Tenet

The brilliant concept of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is decapitated by his suffocating editing and IMAX obsession, yet the fast paced action and incredible set pieces miraculously redeem those flaws in the end. The universal confusion of what happens in this film is not the audience’s fault, it is the director ignoring the necessary build up of the story to instead spend more time on car chases. Is it entertaining? Absolutely, but the first hour and a half feels like a punch in the face.

The whole point of the experience that is Tenet is to never have your feet on solid ground. Nothing is ever given to the audience, they are always left in a separate room looking through the glass, trying to cipher the codes the characters leave behind. The strange part about the fractured relationship that is established between us and the characters is that… even they are not clued in to what is happening. The camera goes at its own speed, ignoring any actor that cannot sprint alongside it to stay in the frame; shots of conversations feel wrong in the framing, and the cuts to people’s faces never land at the right moment. The unstoppable pacing barrels down a highway of scenes through different countries, terrorist attacks, and vault robberies without warning. Once a scene lasts long enough for the audience to calm down, it lurches halfway across the continent to show that the entire sequence prior was just a pit stop. The characters themselves are lost in the madness, but not as a part of the story. Instead, the madness comes from how little the characters are involved in their own destruction. One scene has a character tortured for information, nearly killed, yet what are we shown? A guy that we do not know sitting at a train station we know nothing about as he tries to take a cyanide pill. There is nothing there to care about. It is only after that whole scene is over that we learn the other men at the train station took all of his teeth out to get information, and he never gave up the secrets he knew. How was that not shown! Was the first half of that scene spilled on the cutting room floor, kicked aside and forgotten? What little fragments of character left in the final product are few and far between, and can only be found under the concussive sound design and hours of brain-singeing espionage.

Tenet will always be compared to Inception, and what Inception did best is where Tenet absolutely fails: Character. The characters are… skeletons of what they are supposed to be. There is no meat or pulse to their development, none of them have goals to act upon apart from the ‘mission’ in front of them. Without this necessary anchor for the audience to empathize, the stakes of each scene drift aimlessly in the background. Sometimes the characters are trying to find nuclear warheads, but then five minutes later they are breaking into a vault to get a drawing, but also not really, but maybe he should have, but he was not planning on it… meanwhile the audience is sitting their asking themselves, “what is the point of the drawing?” only for the answer to be ignored because now the characters are with the bad guy racing futuristic sailboats, but it never tells us they are racing, we just have to assume that. The runtime is cut of all fat, including any set up or character moments, leaving only 150 minutes of action action action that we are told how it works only in the last 60 minutes.

Kenneth Branagh and Elizabeth Debicki give great performances and finally provide emotion into the scenes once they are introduced in the latter half of the film. Kenneth Branagh’s brutish, cold-blooded character fits the mood of Tenet perfectly as he does whatever it takes to create the most destruction and leave everyone broken and behind. Elizabeth Debicki plays his wife, and the more screen time she has, the more in control the characters feel with the pace of the plot—the audience along with them. She offers a lot of empathy to the audience, and her conclusion was the only one I felt connected to. The other actors, John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, give great performances that are trampled under the score, especially since both of them are very soft-spoken actors and they had to run through pages and pages of dialogue in each scene. Everyone tries their best to keep up with the pacing of the film, but they never really match it until they are forced into a fight scene or a high speed chase. It was weird seeing such prestigious actors putting themselves into the fighting and car chases without stunt people, especially with how dangerous every set feels on even the tiniest screen. It was only after I watched the behind-the-scenes extras that I found the actors’ effort in the performances and action, revealing how talented they all were on set, and the amount of skill injected into every frame throughout the entire production.

Which raises the question… what happened? Why is the final product barely comprehensible compared to the jaw dropping display found by watching what happened on set?

The post production.

There is no way to point fingers at anyone in particular, especially because Christopher Nolan brings in the composer and the editor onto the sets and has them participate in the creation of the shoots to understand what the actors and their characters fight through from the opening scene to the end credits. When it comes to Christopher Nolan’s expertise in directing, he lays out every piece of the puzzle from day one. Everyone works together through the entire production. So why was the project butchered by its culmination? The only way I can understand it is that Christopher Nolan made the film he wanted to make, but it was way too long to show in theaters, and he would rather die on his throne than premiere his passion project on a laptop. Everything that could be cut, as in anything that might bore the audience or took the least amount of time to film, was cut. Character beats, set ups to locations and scenes, explanations of the world, spaces between the action to breathe—all these things are missing, and I think they were there originally. The runtime is already two-and-a-half hours, and unlike The Dark Knight trilogy, there is no obsessed fan base to flood the theater in every state and country around the world. Tenet is an original story, so why would someone waste four hours in a dark room surrounded by strangers to watch something with no expectation of its quality? For me personally, I think Christopher Nolan fell on his own sword when it came to editing the behemoth of this project. It had the potential to be his magnum opus. The soul is still there in the weeds if you have the energy to dig your hands into the noise, but seeing the final product by itself at face value might make it very challenging to enjoy; the only memory will be the confusion, and you would miss the fun of dissecting the film to find that hidden heart.

Overall, this film demands multiple rewatches, and the way it is crafted will redeem those who stick through to the end each time. The breadcrumbs sprinkled throughout converge with the final scene, and a sudden euphoria of excitement washes over you as the entire film rewinds in your brain. Nothing grows stale in the action, and the extras that come with buying the film (the only way one can watch it) are more impressive than the film itself. This film is definitely Christopher Nolan’s most flawed; the score is obnoxious, the editing is awkward and constricts everything way too close together, and the sound mixing tosses the dialogue out the window, but it somehow redeems itself in the end. The more I think about it, the more I want to go back to the experience, even though the beginning pissed me off. The storytelling is so bare-bones and unforgiving as it leaves the audience behind, but when the action scenes start and the true face of the conflict reveals itself, that is when you get sucked into a whole new world of cinema.

To compare its cumulative score, I also graphed it alongside a rewatch of Rogue One, another flawed but impressively bold film that just had its four year anniversary.

The grand average score calculated from the 111 scenes:

59.07%