Tenet (2020) Review
6/10
A man with no name is recruited into an operation involving objects whose entropy runs backward, and told that understanding it won’t 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 real 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.
What people argue about is the sound. Nolan buries dialogue under score and effects, deliberately, and has defended the choice. He’s wrong about it, and the reason is more important than the complaint.
I spend the first hour of Tenet grinning at the machinery and the last hour squinting at a battle I can’t follow, led by a hero who gives me nothing to root for. That split is the whole 6. I admire what Nolan built here more than most studio filmmaking of its decade, and the movie still leaves me feeling almost nothing.
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 because the mechanics hold up.
The highway sequence is where I’m most firmly on Nolan’s side. Cars moving in both directions through one shot give me the thrill I want from a blockbuster, the sense of watching something nobody has pulled off before. 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’s unlike anything else in a studio film.
It’s 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’s where or what’s 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’s 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.
A formal device has to be legible before it can be impressive. The audience needs to understand the rule well enough to read a scene, and every failure of legibility converts spectacle into noise.
The rule here’s simple and gets explained badly. Things can run backward and you meet yourself. Stated plainly at the start, the whole film is followable, and the picture insists on complicating the explanation instead.
There’s a limit to feel it instead of understand it. That instruction works for tone and it doesn’t work for mechanics, because the audience can’t feel who’s winning a fight whose rules they can’t follow.
The Protagonist Has No Character
He’s credited as the Protagonist. He’s no name, no established past, no family and no stated want beyond doing the job he’s been recruited into.
John David Washington is good in it and is given nothing to hold. He’s charming, competent and physically credible, and the film never establishes what he’d lose. That means the audience has no stake in the outcome beyond an abstract world-ending clock.
Compare it to Inception. It’s the same shape of puzzle film. Cobb wants to go home to his children, the film states that want in the first ten minutes, and it measures every rule of the dream architecture 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 works 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.
Pattinson walks off with the picture. I’d happily trade half the inversion lectures for more of Neil, because he’s the only person on screen who seems to be enjoying himself and the only one I miss once he’s gone.
Elizabeth Debicki does the other half of the emotional work and the film treats her thread as a subplot. Kat wants her son, and a husband who owns her legally and practically traps her.
That’s the only want in the picture a person could recognize. The audience borrows everything it feels about the ending 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 don’t 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. That’s asking them to intuit a mechanism they were prevented from hearing.
It’s the choice that fails hardest. When a movie tells me a rule matters, drowns the explanation under Goransson’s score and then tells me to feel it instead, I stop feeling anything but annoyed.
There’s 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. That 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 didn’t need. A father saying goodbye works as sound and shape. A scientist explaining a rule about entropy doesn’t, and the difference is whether the scene is carrying information or emotion.
Deliberate difficulty is a choice with a bill attached. If the audience must follow a rule to enjoy a scene, obscuring the rule isn’t sophistication, it’s a self-inflicted wound. Separate atmosphere from information. Bury whatever you like under sound and rhythm, and make sure the essential sentence arrives clean.
For prose the parallel is a style that hides the plot. Elliptical writing is a legitimate mode and it can’t be applied to the paragraph where the reader learns how the world works.
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 serious 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’s a clear failure. In those conditions it’s unreadable. That’s exactly the problem it created.
Warner Bros. shielded daily domestic figures, which studios almost never do, to prevent the number being read as a flop. Within a week of release they moved Wonder Woman 1984 to Christmas. It tells you what they’d 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’s a reading where this film did what it was sent to do. It kept a considerable 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.
A work released into abnormal conditions produces data nobody can interpret, and everybody interprets it anyway according to what they already believed.
That’s worth remembering about your own results. A launch into a bad week, a crowded season or a news cycle gives you a number that means less than it appears to. The durable lesson is about who controls the frame afterward. Nolan spent the following year arguing publicly about what his own box office meant, and the argument mattered more than the film.
Should you watch Tenet?
Yes, and watch it with subtitles. It’s a real formal achievement wrapped around a character with no name and no reason to care, mixed so the explanations are hard to hear. The inversion work justifies every point of the 6. The blank hero and the buried dialogue cost it everything else, and that’s a sad loss on a movie this ambitious. Robert Pattinson is doing the only warm thing in it.
