Time, surely is interesting. We perceive the flow of time and make assumptions about when something happened. While I don’t know if there was any enigma that people ascribed to time before Einstein showed that it doesn’t flow at the same rate for everyone, I cannot imagine how someone is not intrigued by the very nature of time after that. Not just that, Einstein’s theories also opened up the possibility of real scientific time travel. I personally have been captivated by time and everything to do with it for almost a decade now. Whether it’s reading books about time, researching time travel, or spending absurd amounts of time staring at walls and scratching on notebooks coming up with strange time-travel related puzzles, this fascination for time and it’s paradoxes has only grown stronger with … well, time. So yeah, I would say I think about time a lot. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine something as brilliant as the concept of Tenet.
But a good concept alone seldom makes a good movie, it’s the execution that matters. That’s where I can see people differ on whether Tenet is a good movie or not. Without spoiling anything, I will admit that Tenet is really a puzzle more than it is entertainment. While other Nolan movies are heavy on the puzzle as well, they are not as complicated as Tenet. They also generally have some ties to reality and are filled with relatable human emotions. Inception was about a guy trying to get back to his family, Interstellar was about a guy trying to save his family, Prestige was a tale of revenge and passion. But Tenet is essentially just about time. A very interesting and complicated puzzle about time. If that’s what you’re interested in, it doesn’t get better than this. If not, you’ll just have spent 2 hours and 30 min for a brain ache you don’t want. I wanted the puzzle, I craved for the pages of timeline diagrams, the rewatches, and the reddit threads I had to go through to understand every scene of the movie. So yeah, I loved it.
The Good (for me at least):
Having spent so much time thinking about time, I’d assume it was easier for me to follow the movie than it would be for the average audience. Discussions about closed loop time travel, parallel universes, grandfather paradoxes were very obvious to me from the onset. In addition to that, experience with timeline diagrams also made me understand the concept of “turnstiles” and their mind-boggling consequences a lot better than most others. In fact, until the last act, I honestly followed most of the movie in the first watch. But all that aside, you don’t have to really know anything before you watch it. It might just help to grasp a little more during your first watch (assuming you’re going to watch it again), but that’s about it.
It goes without saying that Tenet has great actors and Nolan’s direction is fantastic. The most important thing to me about a movie that is complicated is that if you do take the time to try and figure it out, it should check out. There cannot be inconsistencies and irregularities. This becomes even more essential when the rules of the world are entirely fictional and are created by the writers of the movie. Unlike Interstellar, where you can look to actual science to explain the movie, here you can only look to the movie and the rules it lays out to explain the plot. And unlike Inception (check out this article about why I think Inception is full of holes), Tenet checks out.
The Bad:
Tenet is not perfect though. I think a more relatable character with more grounded scenes would have definitely helped the movie. Not only would it resonate with the audience a lot more but also slow down the pace of the movie just a little in between all the action. The soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson is decent, but I absolutely missed Hans Zimmer. I don’t know what it is but Zimmer’s music just gets you to feel that emotion and the excitement so much more. Tenet probably has the dullest final scene of any Nolan movie, who usually ends his movies with one of the most gorgeous scenes in the reel. Remember Churchill’s speech as Tom Hardy burns the plane at the end of Dunkirk, or Batman riding away in the Dark Knight, or McConaughey stealing a spaceship in Interstellar, and who can forget the spinning totem in Inception. But Tenet doesn’t stack up to any of these, and a missing epic soundtrack might also be partly culpable here. Not only that, even the plane crashing scene that all the trailers were mentioning to whet your appetite feels oddly muted. I mean, what happened to the Nolan who gave us the docking scene in Interstellar? And finally, I really didn’t get the color grading look this movie was going for. What’s with the yellow tones everywhere?
Verdict:
It’s hard to say much about Tenet without getting into the specifics of Time inversion and how it works, so I won’t try. Just remember that every scene in the movie is important and you may watch many of them more than once. If you like a good puzzle that you’ll need many rewatches and a few days of rumination to solve, go for it. If not, the movie doesn’t really have much else. I mean you could just watch it as an action movie without giving a damn about it’s plot, but at that point, you might as well be watching Michael Bay movies.
The Movie Court 