Quick review: _Tenet_

[jducoeur]

Kate and I have taken to treating Saturday evening as Movie Night. Tonight's outing was Tenet.

tl;dr -- swing and a miss.

It's kind of frustrating, really. You know how a lot of streaming series feel over-stuffed -- like they're spending ten hours on four hours of story? This is the opposite: Tenet is two and a half hours long, and is ridiculously over-compressed. I think there's a good eight-hour TV series here, that they unfortunately chose to do as a movie.

The high concept isn't really a spoiler (you can largely glean it from the trailers): there is a technique of "inversion", that allows things -- arbitrary things -- to have their timestreams reversed. They start running backwards in time, while still existing in our world.

The movie has the courage of its convictions: it takes this batshit premise completely seriously, works very hard to follow the logic through, and results in a story that is, I believe, logically consistent. Unfortunately, it is also borderline-incomprehensible for mere humans.

The biggest failing is that the plot races along so fast that the story never has time to breathe. There are several major characters, but our protagonist is the only one who even remotely advances beyond being a cipher, and even he doesn't really get any motivation. (There's a whole running theme of him Saving The Girl, but they never explain why a pretty cold-blooded spy like him gives a damn about her.)

It says something that even the name of the movie, which is a codeword that runs through it, never achieves even the slightest significance. It's a thing; it's important; it's really never explained. It feels like it got left on the cutting room floor. Moreover, the premise of why all this matters -- why this could potentially bring about the end of the world -- never makes a lick of sense. They wound up taking a coldly logical (kind of) premise and MacGuffinizing it in order to add dramatic tension.

The special effects are, of course, fabulous -- they have a vast amount of fun with time running both forwards and backwards at once. And the climactic set-piece is one of the greatest bits of military battle strategy ever shown in fiction, asking the question, "What if you could fight a battle in both directions of time at once?" Basically -- what does a temporal flanking maneuver look like?

The movie leaves a lot of room for a sequel, and there's a part of me that hopes they do that -- on television. There's a potentially great (if insane) series fighting to emerge from this premise. I just wish Christopher Nolan had realized that from the beginning, and pitched it as a series, instead of trying to compress it into a movie.

Summary: it's kind of a fun ride, loud and action-packed, and bizarre in the ways that you expect from Nolan. But it's too rushed and confusing for me to call it a good film. Which is a pity, because if it had had more room to breathe, it could have been great science fiction.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Thanks for that. I had assumed that it wouldn't work (last Nolan film I loved was The Prestige), and it's good to hear I don't need to run out and watch it!