"Tenet" is So Christopher Nolan

Minor spoilers ahead

"Tenet" is not the best Christopher Nolan movie, but it is the most Christopher Nolan movie.  It's a puzzle-box science fiction film that takes its aesthetics straight from James Bond, that looks gorgeous, but is pretty incoherent.  The plot really isn't important for most of the film, though.  You'll recognize the usual character types - the stoic man-of-action hero, the charming wing man, the woman in trouble, and, of course, Michael Caine.  The protagonist doesn't even have a name, though he's played by John David Washington, which is a nice change from form.  

Despite all the complaints about the film's dialogue being impossible to follow, and those who like to take apart plotting minutiae will be endlessly frustrated, I found "Tenet" pretty digestible on a surface level.  The audio may be lacking, but the basic film language is perfectly clear.  Nolan goes so far as to color code the action in some scenes to better help us follow what's going on.  Washington plays a CIA agent who is recruited into a secret organization  called Tenet.  They're trying to combat forces from the distant future who have figured out a way to reverse the flow of time for objects, and even people, causing chaos around the world.  An arms dealer named Sator (Kenneth Branagh) is our main villain, and Washington recruits a friendly mercenary named Neil (Robert Pattinson), and Sator's unhappy wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) to help him counter Sator's nefarious plans.

"Tenet," for all its tricky experimenting with time, is an action film first and foremost, and offers plenty of visceral thrills that showcase plenty of fancy visual trickery.  Most of the film's most arresting images are built around one of the oldest, yet most effective tricks in cinema - rewinding the action.  Bullets unfire themselves.  Exploded buildings reassemble.  Soldiers march grimly backwards through clouds of dust and debris, all flowing in reverse.  Don't try to overthink the mechanics, the film explicitly warns, or you'll get a headache.  But you have to marvel at the sheer scope of some of these action sequences, taking the familiar building blocks of your standard car chases and gun battles, and doing something startlingly different with them.  

So it's a shame that the story built around these sequences comes off as such perfunctory stuff.  The biggest trouble really is that Nolan doesn't take the time to properly set up the story around those big action sequences - what the stakes are, or even what the goal is half the time.  We just get a torrent of mumbled exposition, and suddenly we're in the middle of another gorgeous bullet ballet.  I mean, viewers should be fine if they treat "Tenet" as a Bond movie, and just follow Neil and the Protagonist through the action.  Their mucking around with the timeline is pretty straightforward for this kind of narrative, and I doubt most people will get very lost.  Attempts to keep track of anyone's motives, strategy, and allegiances, however, are probably futile.  

"Tenet" is probably the closest to "Inception" of the other Nolan films, full of thinly drawn characters, big action sequences, and tons of style.  However, "Tenet" feels much more haphazardly put together, with a lot of characters who are around for a scene or two to provide information or pitch in for a big operation, and then disappear again.  Clemence Poesy, Himesh Patel, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson all make appearances as various Tenet operatives that fall into this category.  Most of the actors, especially Branagh and Pattinson, are good enough to make the best of playing broad types, but occasionally the dialogue gets so ridiculous, you have to marvel that any of it works as well as it does.

I expect "Tenet" will be best enjoyed by the usual Nolan fans, who will appreciate the twisty narrative, and the nerdy things like the incorporation of the Sator square.  The casual viewer will likely be impressed by the beautiful effects sequences, but not especially engaged.  The film is much too cold, imposing, and unfriendly to be a crowd pleaser.  Frankly, Christopher Nolan can't be making mistakes like the flub with the bad sound mix, not at this level and at this budget.  It makes it seem like he doesn't know what he's doing, which breaks our suspension of disbelief.  And that's a cardinal sin when it comes to the movies.

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