Tenet (2020)

Of course I had to look up reviewers and websites I read regularly when I am confused before I could even think of trying to make sense of Christopher Nolan's giant headfuck valentine to action movies, one of the larger cultural artifacts lost in the pandemic, although likely that is temporary. A 70-mm version made the rounds last summer, but I suspect we still have to wait until after next year before it might be safe enough to see movies with crowds again so it will likely be back. I went ahead and looked at it on TV. I thought of James Bond while watching it and so did Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending, Steven Rubio at Steven Rubio's Online Life, and Brian Tellerico at RogerEbert.com. Start with that. I'm not a big fan of Bond movies but it's fair to say with Tenet that "ultimately its pleasures are the pleasures of the chase followed by the fistfight, interspersed with scenes of craftily sneaking into secure locations." That's Brayton, who by the way argues even the high concept of the movie is lucid. Everyone seems to agree on the rousing action scenes, as abstracted as they are minus lucid narrative context, but the view that this movie makes sense is more a minority one—I was lost most of the time, and Rubio and Tallerico seemed nearly as befuddled as me, not to mention hordes of commenters on the internet. The concept of Tenet (please note how it reads the same backward and forward) rests on a technology that can reverse entropy (I know: yeah, right), enabling access to a timestream that moves from future to past, instead of only past to future as we all normally experience it. What that means for the movie in practical terms is that in the big action sequences with helicopters some things are moving forward and some are moving backward (most obviously, lots of un-explosions). Nailing down the conflict in this story is a problem I'm not sure Tenet ever solves. We're told we are under attack from the future, with some chatter about the time-travel grandfather paradox, but I didn't catch much explanation beyond that so I will have to leave it at that. I'm not ready yet to resort to YouTube. Between Nolan's big budget and the amazing fat soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson there's plenty to gape at and it is often somehow even thrilling. But the ongoing lack of narrative clarity combined with the long running time was wearying. Will it make more sense another time? Maybe when the pandemic is over I can go see it in full theatrical glory and then adjourn for coffee and pie and a long conversation. I resent movies that require multiple viewings as basically incompetent on their face, but there's also a few I've grown ever more fond of after second and third and more viewings (In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr., and Yi Yi, for example). Jury's still out on this one, and not just for me. I already know it expects us to work hard.