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Writer's pictureJason Michael Morgan

Review • TENET



TENET, Christopher Nolan's sophisticated time epic, was one of the most insane cinematic rides I've been on in a long time.


Here are my thoughts.


Heavy spoilers ahead.


My wife and I saw an early screening of it in IMAX this summer - one of the most fun reprieves we've had during this very sullen and monotonous time we're in - and I feel like it took a good four days for me to really wrap my head around it. On the way home, I rambled about it for three hours. I think that there are still layers that will be too deep for mortal comprehension and only the wrist watch on Nolan's arm will ever know the great secrets. But nonetheless, I find it interesting that this film has split audiences despite its achievement.


So, the sound mixing wasn't good. There. I'll admit it. Now that's out of the way....


When I think about movies, and the way I watch and enjoy them, I feel like I have a warped perception - much like a trained illusionist at a magic show always trying to figure out the trick or holding an aloof smirk at already knowing how it was done. I've spent so much of my life learning about cinema and doing it and thinking about it, that watching a movie is an almost clinical experience. Much to the chagrin of my viewing partners, I'm constantly enamored by the how of the film and never much by the what of the film.


This being said, one of the biggest comments I hear about TENET goes something like, "Yeah it's cool, but it was really loud and I didn't get the story. Feels like he's sacrificing character for spectacle." But at the same time, I feel like that's the point. Whether it's a good point or not, that's the point. I think Nolan even tried to cleverly let us in on the joke by so blatantly warping and obscuring tradition narrative convention. He had important plot points and dialogue take place against the backdrop of a deafening train yard or a high speed boat race. He even went as far as to name the leading man "The Protagonist" - a nameless archetype, a vehicle for us to experience the story through, further detaching us from preconceived notions of story. All of this, in my opinion, was an attempt to communicate exactly what Clémence Poésy's character Laura says to Johnathan David Washington.


Don't try to understand it. Feel it.


The actual spectacle, if you let it, will rip you off of your seat and jerk you around like roller coaster. You hardly get a minute to breath. It is so visually striking both in its mise en scène, its color palette, and its shots that it's impossible not to become engulfed by its cold, assaulting beauty. Much of this is due to Director of Photography Hoyte van Hoytema and his amazingly human way of capturing gargantuan sequences. Part of it is also, I believe, due to shooting much of the film on large format IMAX film. Things like this add to the spectacle - a Nolanism which dominates the film.


For me, though, spectacle is never enough. Spectacle is hardly anything. Although many people claim that it isn't enough because it overshadows story, I primarily say it isn't enough because these days spectacle doesn't have to be real.


Nolan, however, insists that it's real. He claimed his goal for TENET was to be an inherently emotional experience. Not necessarily that you become emotionally attached to the character's or the plot, but more so that it evoked a visceral, primal, emotional reaction out of you. And that it did. But all the while, I was still like that trained magician watching, trying to analyze and decipher every illusion.


I'm often asked, "What's your favorite movie?"


Impossible to answer.


Instead of that futile inquiry, I often think about films in two lists.

  1. Greatest Films [These are films of notable cinematic achievement. Films that taught me the most. Films that stand out as ~the best~ whatever that means. Movies like The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Seven Samurai]

  2. Favorite Films [Films that I love watching - for better or for worse. If one of these movies came on in a DMV waiting room I would, without hesitation, watch it from beginning to end. Movies like La La Land, Twilight, or Star Wars: Episode III ]

Looking on the filmography of Nolan, I would say a movie like Inception goes on the favorite films list, but TENET would find its way onto Greatest Films.


Inception is a film of story and character. A singular driving force takes Cobb through the insane world of dream hacking. The sheer wonder and intensity combined with a masterful ensemble and genuine passion give that film a certain heartbeat that I enjoy so thoroughly.


But TENET, for all its disorienting plot and sound design, is a masterwork. The sheer cinematic achievement and unthinkable filmmaking takes this film into another level of film making as a technical art form that I don't believe we've ever reached before. It's the work of a seasoned craftsman who has designed and engineered a puzzle, not a film, to show us how we can push the limits of film as a medium for playing with time. It's more akin to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon - a film that showcased masterful filmmaking through slow, deliberate, painstaking detail at the expense of a tight story - than to a modern blockbuster.


Now, as we all know, Nolan is not a stranger to the notion of using film as a means of manipulating time. He has dedicated much of his career to making films which take one particular concept and expound upon it in as much depth as possible. Time, awareness, consciousness, experience. These are all elements that he has touched on and developed, but which culminate into the heart of TENET - time inversion.


