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I really wanted to like this movie. Truly, I did. A number of weeks ago, I wrote a piece lambasting the filmography of Christopher Nolan for its superficial character work, hollow themes and rampantly misogynistic storytelling tropes, and while I stand by every last word of it, I am equally convinced that Nolan is capable of growth and change. When deployed correctly, his gifts can be immaculate; Inception (2010) weaves together an elegant labyrinth of structures and twists with effortless grace, while The Prestige (2006) is sensational precisely for its willingness to fully embrace Nolan’s love for smokescreens and illusions. Tenet possesses none of these traits, rather it is a concentrated case study for the worst impulses of its creator. This is a film so deliberately, disastrously baffling that its ensemble cast of world-class performers are left with little choice but to flail desperately across their respective emotional ranges without any idea of their objectives. The only tangible arc within the film’s bloated, two-and-a-half-hour runtime is one stuffed full of malicious, gratuitous spousal abuse. This is not only Christopher Nolan’s worst film to date, but it is also likely to serve as the low bar against which all other high-concept blockbuster efforts will be measured for quite some time.

 

Tenet is centred around a nameless character credited pointlessly and pretentiously as ‘The Protagonist’ (John David Washington) who overcomes a seemingly impossible test and is rewarded with an assignment unlike any other; the prevention of a third World War. He is partnered with the enigmatic Neil (Robert Pattinson) and pitted against the brutish Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian arms dealer who has discovered a new kind of technology which enables him to invert an object’s entropy and essentially reverse the flow of time for any place, person or thing. Trapped between these two forces is Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), Sator’s estranged wife who loves her son Max (Laurie Shepherd), and will do anything to protect him. If that description seems reductive, particularly given that Kat is the only significant female character in the film, then be warned that it only gets worse as her story unravels. To put it in far more dignified terms than it deserves, Tenet’s regard for the female experience is abhorrent.

 

This is the spoiler-free essence of the film’s plot, though it should be said that beyond this premise there is in actuality very little to reveal beyond the IMDb logline. The narrative is shockingly linear and barebones given the elaborate conceit, especially considering Nolan’s fondness for complex tapestries in the past. Rather than hurtling down a winding rabbit hole of suspenseful rug-pulls, Tenet is instead constructed around a series of visibly expensive set-pieces each of which could have instead been spent as the entire budget of a smaller, less self-obsessed film. Much has been written about the sequence wherein Nolan crashes a Boeing 747 airplane into a building in an act of what he jokingly described as “impulse buying.” This could be forgiven if it were at least essential to evolving the film, but in action the stunt is entirely incidental. There is no character to these scenes whatsoever, to the extent that they appear to function in isolation from the film’s alleged story. This is particularly egregious when compared to what other films within the genre have been achieving over the past number of years, with the most successful example being the largely practical, daredevil spectacle of Mission Impossible: Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018), which uses Tom Cruise’s gamesmanship for stunt work to centre every single beat, no matter how intense, around the affection we feel for his character. 

 

Stripped of its seismic explosions, the story of Tenet is an utterly empty experience desperately in need of Ethan Hunt’s empathetic charisma. Nolan has always had a callous disregard for the needs of his characters, but it has never manifested with the numbing disinterest on display here. There are full scenes where the dialogue of the characters is drowned out by the literally painful sound mixing, which was so unnecessarily loud during the film’s few intimate sequences that it began to feel like a direct attempt to chase me out of the cinema. Washington pours his heart and soul into the Protagonist, but between his frequent inaudibility and a visibly limiting script, he is left with little to do other than perplexed panting. His role within the film is exclusively to be confused by the plot, and his arc is complete once he solves its premise. The Protagonist is not a human being, rather a mechanism through which Nolan can peel away layers of his meaningless puzzle box. Where Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Inception and Coop (Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar (2014) are anchored in relationships with their respective wife and daughter, Nolan only makes the faintest effort to attach an emotional chord to Washington’s Protagonist in the shape of the aforementioned Cat, Nolan’s apparent love letter to motherhood who instead comes across as an unsettlingly literal mash-up of The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin, 1972) and Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004) without either source’s sense of satire. 

 

With Tenet fitting comfortably into Nolan’s career as a case study exemplifying in dramatic fashion the worst facets of his directorial vision, it is an unfortunate inevitability that the film would also rank as his most misogynistic to date. Over the course of the film, Kat is threatened, bullied, gaslit and horrifically beaten by the men in her orbit, both heroes and villains. These constant acts of violence are not only mean-spirited and repetitive, but they are also, disgracefully, the censored version of Nolan’s original ideas for Kat’s treatment, which reportedly included nine additional seconds of a man kicking her in the stomach, all for the sake of protecting her son. Even Kat’s climactic moment of empowerment is a bizarre, tangled boast about the power of mothers to overcome abuse, which then results in her making a grave error which her male allies are required to fix. It is as insubstantial as it is offensive, and single-handedly makes a stronger case for Nolan’s budgets being taken away from him and allocated to more sensitive and, frankly, emotionally intelligent filmmakers than any number of strongly-worded essays ever could.

 

No one knew what to expect from Tenet, to the extent that the suspenseful meta-narrative of the film’s contents were reworked into a marketing campaign in similar fashion to Avengers: Endgame (Joe and Anthony Russo, 2019). In the case of that indie gem, the campaign worked brilliantly because the payoff was rooted in surprises tethered to the instantly iconic voices of its characters. For Tenet, the surprises are so detached from any passion or purpose that they instead land as futile exercises in excess, leaving its audience with nothing to cling to apart from Nolan’s sadistically thorough efforts to present domestic violence on an IMAX screen. I have not left a film this concerned about the apathetic values which popular cinema is rapidly embracing in quite some time. This is the antithesis of what filmmakers could and should be doing with the platform of mainstream blockbusters, and I can only hope that its failure will someday be remembered as a turning point for the industry into an era of films that can reflect on more than their own perceived genius.

 

Tenet is released in Irish cinemas on August 26. 

 

Image: ELIZABETH DEBICKI and KENNETH BRANAGH in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action epic “TENET,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

Copyright: © 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Photo Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon.