Tenet is the fifth film in which Christopher Nolan experiments with time. This time, the premise is that humanity faces a threat from the future. Our protagonist, named in the script The Protagonist, is brought into a secret organization working to thwart…the antagonists, who also remain unnamed.
If Christopher Nolan wants to make a Bond film, Tenet is the resume he’ll share with Barbara Broccoli. Tailored suits, scenic locations, yachts, fistfights, gunfights, gadgets, betrayals, shadowy agents, it’s all here. John David Washington may be an American agent, but we still get British accents courtesy of Robert Pattinson and Michael Caine.
The science fiction sets Tenet apart from the customary secret agent yarn. In this world, it is possible to invert time, meaning make some things move backwards through time in the same space as things moving regularly forward in time. Like he did in Inception, Nolan uses this time-flexing premise to deliver some engaging cinematic novelty. In the most memorable scene, two characters grapple in different time movements.
There is subtext in this assault from the future. The story tells us the future has become uninhabitable so future people created a way to reverse time to survive. The accusation is implicit: the decisions of the present must have ruined the future. As if further implying the cause of the future calamity, the movie conveys an eco-consciousness. At one point, The Protagonist takes refuge in a wind turbine. The villain seems to represent the 1%, coordinating his nefarious plan from his mega-yacht, and his plan uses a building that serves as a tax loophole. A 747 airplane—which was mostly retired due to fuel efficiency concerns—is intentionally destroyed by the heroes. Since returns are paramount for big budget films, and environmental concerns are perennially hot-button, Tenet leaves it all under the surface, as did Interstellar.
Tenet’s characters exude the requisite style and cool of a Nolan film, or a Bond one. Washington swaggers and quips like a Bond. Pattinson brings a nerdy charm, not unlike Q. Elizabeth Debicki plays the damsel in distress, albeit better drawn and with more agency than Bond love interests do. The characters and their relationships are well-drawn enough to resonate after the credits roll, with the exception of one. The movie teases a romance between Washington and Debicki, but shies away at the ultimate moment. If interracial romance among leads was too much (in the year 2020, egads!), it would have been better to leave it at early-X-Files levels of unexpressed.
More than other Nolan films, the plot is complex. Because inverting time grants the ability to travel through time, the viewer must piece together the linear story. For example, multiple versions of a character can be present in the same scene—this is a more complex Back to the Future 2. This results in frequent exposition, also more than other Nolan films. It’s not always well-hidden. One of the concerns in the film is what will happen to a child. We never see an actual interaction with the child and the child has no lines. Everything we know about the care and concern for him is delivered via dialogue.
The score by Ludwig Göransson is worth mentioning. Göransson not only wrote an intense, bass-driven score, he also inverted parts of it to keep with the theme. To really commit to the bit, he had the orchestra learn to play the piece backwards. The result does make for fun listening, even outside the movie. The track INVERSION gives a sense of the result:
Tenet is worth a watch for sci-fi fans and Bond fans. Nolan fans will especially enjoy the time element and will surely be happy to work to understand the plot.
