Review : Tenet

I should probably start by saying that I find Christopher Nolan extremely hit-and-miss as a director. I liked The Prestige, I loved Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception, but The Dark Knight Rises* was a broken masterpiece, Interstellar was a pile of well-rendered crap and Dunkirk was ultimately pointless.

* Sod off Robin, I want more Anne Hathaway in a leather catsuit.

Unfortunately I have to say that Tenet is in the latter category. In some ways it reminds me quite a lot of Ad Astra, which is going to sound bizarre so let me explain. Minor spoilers ahead.

First, the audio. The only Nolan film where I previously thought the audio was off was Interstellar, but then only occasionally and not for anything crucial. Contrary to other web denizens, I had exactly zero problems understanding Bane's voice in The Dark Knight Rises. It was hugely charismatic and basically perfect in every way. Here it is again, in case you've forgotten :

But for Tenet I have to agree with the Guardian :

There is a wonderful exchange in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, between Robert Pattinson and John David Washington. “Hngmmhmmh,” says Pattinson. “Mmghh nmmhhmmmm nghhh,” replies Washington. Marvellous.

It’s hard to imagine that Nolan is unaware of the criticism. Price suspects the director wants to make the audience work harder to understand the dialogue; he thinks Nolan believes this will make the film a more immersive, engaging experience. But, Price says, “I think he is the only one in the world who believes that.”

The audio bothered me from the word go. With the opening scenes set in Ukraine, I thought I was just listening to Ukrainian (being in a Czech cinema, all the subtitles were in Czech). It took some considerable time before I could be certain they'd switched to English. Pretty soon I began wondering if they'd done any audio tests at all, because this kept going throughout the entire movie and never let up. I imagined myself sat in a sound test trying to write down what the actors were saying and pausing it every few seconds to say, "nope, sorry, didn't get a word of that. Let's try that bit again, Chris."

Probably I missed a good 20% of the dialogue. I got the gist of what was going on, but missed so many details that a lot of scenes simply didn't make any sense. And the rest of the time it was such a struggle to hear what was being said that I found it annoying and boring, not engaging.

It's not just the dialogue either : I'm gonna go full grumpy old man here, but dammit, the whole audio felt too loud. Sometimes I even suspected it would be easier to hear what was being said if they just turned it down a notch. At other times I felt that the constant hail of gunshots and explosions was just irritating, not exciting. I don't know if I'd quite say the audio was distorted, but it was close.

But it's the dialogue in the film which is more important. Since the plot is innately confusing, the audience needs information. Nolan did this masterfully in Inception, delivering a plot which could have been confusing as heck in such a way that it made perfect sense. Here he did the opposite. The plot is cleverly palindromic, but delivered in such a way as to be far more confusing than necessary. So not knowing why characters are doing certain things - or even what they're trying to do - isn't so much cutting down to the bone as it is into the bone so deeply that the film's leg falls off. It's a bit like having a film about the Spanish Armada but being no clue as to where the ships are going or what they're going to do when they get there.

And the movie does this in other ways too. It's got a plot, but nothing you could call a story. It's a sequence of set pieces with even less than the bare minimum of required linking explanatory scenes to hold them together. Now, that in itself isn't too bad; kudos for trying something different. But without crystal clear dialogue, trying to figure the damn thing out is tedious and annoying.

Here's where the comparison to Ad Astra comes in. The first half of the movie I did actually enjoy quite a lot. The action sequences are quite fun - the bit with the plane is something I've never seen before - and the plot and tone of the movie are at least self-consistent. Did I understand everything ? No, but I didn't feel I needed to. The on-screen experience stood for itself.

After that things got steadily worse, until by the end of the movie I just wanted the thing to be over.

The basic plot is that some people are trying to stop some other people in the future from destroying the world by reversing time. Midway through, our chief protagonists are "inverted", meaning they move backwards through time so we see quite a lot of the previous sequences in reverse. This is clever and well done. In the first half there's a distinct mystery element, and though it's hugely derivative (the temporal cold war is lifted straight out of Star Trek Enterprise; meeting people in reverse is the same Doctor Who / River Song plot; everything going backwards is taken straight from a Red Dwarf episode) it's also well done. It's a straightforward serious action sci-fi flick, no doubt about it.

After that, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. The world-destroying plotline is clearly epic, but it's delivered in an impressively humdrum way that gets ever-more cliched as the movie goes on. The "here it is in reverse" trick is played too often, the characters are so generic as to be utterly unengaging, the villain's reasoning for destroying the world far too obvious and boring. The rest of the characters are similarly dull at best - their motivations and emotions either unclear or cliched and two-dimensional. There's no tension, no sense of threat, no reason to care very much about anything that happens. 

Even the action sequences are, uniquely for a Nolan film, dull. Okay, Chris, you've done them full scale, but they're just not that impressive. The big car chase sequence doesn't hold a candle to the one in The Matrix Reloaded and the final end battle looks like it was taken from Call of Duty. It's nothing we haven't seen a million times before, with a hugely overused but underexploited time-travel gimmick thrown in for no reason. You could literally take the time travel out of the movie and tell the same basic story without any loss. In short, the movie misses its own point and doesn't quite know what sort of tale it wants to be.

They say it's one to see on the big screen, but I disagree. There's nothing spectacular enough here to benefit much from being on a big screen; the action sequences are too understated and underdeveloped. It's like the movie can't quite get over its own perceived novelty and is convinced audiences will be equally enthralled by its clever but useless gimmick.

In fact I thought quite often that this would be a better suited to a good ten-episode TV series. It needed a lot more time to develop the characters and their motivation, and just to explain just what the hell was happening. As it stands, it's a series of "this happened and then this happened and then there was an explosion and a really slow car chase and then this dude got an army from somewhere and someone died." The premise is clever, the execution was not. So tiring was it trying to follow what was going on that I completely zoned out during several key scenes (at the start, didn't even realise the whole audience had been gassed, and I don't even remember the final scene at all).

Overall then, I'm not impressed. I'd give the first half of the movie a solid 7/10, but falling to maybe 2/10 by the end, and 4/10 for the whole thing. I might change my mind if I watch it again on the small screen with subtitles, but we'll see.