Christopher Nolan’s Tenet finally arrives in theaters, and only in theaters, after several delays as the first blockbuster of the Covid era, even as the pandemic rages on around the world. How apt, then, that the film distills existential and contemporary anxieties into its bloated and riotous spy-movie package. Here, time moves forward and backward simultaneously and the characters wear gas masks, wanting for a return to normality as nefarious forces seek to accelerate the destruction of the planet through the use of a bomb sent back in time. As Tenet is keen to remind us, it’s a palindrome in both content and structure. But in the context of our uncertain moment, it’s also scarcely what you’d call escapist entertainment.
During a mission at a Kiev opera house, a C.I.A. agent known only as the Protagonist (John David Washington) notices time operating in ways that it shouldn’t: a bullet hole appearing in a seat before a shot has even been fired, a terrorist dying as if he were the star of a film running in reverse, a bullet emerging from the un-splintering seat and surging backward until it’s swallowed by a gun. Turns out that everything we see in the film has already happened before, and soon the Protagonist is swallowed himself into a global conspiracy where all roads lead to Russian billionaire Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Bond-esque villain in a film that would not be possible without one Ian Fleming. Indeed, think of Tenet as another self-consciously sculpted pulp framework through which the characteristically dour Nolan filters his heavy ideological concepts.
Nolan’s obsession with capital-T time as a structural and thematic device seemed to reach a logical endpoint in Dunkirk, a film without traditional characters and whose interweaving of timelines was its driving force. But Tenet would seem to go further—or, rather, backward into the realm of Inception—positioning itself as a large-scale puzzle box of ever-unfolding narrative pieces. Predicated on our viewing time from different angles, the film raises questions about free will and living life forward and backward, though it’s at pains to answer them, as Nolan is more interested in positing his characters as chess pieces and having them explain the “tenet” phenomenon by just repeating the word “entropy” like a mantra. “I am the protagonist,” says, yes, the Protagonist at one point, and in Mumbai, he connects with his sometimes posh, sometimes cockney gun-toting handler, Neil (Robert Pattinson), who explains concepts of parallel universes and the grandfather paradox to him as if knowing that the man was too busy in C.I.A. training to ever watch Back to the Future Part II.
The phrase “we are living in a twilight world” is also repeated ad nauseam, expressing fears of a quantum Cold War. Even before the creation of “tenet”—think of it as a philosophy and top-secret organization rolled into one—society was in communication with the future, as pointed out by exposition-delivering cypher Barbara (Clémence Poésy), through email and credit cards. Which means that the film’s characters are also living in a material world made possible by old money. Michael Caine, as a British secret agent, appears briefly to arm the Protagonist with a bottomless Amex, and to inform him to get a better suit. And as if to highlight the nature of our globalized world, Nolan has his characters teleport across the planet between scenes, with almost every action set piece involving a vehicle of some kind: from yachts to high-speed BMWs to a cargo plane that, as it leaves its hanger, suggests the spaceship from Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon.
There’s no critique in the film’s fabric about how technology shapes modern life, but its action sequences do busily go about working out Nolan’s ideological fixations, and without actually driving character or plot forward. Fight scenes play out twice from inverted perspectives, with Nolan all the while bombarding us with inescapable Easter eggs: an orchestra that sounds as if it’s tuning up backwards and forwards, two trains going in opposite directions as they frame the characters, a wind farm where the turbines can spin both ways. After a while, the show that’s made of such inversions comes to feel like watching a snake eat its own tail. One of the film’s central locations is the London street Canon Place, the sign for which is shown hidden behind a lamppost so that it reads “Non Place.” How droll. Nolan strips locations of their specificity, echoing the broad strokes of your average Bond film’s depictions of other cultures: India’s streets are colorful and filled with sweaty locals, Oslo is a flatpack-laden marvel of architectural design, and Russia is a desolate wasteland.
There’s a gleefulness to Tenet’s backwards-moving explosions that you won’t find in its plethora of walk-and-talk scenes. Nolan has been vocal about his love of lean genre masters like Michael Mann and Don Siegel, and while you sense their influence here in the way that Nolan shoots bodies moving through urban environments, he never catches, as those filmmakers did, the alienation of a cityspace in a killer’s eyes. The Protagonist may know how to wear a suit, but he’s a sterilized version of 007, a secret agent without agency, and whose race is, for the film, an intentional but still curious non-issue. “He didn’t like the look of me,” he says of Sator at one point, emphasizing the word “look.” But within the crowded infrastructure of Nolan’s narrative, race would seem to warrant more of a conversation than the Protagonist’s blackness is permitted here.
In keeping with Tenet’s allegiance to the world of James Bond, Branagh’s villain almost itches to prove how bad he is (think of Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre bleeding from his eyes in Casino Royale). Sator constantly checks his pulse, which never rises above 130. “Each generation looks out for its own survival,” the Protagonist says, and it seems like Nolan is trying to acquit himself of not taking his 007 riff further. Bond has been pilfered, reworked, and parodied, but Nolan’s self-seriousness is such that he’s loath to subvert the tropes of Fleming’s spy universe. Yes, Tenet knows how to go full throttle. There’s fun to those explosions, and Ludwig Göransson’s throbbing score, which gets the blood pumping higher than Branagh’s pulse counter will allow. But every time it stops to speak, it only emphasizes a hollowness within: how enamored it is of its own cleverness.
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