Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020) (Patreon)

I happen to be of the opinion that Christopher Nolan's best film is The Prestige (with Dunkirk a close second). The Prestige, of course, is explicitly about stage magic, and the ontological conundrum of a world in which apparent miracles are possible two ways: through advanced science, or by incredibly hard work and deception. It struck me while watching Tenet that The Prestige might be Nolan's statement of purpose. As a director, he is not really interested in characters, although he does seem to care about "humanity" as part of a larger philosophical equation. (Like most Brits, Nolan is given to analytic philosophy rather than the far messier Continental stuff.) Part of why he was a good choice for the Batman movies is that he could concentrate on his problem-solving, since he was under no obligation to "flesh out" Batman or The Joker. (Note: never try to flesh out The Joker.)

Tenet is both awe-inspiring and exhausting, a film that suggests that Nolan could be the thinking person's Michael Bay. I don't mean that as a dig, mind you. Nolan is fascinated with contraptions, the monumental, and all the stuff that cutting edge imaging technology can put on a screen. Watching Tenet, oddly enough, I remembered an argument on Twitter about the band OK Go and their greatly admired, Rube Goldberg videos. Someone (I think it was Jeffrey Overstreet) observed that no one likes, or even remembers, songs by OK Go. They are purely a pretext for the video, an inconvenience that is nevertheless deemed necessary by the constraints of the genre. I think this is pretty much how the plot functions in Tenet. 

Could you follow it? I couldn't, although at a certain point I gave up and just grooved on "ooh, backwards!" There are enough basic concepts thrown out to fill the space where a plot would be. And Nolan takes his ideas seriously enough to lend them an air of legitimacy, to the degree that when something seems illogical, we are willing to suspend our judgment and just go with it. How is "reverse entropy" different from time travel, or a parallel world where history runs in reverse, presumably all the way back to the neutrinos? Who cares?

So really, when certain aspects of Tenet turn out to be palindromes, it makes enough sense for us to not get hung up. But like a magician, Nolan is interested in the trick, and the sci-fi mumbo jumbo is little more than misdirection. This is a formalist exercise, and on that level it mostly succeeds. From the opening setpiece in the opera house, through its extended car chases and side-by-side views of The World and Dlrow Eht, Tenet is a technical marvel. When the film opened, I made mention of the Lumiere brothers' famous Destruction of a Wall, the film where it was (allegedly) discovered that cranking the filmstrip in reverse could manipulate our perception of time itself. In fact, Tenet is really just a 21st century, high-tech version of that feat of early cinema, and the pleasures it offers are very much the same.

Tenet gets a little bloated. The two-team attack on the bad guy's desert compound is a bit tedious, mostly because Nolan overestimates how many moving parts we can keep track of and adequately admire. And while the buddy-cop energy between Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) actually works pretty well within the film's limitations, the supposed emotional core of Tenet (Washington and Elizabeth "the Human Giraffe" Debicki) is fairly embarrassing. (Notice how we never even meet the kid? That's how much Nolan cares.)

But then again, I've never seen a building un-blow-up on the top, only to re-blow-up on the bottom. That was cool.