‘Tenet’ five years later: Christopher Nolan’s worst movie or a misunderstood masterpiece?
Before digging into this retrospective look at Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in all its backwards glory, it’s worth starting with a disclaimer.
So, here it is: I’m a bit of a Nolan superfan. I know, how ‘basic film bro’ of me. However, I can only be who I am, and I can track Nolan’s filmography alongside my development as a cinephile pretty closely. I remember having my fragile teenage mind rearranged by Memento when I saw it on DVD at 15 years old, and I was 19 when Batman Begins hit me like a freight train. I even loved Insomnia (arguably Nolan’s most underrated film) so much that, when he was announced as the man entrusted with rebooting the Caped Crusader, I was one of the three people in the world who said, “Hey, that’s the Insomnia guy!”
What I’m trying to say is that, yes, I’m one of the millions of Nolan-heads out there in internet-land. From his 12 feature films released so far, I can honestly say there’s only one that I actively dislike: Interstellar. I’ve tried to watch that gruelling test of a human being’s patience twice and never managed to finish, what with it being stupefyingly boring for large swathes of the runtime. I can’t even make a joke about how lame it is that the movie portrays love as a force that shapes destiny across the cosmos, because I didn’t even get that far.
Hopefully, such a proclamation reveals that, even though I’m a card-carrying fan, I’m not blind to Nolan’s flaws. His handling of female characters is highly suspect, and he does love to bury complicated dialogue under a cacophony of score and chaos. His movies can also be too serious for their own good at times, and I reckon that’s Tenet’s main flaw, mostly because its po-faced nature constantly bumps against the objectively silly premise of secret agents wearing gas masks to go backwards in time, all while everything else is moving forward. That’s hard to take completely seriously, even for someone who doesn’t like to admit when Nolan gets it wrong.
However, five years after Tenet was released and failed to be the movie that single-handedly saved cinema, I’m not ready to call it Nolan’s worst movie. I find more to enjoy in it than I do in Interstellar, and it’s probably on par with Following, Nolan’s micro-budget noir debut.
Tenet has some barnstorming action sequences, Robert Pattinson’s performance is a delight, and the visuals are often mind-boggling. There is something undeniably cool about watching a backwards fight, for example, and Nolan smashes a real passenger jet into a building at one point. That’s awesome. Then there’s the car chase in which some vehicles are driving forward, while the chasing vehicle is going the opposite direction, complete with backwards characters inside, some of whom are the same people as the characters in other cars going forward. Look, I didn’t say Tenet made a lick of sense; I just said it has some cool stuff in it.
If anything, Nolan’s claim that Tenet isn’t a movie to be understood, but a movie to be experienced, is both its biggest selling point and its most glaring flaw. It really is an experience, and your head will be left swimming from it. But its labyrinthine plot really doesn’t hang together well at all, and the final action sequence is utterly baffling, even if you think you have a handle on what is happening right before it starts. The central performance from John David Washington is also lacking, as Nolan seems to have given the poor sod a charisma bypass. Seriously, watch the man in HBO’s Ballers or BlackKklansman, and you’ll wonder why that guy didn’t show up for Tenet.
So, all things considered, can I honestly say Tenet is Nolan’s worst movie? No, but it’s not far off. Still, I’d be more likely to watch Tenet again on a lazy Sunday afternoon than I would Interstellar or Following, and that keeps it from scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s not a misunderstood masterpiece, either, though. It has too many flaws that drag down some of the sheer spectacle Nolan is able to pull off, and it’s hard not to feel like he was never fully able to wrap his arms around his own wacky concept. Then he tried to style it out by saying, “Uh, it’s not supposed to be understood. You just have to feel it.” Pull the other one, Chris!
