MOVIE REVIEW: Tenet (2020)
NOTE: This is more an opinion on certain behaviors during COVID-19, and less a report on the movie itself.
British triple-threat (director/writer/producer) Christopher Nolan has made a name for himself in Hollywood with cinematic gold like The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010; also BWAAAAM~), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). He even revitalized the Batman universe with the Dark Knight Trilogy (2005–2012), giving us the incredible performance of Heath Ledger’s Joker. His next project, 2020’s Tenet, was to be a film like no other, featuring a concept 20 years in the making unrealized by none other than he, to be seen as Christopher Nolan wished it to be seen —on an IMAX screen, the best movie screen possible. It was to be the latest crowning achievement in an already impressive film catalog.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, changing life as we knew it.
Suddenly all the plans of mice, men, and Mr. Nolan were tossed to the side as thousands of people died every day as medical science and panicking governments tried to keep up with a rapidly spreading respiratory virus. It was like something out of a science-fiction film, and like most sci-fi films, people acted stupid so the movie could happen. Outright denial of the disease crippled nations and economies, and some even thought it was the end of the world. It might as well have been in the world of business, as many companies which required people to interact at transmission ranges suffered and shuttered when people were too scared to leave their homes.
The film industry and the movie distribution industry, both dependent on people sitting together in packed rooms, were deeply affected. Movie theaters had to change to meet new safety guidelines, and ultimately had to relent when the film companies started releasing films to theaters AND their nascent streaming services on the same day. While some understood and tried their best to save the movie industry by adhering very closely to the safety guidelines (thank you Tom Cruise), many others wanted business as usual: people coming to the theaters during a PANDEMIC.
Christopher Nolan was one of those people, for a select reason — he had a contract for Tenet wholly dependent on a movie’s release in theaters, not in the home theater or (God forbid) on a CELLPHONE. Tenet was intended to be seen IN THE THEATER, because that’s where the contract he signed promised the movie would show. He made a big stink about it and threatened to sue, so the theater chains did show it in US theaters on September 3, 2020…to mostly empty seats…after three earlier delays from its initial release date. It eventually was released on home video and on-demand streaming on December 15, 2020. I had the privilege of watching this labor on Amazon Prime on my computer…and I do not agree with Mr. Nolan’s urgency to see it in the theater.
The idea that linear time moves forward and perceived as such is a given; it is how the third dimension is represented in observable forms. With each moment, time affects the objects subject to it by drawing the energy from their forms and sometimes displaying forms of degradation in the phenomenon called decay or “entropy”. But imagine, for a moment, that somehow that entropy could be replaced or its flow could be reversed. What would the outcome be?
Several years in the future of the world of Tenet, someone figured out an algorithm that could reverse the entropy of an object or creature and realized it could be weaponized to change the past to affect the future — creating time reversal as a byproduct of objects or creatures with “reverse entropy”. The people of the future wish to destroy the past, because the world they live in is flooded and barren from global warming, caused by pollution. In our time, no real chance is taking place to alleviate the pollution/global warming issue, so the future suffers. Thus the people of the future decided to unravel time in the past and destroy the world before the future comes to pass, because it couldn’t be any worse than what they were going through.
The scientist of the future did not want the past to be destroyed, so they destroyed the machine, reversed each piece’s entropy to send it back in time (which makes sense somehow), sent messages to a select individual in the past to destroy the items, and killed themselves in a bid to keep it out of the resigned hands of a dangerous future. The messages were received by a Russian oligarch Anton Sator (played by Sir Kenneth Branagh, Valkyrie [2008], Othello [1995], Wild Wild West).
Sator thinks this “future-bomb” is his ticket to an awesome suicide (he’s dying of cancer) and he wants to take the world with him — exactly what the scientist didn’t want. Thankfully the CIA caught wind of Sator’s plans and put a special agent on this case which is codenamed “Tenet”. The agent in question is “the Protagonist” (played by John David Washington, Black KKKlansman, Malcolm and Marie) and with the help of his British handler Neil (Robert Pattinson, Good Time, The Devil All the Time, the Twilight Saga), he goes on an adventure forward AND backward in time through the wonders of reverse entropy. The Protagonist also gets involved with Sator’s estranged wife, the art dealer Kat (Elizabeth Debicki, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. [2015]). The three of them team up to defeat Sator and save the world, but Sator always seems to be one step ahead. Remember: he’s probably seen all this before and knows what to expect. Will our trio of heroes be able to save the future — THEIR future?
There were a lot of set locales — Estonia, India, Denmark, Italy, Norway, the US and the UK— to stand in for other places in the script. They crashed a Boeing 747 into a hangar, which cost a whole lotta money. The movie even took the time to have actors act backward during forward motion special-effects shots to give the illusion of inversion, after the film was run backward. And after all that, nobody could understand what was being said because the sound mix was horrible.
Between talking while wearing masks to breathe inverted air (inverted lungs cannot breathe regular air; them’s the rules) or talking at normal volume while the roaring sea drowns out dialogue, it was super hard to hear the complicated dialogue. Couldn’t your layered sounds have its problems when NOT explaining plot points involving physics?
Despite the global pandemic, Tenet made a buttload of money in theaters worldwide but failed to break even on its ~$200 million budget. In his chase for money, Mr. Nolan advertised comfort over safety. It’s not Christopher Nolan’s fault people went to the theaters at the height of the pandemic, got sick and died; that’s a decision people must make for themselves and their loved ones. But his fervor that people go see Tenet in the theaters may actually have convinced people to brave the danger of something that a surprising amount of people did not believe was actually happening. That kind of behavior is irresponsible, ultimately bringing down my impression of the movie overall.
And to think: this global event affected a movie where the Black guy was the Protagonist.
CHOICE CUTS
- Did you know Elizabeth Debicki is 6 feet tall? That would explain why she would always sit near her shorter male co-stars.
- Hollywood Racism: Kat is a true damsel in distress only existing to be saved by the Protagonist — and in true Hollywood fashion, the Black male lead doesn’t get the White girl.
- The pandemic really screwed up this movie. FULL STOP.
- Special effects for “inversion” really had me loopy as I watched inverted bullets jump back into gun barrels, inverted men trying to drive forward, inverted bungee jumping up walls, and inverted flames causing severe frostbite.
- Aaron Taylor Johnson (Kick-Ass, Avengers: Age of Ultron) is in this movie, but he doesn’t look like himself under all the beard.
- John David Washington is the son of famed actor Denzel Washington, and he has surpassed his father in the action department. The younger Washington pulls off combat scenes with fluidity, ferocity, and flair. He’s no Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57, but still.
- “Don’t think about it” and “We’re not trying to make this scientifically accurate”: This is an actual line spoken by Tenet actress Clémence Poésy to get people to not think about the rules and consequences of “reverse entropy” in Tenet. Christopher Nolan knew he had no leg to stand on with this gimmick, and basically tossed these lines out both in-universe and out-of-universe to cover his butt.
- FIX THE SOUND MIX.
- Tenet gets its name from the Sator Square, a word puzzle dating back to the Roman Empire.
