Christopher Nolan and his Tenet Problem
“We live in a twilight world.”
Moderate Spoilers
If there is one common motif to Christopher Nolan’s films, it is a feeling of forward propulsion. The music, the cinematography, the motion of our lead characters; so much of Nolan’s cinematic language has the motif of forward moving energy. In his recent work the music of Hans Zimmer and Ludwig Goransson has distinctly captured the feeling of time running out, of notational adrenaline pumping through the audience’s veins. If Tenet’s staunch dedication to this motif says anything, it reveals that Nolan still has an addiction to the type of blockbuster filmmaking that Don Simpson & Jerry Bruckheimer pioneered more than two decades ago – the now rare adult summer blockbuster. Like Simpson & Bruckheimer’s 80s and 90s output, Nolan is interested in creating pop culture films for the remaining adults who still attend cinemas. The one difference Nolan incorporates is usually a device of high-concept science fiction that somewhat modernizes the form.
In Inception (2010) it is the dream machine that facilities mind crime, in Interstellar (2014) it is advanced space travel, in The Prestige (2006) it is Nikola Telsa’s invention of nightmares. In Tenet (2020), the device is the Turnstile, a machine from the future that is capable of reversing the entropy of an object or person, allowing them to travel backwards against the flow of time. It’s a time machine essentially, but in Nolan’s world such a thing would sound silly. Using the word Inversion and keeping the term ‘time machine’ at a distance is the perfect example of how Nolan maintains a tone of hard-science seriousness – don’t make it sound ridiculous, even if it is ridiculous.
It’s undeniable Tenet is a step backwards for Nolan. While I admit Dunkirk (2017) is my least favorite Nolan movie, it was a step forward in a new creative direction. It was his most patient, disciplined movie, taking considerable risks against the tide of traditional war cinema. Tenet is undoubtedly the most excessive form of sci-fi seriousness that Nolan has undertaken, excessive in sound, excessive in plot, excessive in exposition. It is a bloated sister to Inception, but without the ingenious emotional through line that Inception committed to – one of a father mourning a wife and missing his children.
In Tenet we are provided with the very capable but emotionally distant character The Protagonist (John David Washington). Philosophic meanings aside, it is a red flag that Nolan offers no name to his narrator, who spends much of the running time having a fleeting attraction to the estranged wife (Elizabeth Debicki) of a powerful Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). To give its due, the first two thirds of Tenet are brilliantly over-serious action movie fodder. The propulsive music, the perpetual motion of the camera, a heist scene that Nolan cannot help but include (he loves heists), Tenet comfortably, if coldly, walks the same line that Inception did so well 10 years ago. But remarkably Tenet continues into its finale by committing to one of the most underwhelming, disappointing third acts I can remember. And it’s a little heartbreaking, because the journey to get there is so much fun.
What little intimacy that held together the core group of characters is lost in the ham-fisted spectacle of a large and narratively muddled final battle. What previously has been a small, focused group of characters engaging in secret James Bond-ish operations of ever increasing danger, ultimately devolves into large scale desert warfare between two faceless groups of characters we don’t care about. This scene quickly highlights his weakness in coherently depicting crowded set pieces (The Dark Knight Rises finale is still a low point). I couldn’t help but feel that an ending of this scale was unnecessary and simply a distraction from what was important – how characters resolve their inner and outer conflicts.
“What little intimacy that held together the core group of characters is lost in the ham-fisted spectacle of a large and narratively muddled final battle.”
Of course, there is such detail in Tenet, that no-doubt there is a detailed and complex explanation for why Tenet’s ending is the way it is. But there is unfortunately no reason robust enough to reinvigorate Tenet’s final act with the drama it deserves. What we have is undoubtedly a choice of scale over substance. It’s no doubt that Nolan wanted both, but unfortunately he falls short.
Here is Nolan’s Tenet problem – it feels that to justify itself as a Hollywood Summer Blockbuster, the project must be a 200-million-dollar movie. And the fix? Less scale, more intimacy. In 2020 I am still waiting for a filmmaker to make an exciting movie that is content and aware that it is worth making an exciting high-concept movie on a medium-sized budget within the Hollywood system. I’m begging for Tenet to be the small, mind-bending pleasure of the year, but instead it ultimately drowns in its blockbuster excesses.
