Review: Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ is an impenetrable sci-fi thrill ride

Christopher Nolan has been embedding deep philosophical notions into his films for years now, but Tenet is the first time that his weighty ideas are given as much screentime as his blockbuster tendencies. An intriguing mix of Bond-style spycraft with hard sci-fi ideas about the very nature of time, Tenet is a heady experience that is ultimately as thrilling as it is confounding.

“Don’t try to understand it,” a mysterious operative warns John David Washington’s character (known simply as “The Protagonist”) early in Tenet, which might as well be the film’s unofficial tagline. After teaming up with the CIA to try and stop a terrorist attack at an opera house in Kiev, The Protagonist is recruited into a shadowy organization to help avert a coming crisis. Forces in the future have been seeding the elements for a coming disaster by sending them back in time — the technology inverts the natural path of entropy, allowing items and people to travel through time in reverse.

After a good deal of globe-hopping with his new partner Neil (Robert Pattinson), it’s revealed that the Russian businessman Andrei Sator (played to the hilt by an over-the-top Kenneth Branagh) is at the helm of the inversion scheme. The Protagonist attempts to get to Sator through his wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who works at a high-end auction house and is being blackmailed by Sator to stay together due to her involvement in a fake art transaction. The Protagonist and Neil then set off to try and thwart Sator’s destructive ends by securing the fake painting to clear Kat’s engagement to her vicious husband, which kicks off a mind-bending cat-and-mouse game through time as Neil and The Protagonist try to stop Sator from destroying the world.

At nearly 2.5 hours, Tenet is so overstuffed with plot and head-scratching scientific theories about the nature of time and how it can be subverted, that half the film is made up of exposition blocks just trying to get you to wrap your head around the latest twists in the narrative. Thankfully, for all the talk of a “temporal pincer movement” or “temporal stiles,” there are a handful of incredible set pieces in which Nolan lets these ideas play out on a huge scale, including a stunning chase sequence featuring a car driving backward through time, and a thrilling fight sequence played out simultaneously in forward and backward time that is unlike anything ever seen on-screen.

Nolan has staged huge set pieces before, from a city turning in on itself in Inception to a planet-wide storm in Interstellar, but Tenet may just reign above all of Nolan’s prior works in terms of pure spectacle. This is a film where an entire plan crash is used simply as a diversion tactic, and characters battle forces that can attack from multiple moments in time simultaneously.

Yet despite all of the film’s bombast, Tenet is surprisingly restrained in many ways. Apart from Branagh’s chest-beating performance, everyone else speaks in a clipped monotone voice and glowers throughout the entire film. Nolan’s films have been criticized as being “cold,” but Tenet is dour even by his standards. That sort of detached air from the characters may help audiences focus on the film’s complicated plot mechanics, but it does little to make any of the relationships in the film believable in any way. Much of the film depends on The Protagonist taking huge risks for Kat, but there is nothing to ever indicate that they are more than partners in a complicated scheme. Kat is given a strong trajectory of her own, but Nolan never demonstrates why The Protagonist would risk derailing a plot to save the entire world for a woman he barely knows or connects with.

Much of the discussion surrounding Tenet is due to the fact that it is only playing in theatres, while many other major releases have gone straight to VOD or will be offered theatrically and on-demand simultaneously. Without wading into a discussion about whether you should see Tenet in a theatre (please use your own judgment), it’s clear that Nolan designed this film for the biggest screen possible. Filmed in IMAX and 70mm, the IMAX sequences are truly staggering and make the most of the super-sized format. There are incredible shots from the film’s locations in India and throughout Europe, and a final climax in a secluded Soviet city that feels like a sci-fi take on a classic era Hollywood war film. Ludwig Göransson’s booming electronic score is another highlight and marks a noticeable change of pace from Nolan’s long working relationship with composer Hans Zimmer (who was busy working on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune).

While the jargon and plot mechanics may be impenetrable to most, you have to admire the sheer audacity of Nolan’s vision. He’s essentially taken a standard spy/heist film and dropped it into a hard sci-fi parable about the manipulation of time. Tenet is an overwhelming experience in nearly every way, and that might be Nolan’s point. He lures you in with the spectacular visuals, then bombards you with enough wild ideas that hopefully a fraction of what he’s putting out sticks with you. Nolan either just assumes that you can keep up, or simply doesn’t care. For all it’s faults, Tenet is not a passive viewing experience —  after only watching new movies on the couch for the past five months, Tenet is a welcome return to theatres, even if it sometimes feels like you’ve just had a physics quiz sprung on you during the summer break.

Tenet is in theatres on August 26th.