening, why should the audience?

Characters have never been that strong in even the best of Nolan’s work, as they are usually either generic people placed into complicated environments where the stories and ideas rule the film, or they’re just there to dispense positives or negative messages and act accordingly. This isn’t to say that all of them are terrible, but very few are going to be remembered in the galleries of cinema history (outside of a certain clown prince who he can say had some hand in reworking as he does feel fairly different from regular versions). In Tenet, these roles are easily the blandest and most forgettable out of his entire filming roster and it comes down to the simple fact that practically none of them are given a solid motivation or personality, they just exist so that this story can be told. No character has a past outside of this plot, no character has any urgency whenever something happens because it would slow things down, and they are so bland and lacking any sense of character traits and unique lines that any of them could say any line and it would work for any of them. The acting overall isn’t especially bad as most of these actors either have or would go on to be in much better stuff, but it rather feels like a problem on the director’s part. It feels like they were directed to be stoic, unfeeling, and incredibly bored with everything, so it just leaves every line delivery feeling stoic, unfeeling, and incredibly boring and since the script has no moment of development, introspective connecting moments or even just a simple desire for any of them to have, they are nothing but computer programs dictated to do things and complete tasks. The lead suffers this a lot with practically nothing of substance coming out of him at all (makes sense why they could’ve even be bothered to give him a name) and while John David Washington (in one of his first leading roles) doesn’t seem incapable of starring in a film like this, he doesn’t have enough personal charisma or strong personality traits to sidestep the horrible scripting, so he does feel like he’s struggling to survive in every scene. Actors like Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki feel like they could have worked with these very minor roles if they had any sense of character but don’t get any chances, and Kenneth Branagh as the villain in this is so laughable in the absolute wrong way. Giving him this terrible Russian accent is bad enough (especially for an actor who’s already known for being a hammy performer who can’t do accents)  but expecting the audience to be intimidated by this awfully bland ridiculous villain with no character or motivation is just baffling. The movie has no sense of humor, so the audience isn’t even allowed to laugh at how awful it is, he’s truly the worst part of this movie and it actually does border on pathetic.

The movie’s lack of humanity and sense of emotional connection also means that its deadly serious throughout the entire thing, which becomes unbelievably annoying to sit through for that long. Even the most down-hearted movie needs somebody to smile or tell a joke at least once as it provides good contrasts, whereas this movie is so ‘’serious and complex’’ that it doesn’t even bother trying to make its character’s endearing. Most of the visuals in this movie feel more wasted than actually bad as seeing some of these concepts visualize aren’t that bad despite not being that original. They feel like they could be better utilized in the action like bullets that are sucked into the gun as opposed to being shot from them or having a car chase in reverse, but they aren’t ever used or even in a creative or unique way. Instead, it just decides to present these ideas as generically as possible pretending like it’s doing something monumental when really, it’s not leaving any impact because it doesn’t go far enough. Even the musical score by Ludwig Göransson and cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema work on a similar level; on their own, they work perfectly fine, but it’s nothing special especially for what this concept was promising and the fact that both of these two are exceptional talents who have proven their worth several times over in other properties. Despite apparently being inspired by Once Upon a Time in the West and even trying to capture the spirit and essence of a James Bond movie, the film lacks that sense of charming grit and energy that could actually function great within this set-up. If this were given a Men in Black-style atmosphere with a heavier edge, this could have worked fine but that would require someone to crack a smile and not pretend like they are writing ”the greatest work of fiction ever to be invented”.

Overall, one of the biggest sins with this movie is that it just showed off the cons of a director who unfortunately has a lot of familiar negatives despite being pretty talented. He’s made some pretty great movies that will be remembered for a long time and is even responsible for what most people consider to be the greatest comic book movie ever made with The Dark Knight, but his negatives can be pretty frequent in even his best work and they start to become noticeable as more of his movies come out. Honestly, Tenet is the one that features every one of his worst elements; unclear story with way too much talking without purpose, characters with no personality and only used to spout out exposition, and effects and concepts that on their own are interesting but not always taken the most advantage of. Even in some of his lesser work, there’s usually something to check out (a cool idea, some nice visuals, memorable lines, or actions scenes), but there is nothing of worth to be seen in this movie that others haven’t done so much better elsewhere. It was only fitting that after the strong lack of his cliches in Dunkirk that a backtrack was bound to happen, Tenet is that backtrack and is definitely not worth going back to view again and again.