I had been eagerly awaiting Christopher Nolan’s new mind-bending, time-twisting movie Tenet after his last 2 films that explored dreams within dreams (Inception) and time loops (Interstellar). Hearing that Tenet was about a nefarious group that had weaponized Time made it more intriguing. After the lockdown made it almost impossible to see in theaters, I was glad to see it show up for rental at Redbox. Sadly, it was a huge disappointment. The early reviews were about how confusing it was; all of the time bending material I had no problem with. My issue was that it had no soul; it’s a cold technocratic extravaganza with no characters I cared about. I purchased it for 2 nights, fully expecting to watch it twice to get the finer aspects of the story, as was needed with Inception and Interstellar. I could barely make it through one viewing. The film alternated between a painfully loud sound mix that had me reaching for the remote and muddled dialogue that required subtitles. Maybe it made as much sense as it did because I watched it with Closed Captioning on, as if it were a foreign film. There are some fantastic ideas in Tenet hidden behind all the explosions, but it took visiting multiple websites to make sense of the convoluted details of the plot.
If you want mindless entertainment - car crashes and buildings exploding both forward and backwards! - then it’s still an over-long popcorn movie. But the concepts regarding time would be annoyingly confusing to that audience.
Director Christopher Nolan has been in the news lately railing against one of the major film studios releasing their slate of films online only in 2021, and I’d previously supported his position. But this film shows an artist addicted to mega-budgets, and the explosions and multi vehicle car crashes that money allows at the expense of the human stories that made his previous films worth watching multiple times. (The Prestige is still my favorite Nolan film that holds up to repeated viewings; it has a solid through-line of a story that’s worth the effort & David Bowie as Tesla!) I’d love to see him make a small movie that takes a deeper dive into his next-level concepts of time and alternate realities. My favorite time loop movie is still Primer, made for less than one day of filming on this film. Maybe if there is one benefit from 2020’s cultural and technological shifts away from big screen blockbusters, the budgetary constraints caused by the shift to online viewing might bring a return to creativity that seems lost in Tenet.
But there is hope: my local Redbox also delivered another time travel film: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure!