Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan) (Patreon)

69/100

First, a confession: While my rating would definitely land somewhere in the 70-68 range, I could not resist the number consisting of two digits that are inversions of one another. It's just too perfect. This should serve as a reminder not to put too much stock in what are just approximations.

Second, some (slightly embarrassing) context. I successfully avoided learning anything about this film in advance—didn't even know who the stars were (apart from Washington, who's on the poster), and was pleasantly surprised when first Pattinson and then Debicki and then—no, seriously?—freakin' Branagh showed up. (Nolan shows Sator from behind initially, so I knew he must be played by a major actor, but wouldn't have guessed Branagh given 50 tries.) The one thing I'd inadvertently gathered from Twitter chatter was that "tenet" being a palindrome is somehow meaningful. As it happens, I read about the Sator Square long ago (most likely as a teenager), and dimly recalled its other four words; when they started cropping up as character and company names, I mistakenly assumed that this knowledge would tip me toward whatever Nolan was up to, as if this film were The Da Vinci Code or something. Thankfully, that's not the case. Just Nolan being cute. 

Third, another (perhaps shocking) confession: I consider this a better Mission: Impossible movie than Fallout. I might even like it a smidge better than Ghost Protocol (which got the same rating). Ignore all the convoluted, admittedly hard-to-follow inversion stuff for a moment—strictly as a globe-hopping setpiece machine, this sucker delivers. There's not an ounce of fat anywhere. Plot's already well in motion from the opening shot, and events just barrel relentlessly forward from there; we learn virtually nothing (not even his name!) about the Protagonist, because who gives a flying fuck? Been a long time since a film's pace alone frequently made me giddy. There's time for some quick dry wit ("You British don't have a monopoly on snobbery, you know." "Well, not a monopoly. More of a controlling interest"), but virtually everything else that doesn't either move the story forward or strive to drop jaws has been ruthlessly pared away, to the point where it often feels as if you're jogging to catch up. And while Washington doesn't perform sweaty death-defying stunts à la Cruise, Nolan's facility for sheer kineticism has somehow gone from nil to wow in the dozen years since The Dark Knight. I heeded the advice of Clémence Poésy's expository lab coat, trying to feel what I couldn't immediately understand; while some nagging questions remain (see below), the dual-entropy action sequences just plain look cool—certainly more so than bullet time. Even when you can't wrap your brain around what's happening, it's dazzling spectacle.

But Tenet lacks "heart," you complain. In theory, that doesn't bother me—I don't require emotional depth from every movie, and am quite chill with its absence from this genre in particular. Fine by me that the Protagonist stays a rootless, quasi-robotic cipher throughout, and that the world-ending catastrophe he seeks to avert involves Antagonists we never even see who haven't yet been born (with their scheme channeled through Branagh's suicidal Russian psychopath). Trouble is, Nolan does try for pathos, and fails miserably. This film suffers from almost exactly the same problem as Arrival: Both take events of literally global import, affecting all humanity, and seek to boil down their significance to the love that one mother feels for her child. (Interstellar kinda does the same, with a dad in lieu of a mom.) That's not an inherently dumb idea (cf. T. Malick), but it requires a more empathetic approach than either Villeneuve or Nolan can manage. And it's literalized here to a degree that's almost goofy, with Kat, informed that everyone on the planet is in danger of being obliterated, actually saying "including my son." First-class deductive reasoning, that. Wasn't especially moved by Neil's sacrifice, either—it's just too abstract. And I'm not confident that I've correctly interpreted the one aspect that did kinda rattle me, as that would require "What's happened's happened"—which I think of as the Twelve Monkeys approach to time travel, though there's technically no time travel here, I don't think; again, see below—to be erroneous, or at least alterable. Is it significant that her message gets cut off in mid-sentence? Seems like it must be (especially given that Nolan also cuts away from her at the same instant "live"), but I'm confused enough not to feel confident. So it's strictly surface pleasures, both big (best wrong-way car chase since To Live and Die in L.A.) and small (the Protagonist making his threat to shoot someone in the head a bit more real by shielding his own face, with his free hand, against the potential spray of blood and brain matter—a badass touch I don't ever recall seeing in a movie before). Those are copious, though. 

Okay, here's the stuff I don't understand. Read a few "explainer" pieces, but they focused on the basics, which are reasonably clear to me (even if I often still have trouble processing inverted movement in real time, just because effect preceding cause is so contrary to human perception). Whether coherent explanations would make a notable difference in my overall opinion, I have no idea; this stuff bugged me much less than the failed pathos bid, but "Whaa?" is "Whaa?"

• First and foremost—and there really must be an answer to this question, as Nolan wouldn't whiff something so huge—I don't get how characters are making their way back to events that happened days earlier. As far as I can tell, Tenet operates on pretty much the same principle as does Primer, in that there's no mechanism for instantaneously moving a body from one point in time to another. There are only turnstiles that invert the entropy of objects, including human beings. In order to get from Friday to the previous Monday, therefore, you'd have to reverse-live your way through the full 72 hours of Thursday, Wednesday, and Tuesday, no? Did I miss something there? Or are we meant to assume that they in fact do so, and that the film simply skips past all that tedium, in the same way that it blithely skips past everything else that doesn't directly affect the narrative? Carruth at least makes it clear that Aaron and Abe have to kill time (heh) in hotel rooms waiting for key moments to recur; here, it seems as if the turnstiles also function as conventional time machines. I feel as if I probably did completely misunderstand something in this regard.

• If the Protagonist is masterminding this entire operation from the future, why does he need to test his younger self via torture? Wouldn't his existence in the future be all the proof necessary of his fortitude? 

• What do people of the future hope to accomplish by destroying the present? It's vaguely suggested that inverting everything will somehow function as a sort of Big Bang that would reboot the universe, but that doesn't help you, nor anyone else currently in existence. Do they believe in eternal recurrence? Is it just spiteful vengeance for our failure to do anything about climate change (as "helpfully" juxtaposed with Kat's obsessive concern for her son)? Sator's suicidal pettiness makes sense, but he's just their conduit. Aliens would be more logical, frankly.

• Aren't composers weary of the Jóhann Jóhannsson "BLAAAAT" yet? (More of a rhetorical question, really.)