Tenet (2020) Review

A man with no name is recruited into an operation involving objects whose entropy runs backward, and told that understanding it will not help him and that he should feel it instead.

The 6 is for extraordinary construction and a protagonist nobody can describe. The inversion sequences are a genuine formal achievement that required scenes to be shot and performed in both directions, and the film gives that machinery to a character with no name, no history and no want.

The thing that gets argued about is the sound. Dialogue is buried under score and effects, deliberately, and Nolan has defended the choice. He is wrong about it, and the reason matters more than the complaint.

The Inversion Is a Real Achievement

Objects and people moving backward through time occupy the same frame as objects moving forward, and the film stages fights, chases and a full battle across both directions at once.

That required performers to learn choreography in reverse and perform it so that the reversed footage reads as forward motion, on top of practical vehicles doing the same. The airport fight and the highway sequence both work on rewatch specifically because the mechanics hold up.

The Stalsk-12 finale is the most ambitious version, with two squads moving through the same battlefield in opposite temporal directions on a shared countdown. As a piece of construction it is unlike anything else in a studio film.

It is also where the legibility problem peaks. Two teams, two directions, a ten minute window running from both ends, and explosions that assemble themselves. Almost nobody watching for the first time can say who is where or what is being achieved, and the sequence is asking for tension from an audience that it has, by its own construction and by its own sound mix, entirely prevented from following what is happening on the screen directly in front of them.

The 747 is the emblem of the approach. Instead of building a model, the production bought a retired aircraft and crashed it into a building, having worked out that a real plane cost less than the alternative. That calculation is the most Nolan fact available about this film.

The Protagonist Has No Character

He is credited as the Protagonist. He has no name, no established past, no family and no stated want beyond doing the job he has been recruited into.

John David Washington is good in it and is given nothing to hold. He is charming, competent and physically credible, and the film never establishes what he would lose, which means the audience has no stake in the outcome beyond an abstract world-ending clock.

Compare it to Inception, which is the same shape of puzzle film. Cobb wants to go home to his children, that want is stated in the first ten minutes, and every rule of the dream architecture is measured against it. Take the emotional spine out and Inception becomes this.

Robert Pattinson’s Neil is the film’s one real character and the reason the ending lands at all. He knows how the story ends from the middle onward and says nothing, and the revelation that their friendship runs backward through his life is the only moment in the film with any feeling attached.

Elizabeth Debicki does the other half of the emotional work and the film treats her thread as a subplot. Kat wants her son and is trapped by a husband who owns her legally and practically, which is the only want in the picture a person could recognize. Everything the audience feels about the ending is borrowed from her.

The Sound Mix Is Not a Complaint About Ears

Dialogue is routinely buried under Ludwig Goransson’s score and under effects, including several scenes where a character is explaining a rule the audience needs.

Nolan has defended this as intentional, arguing that sound is part of the sensory experience and that audiences do not need every word. That position is defensible for atmosphere and indefensible for exposition.

The problem is that this film is unusually dependent on its explanations. A puzzle picture buries its rules under an orchestra and then instructs the audience to feel it, which is asking them to intuit a mechanism they were prevented from hearing.

There is also a practical dimension. Presentation varies enormously between rooms, and a mix optimized for a calibrated IMAX theater is a different experience in a multiplex, which means the film is legible for some paying customers and not others.

Nolan had done this before and got away with it, because Interstellar and Dunkirk buried dialogue that the audience did not need. A father saying goodbye works as sound and shape. A scientist explaining a rule about entropy does not, and the difference is whether the scene is carrying information or emotion.

Released Into a Pandemic

Originally set for July 2020, moved to July 31, then August 12, then a staggered rollout from the twenty-sixth of August in the United Kingdom and the third of September in the United States.

It became the first major studio tentpole to open theatrically during the pandemic, with reduced capacity, with New York and Los Angeles closed entirely, and with a substantial share of the audience unwilling to sit in a room with strangers.

Two hundred to two hundred and five million dollars in production against about three hundred and sixty-five worldwide, most of it international. In normal conditions that is a clear failure. In those conditions it is unreadable, which is exactly the problem it created.

Warner Bros. shielded daily domestic figures, which studios almost never do, specifically to prevent the number being read as a flop. Within a week of release they moved Wonder Woman 1984 to Christmas, which tells you what they had concluded.

It Ended a Partnership

Nolan said publicly that he was thrilled with the result and worried that studios would draw the wrong conclusion, using the shortfall as a reason to make exhibition absorb the pandemic’s losses instead of adapting.

Warner Bros. then announced its entire 2021 slate would go to HBO Max on the same day as cinemas, with no advance notice to filmmakers. Nolan objected in extremely direct public terms and left for Universal, ending a working relationship of nearly twenty years.

That sequence is the most consequential thing about this film and has almost nothing to do with what is on screen. A picture became an industry argument, and the argument determined where one of the few remaining director-driven blockbuster careers would live.

He then made Oppenheimer at Universal, which took nearly a billion dollars, and the conclusion the industry drew was about him instead of about theatrical release generally.

There is a reading where this film did what it was sent to do. It kept a substantial number of cinemas open through the worst quarter in the industry’s history, at a moment when the alternative was closure, and three hundred and sixty-five million dollars moved through an exhibition sector that had nothing else to sell.

Should you watch Tenet?

Yes, and watch it with subtitles. This is a genuine formal achievement wrapped around a character with no name and no reason to care, mixed so that the explanations are hard to hear, and Robert Pattinson is doing the only warm thing in it.

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