The Dumpster Fire that is Tenet

This is hands down the worst Christopher Nolan film I have seen. To be honest this is the worst film I’ve seen this year. Hell this is the worst film I’ve seen since the sacrilege soaked Assassin 33 AD (with the possible exception of Soul but that’s for another post). Let me first get the good pieces out of the way so you know I’m not completely jaded. It looks good...that’s it.

Now it’s time for the bad. First, the main idea in which the narrative revolves is redundant. The viewer sees the main narrative unfold and then is forced to turn around and trek right back to the start in a cruel palindrome sort of way. Now I see why one might think this is neat, you get to see some of the same events unfold from a different perspective. Unfortunately the film is so poorly paced that any extra fun little piece of information you get is drowned out by some stupidly stretched out fight scene. There in particular is one fight scene where the protagonists fights himself in reverse (you don’t know it’s him until about halfway in). Now the extra information that he’s fighting himself is cool, you think “oh wow its him”. That fun quickly wears off as you see the same fight, in full, just from a slightly different angle with the music running backwards instead of forwards. You get tired of it.

The biggest problem with this palindrome narrative is how it destroys the challenges posed to the characters. The viewer and our protagonist are quickly hit with the fact that the world is in danger. Quite literally the biggest stakes a film can pose, complete destruction of our reality as we see it. As the film progresses, you hit the point where stuff goes back and you realize, we will end up at the beginning. Was the world fine in the beginning? Of course it was. So once you get a basic grasp of what’s happening, nothing matters. You immediately stop caring about what happens because you know they’ll be fine. There’s a point right at the end of the film where they say, “no one cares about the bomb that didn't go off”. Are you fucking kidding me, the nerve to put a viewer through 2.5 hours only for everything to tell me how most people don't care. You're damn right I don't care about a bomb that didn't go off, maybe it should have and brought some real consequences to these subjects. That's in the same BS vein as making everything a dream.

So we have an inherently bad narrative form mixed with stupid high stakes that don’t matter, but the gimmick doesn’t stop bringing everything down. Throughout the film the viewer is thrown between folks who are going forward and in reverse. The concept is already unnecessary but it also forces the viewer to think harder for no reason. There’s a moment which looks like a bland military exercise. Guys are running around, shooting, watching bullets and explosions go forward and back. The reverse action isn’t natural, whenever something weird happens like a dude getting lifted by a reverse falling rock, you have to take a minute to process. The action is happening so fast however that you’re left thinking while other stuff you should pay attention to is happening.

On top of all these problems one would like to take solace in the cast and their performances. Again however the viewer is left disappointed. I hated the protagonists performance and his lack of emotion but I’ll set that aside and chock it up to his character. But everyone else is as much a snooze, felt like they were all going through the motions. The only shining moment was the conflict between Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh’s characters where the emotion felt close to real. Unfortunately, like with everything else in this film, we’re forced to sit through it over and over again. By the time the full picture is in focus, no one cares.

In the end this film, in my eyes, is a travesty. It was overly complicated and focused on all the wrong things while exposing itself as nothing more than a masturbatory project. Some folks may say, “Oh you need to watch it multiple times to really get it. Multiple viewings really help solidify and bring out all the cool subtleties and nuances”. That’s all fine and good but a film has to at least entice me to want to watch it again. To force myself to sit through that again only to gain a little appreciation for the use of color coding or reversing the bland soundtrack is ridiculous. Now I don’t want to blame Nolan entirely for this train wreck, most of my anger is really directed towards the folks who didn’t stand up and say, “this film doesn’t work”. What puts much of my anger on Nolan is how he fought so hard to get this picture shown in theaters. During a pandemic this cinema purist had the audacity to push patrons into theaters to watch his garbage. I don’t like folks watching films on small screens but damn how out of touch with the world that you can’t give a pass to folks watching this on full sized televisions in the safety of their own homes.

One final little note which is a gripe I’ve had with Nolan since Interstellar and has come to an absolute boiling point with me is the aspect ratio switching. For being such a purist Nolan sure does loving ripping a viewer out of the story world with ghastly ratio changes.