Does your head hurt yet?
Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2020
#17 : Tenet
After the CIA-wetwork-level secrecy, the hype, the endless headlines about its release-date slippages and whether it could save cinema, Christopher Nolan's palindromic pulse-pounder turned out to be, well, just a film. But it was a film that kept us all talking throughout the dog days of summer, the actual 150-minute tale just a launchpad for feverish time-travel debates that made some at Empire turn into Charlie Day jabbing at an evidence board in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Not all the dialogue was audible. The third act required DIY flowcharts to track. And it's debatable whether it needed to wrap up with a rap whose lyrics include "Last time I did the whippets (yeah)/ Last time I live reverse (yeah, yeah, ooh)". But still, this was an all-caps EVENT MOVIE in a year with very few of them – and a staggeringly smart one too, scenes looking like a Bond flick but sounding like a Mensa convention. Tenet practically demands to be watched again at home over Christmas. This time with subtitles on.
Like the last film, this is another one I've seen but don't remember a lot about - but I do remember it's got a slightly more complicated plot because I watched it with my eldest and we both laughed about how little we understood about what was going on. However, unlike the last film, I'm going to rewatch this but, as Empire suggests, this time with subtitles on because I also remember a lot of it being completely unintelligible audibly, let alone mentally.
And, as I remembered, it's not really worth me even trying to explain the plot because it's so ridiculously complex. At the simplest level, you have a CIA agent "The Protagonist" (John David Washington) trying to stop a Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) doing something bad, with random unspecified dude Neil (Robert Pattinson) and Andrei's wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) kinda helping, maybe. However, making things slightly more complex, time flows both forwards and backwards throughout the film - and I defy anyone to actually explain what the hell is going on at any point in the film (but particularly in the final third).
I generally trust Mr Nolan, so I do believe that in his head it makes some kind of sense - and I'm sure that if I asked the internet it would give me a million different theories which would make some kind of sense in whichever lunatic dreamt them up. So I'm happy to just go with the flow on the plot (you certainly can't accuse it of being unambitious) and judge the film on the visuals - so how does it do there?
Well - it certainly looks very fine. There are some impressive set pieces in it and the fact that they often feature components travelling in different directions in time make them impressively different, but it's often very distracting (not least because you can't help but wonder whether it really makes any sense). The final battle is supposed to be the highpoint, but there was just too much going on for me (too many reverse explosions) - I preferred the car chase, although I still didn't really follow it! But there's certainly a large selection of gorgeous looking locations to gaze at - a lot of money was spent travelling the world for this film.
They also spent a lot of money on the cast - so how did they do? John David Washington is an odd choice to lead such a high profile film but I'm pleased to report that he did absolutely fine. However, I've no idea if "absolutely fine" was intentional here - maybe the idea was that he shouldn't outshine the plot, or maybe he just was absolutely fine (he seemed as confused as me for lots of the film, but I'm sure that didn't take much acting ability). Robert Pattinson looks like he has much more of an idea as to what's going on and he also looks VERY fine in a sharp suit - he's nicely enigmatic and grabs the attention much more so that John David does here.
So how is Kenneth Branagh as a baddie then? Hmmm. Well. With minimal knowledge, I wasn't overly impressed - for a four-dimensional baddie, he comes across as pretty one-dimensional with a terrible accent and some bad acting. Which isn't exactly what we'd expect from Ken now, is it? I was so surprised that one point I thought "is he being made to act this backward?". And, of course, when I check out Google it turns out that, for some of it at least, he (and others) were doing just that - both in terms of motion and dialogue. And we very much don't have a Twin Peaks Red Room kinda thang going on here - it's all very impressive (apparently JDW was particularly good at it). However, is something that's actually impressive but makes things look less impressive really SUCH a great idea? Dear Reader, I will let you decide...
Right - on to my next gripe! Elizabeth Debicki looks very decorative and she gives it as good as she can, but it's really not a well written part - she's very much there to be a damsel in distress and a potential love interest for The Protagonist, who displays a considerable amount of interest for no obvious reason, risking all of humanity for this woman that he's only just met. Christopher Nolan isn't renowned for his female roles, but normally they're just women who behave exactly like men - here he's gone for female cliché and it doesn't really work for me.
There are a million people in this film, but very few others actually make an impression - Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a military type, Himesh Patel as a fixer, Clemence Poesy as a scientist (who talks UTTER bollocks) and Michael Caine who hits the spot nicely as a British intelligence officer are about it for me.
Time for one last gripe, which was a common one at the time - the sound mix! Apparently, Christopher Nolan likes to make the sound "complicated" (e.g. Bane in The Dark Knight Rises) because it drives up audience concentration but he really did take things too far here - the dialogue is often low in the (often quite noisy) mix which, coupled with the added knowledge that some of the dialogue was recorded backwards really makes the whole thing very hard to understand.
So we're pretty much done here, but I felt the need to try to understand the plot one last time and found a Reddit post which actually does a decent job of at least writing it down. I even understand the words when I read them, but when I try to follow all the timelines I'm afraid my head still hurts too much. The most relevant part of the post to me is the comment that says "I don't think spoilers matter much when it comes to this movie, you still won't understand any of it".
So, it's a film which has an unintelligible plot, bad sound, dubious acting and some dodgy characterisation - I must have loved it, right? Well, it's actually surprisingly enjoyable provided you don't think about it too much - it's gorgeous to look at and it's obvious who you're supposed to be rooting for, so you can just go with that. And I can't help but feel that if the people creating it had spent a bit less time thinking about it, then it would have been considerably more enjoyable. Interestingly, it's easily the lowest ranked of all of Christopher Nolan's films on rottentomatoes.com and it's not like some of them aren't also super challenging but this just all feels a bit too clever for its own good.
But if you've not seen it, then I still think it's worth a watch - it's available to rent in all the usual places, but I'm sure it turns up on a free-to-watch channel every so often so maybe check it out if you stumble across it.
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