When my good friend Kadin Tooley asked me what I thought after I first saw it, one of my initial texts said that this film contained the most impressive set-ups and pay-offs I've ever seen in a film. The experience of film as a linear timeline is elevated the most in TENET when it is warped and broken. From the first bits of Neil and the Protagonist encountering inversion together, I knew that something was more than what it seemed. When the "Antagonists" came through the inversion wheel at the Freeport in Oslo, I would never have guessed what was going to occur on the other side of the film when The Protagonist, dressed in swat-style body armor, was blown underneath that bay door by the inverted plane - my goodness what sentence - and then I saw the Protagonist fight himself both forwards and backwards. Then it all began to come together when his mask was ripped off and Neil gave him the same look he gave him before. My thoughts went about like this -

  1. That's mind-boggling.

  2. Woah. John David Washington had to literally learn that fight forwards and backwards.

  3. That poor editor [More on this later.]

  4. Neil knew too much

Neil knowing too much makes the whole thing work - it gave Nolan an excuse to make things much more vague, aiding in the emotional experience and giving the plot more agency to double down on its layering and planting. I think that was the moment where much of the plot began to come together for me, and I started to try to understand the story more as a self-contained sequence than a master plot for the end of the world, even though inversion is pretty much described as a master plot for the end of the world. And it all came down to the scene in the colored room.


When the car chase began [what I suppose we could describe as the midpoint of the film] I was prepping myself the entire time. Oh, boy what crazy thing is gonna' happen next? Then came another of my favorite set-ups - the car crashing in reverse. Aside from that being an incredibly impressive shot, it lets you know that there's something coming and it's going back in time. The proceeding is a wonderful exchange wherein The Protagonist through Sator that box while each vehicle is traveling opposite directions in time. But the soup gets thicker when it's revealed that the box was empty and the special piece to Sator's puzzle was somewhere else. Where was it?


Nolan's glad you asked.


The following sequence is perhaps the most wonderful and painful and baffling and downright impressive things I've ever seen set to film. We see The Protagonist held captive in a room as Sator drags in Kat, threatening and injuring her while interrogating The Protagonist, both forwards and backwards. I still cannot wrap my head around the editing process, because as we see the Protagonist and hear him, we also hear Sator's inverted words match up with his inverted actions as we hear the Protagonist's inverted responses.


Then, we do it all again from the other side. A feat which absolutely could not have been achieved without expert editor Jennifer Lame who was hot off of post on Hereditary and Marriage Story when Nolan asked her to do what he described would be the hardest edit ever done in the history of motion picture.


I believe him.


It's as enthralling as it is exhausting.


In the midst of this scene, we get a few lines concerning the long-forgotten fact which was that the piece of the doomsday machine that should've been in the box was passed off by the Protagonist to none other than himself. It was at this point I had to begin icing my temples with my cherry slushy to prevent a stroke.


During these moments, I think I understood what Nolan was wanting. As the Protagonist explained what he saw and what he did during the car chase, I knew what was coming. He was going to invert himself, get into that car chase, and crash the car. I knew this because Nolan had already shown it to us moments ago. It wasn't given too much attention. It was never hinted at. But once I knew that this was the path we were going on, I was set. I was literally anxiety-ridden just thinking about how this was going to happen and how they were going to pull it off. That was my emotional experience, the moments where I didn't care about anything except this strange, convoluted concept and how on earth we were going to experience it.


As he gains his footing and watches the seagulls fly by backwards, the Protagonist's foot steps forward out of the water. Sounds like a Paul Janeczko poem. He makes his way to the car, and then, we all know what's coming. We follow him moment-by-intense-moment until we finally loop around to where we were minutes ago until, finally, triumph. He catches the device from himself, only because he knew to go back and receive it because he gave it to himself before. This same type of set-up is what makes the circumstances of Neil's death at the end make any semblance of sense. That, and because from that point on I was just trying to trust the sauce and hold on to my popcorn.


What sells all of this is realness. That is the simplest answer. When I saw the trailers and press footage for TENET and the plane was blowing up, they made sure to caveat the fact that this was a real plane! Not only as a selling point or a big ole' "Look what we can do with our money," but also as a seal of approval from Nolan that he is only in the business of making pictures in the most authentic and true-to-life way as possible, even and especially when the film is so otherworldly. TENET used no green screen and, check me if I'm wrong, only had a minuscule 280 shots which utilized CGI.


People fighting in reverse - real. Explosions - real. Bungie jumping up and building - real.


Much of the insanity of the inversion in TENET was done using some of the oldest editing tricks in the book.


Want something to happen backwards? Alright, run the film in reverse. Simple.

Principles like this go right in line to his dedication to shooting his movies on film as opposed to digital. They are necessary, but they are his principles - his filmmaking tenets, if you will.


The notion of spectacle, concept, and film making integrity, I believe, are at the core of what makes a Nolan film. This film is not a story, but an exploration of a concept and using film to push it to its limit. These are the reason why TENET is a great film - perhaps one of ~the~ great films. Not because it's got a crazy concept. Not because Kenneth Branagh absolutely steals the show in every scene he's in. Not because it looks so cool.


The last thing I want to emphasize is that notion of concept. Nolan seems to be a wizard at developing and presenting complicated concepts, and at this point, I believe he's obsessed with. I've seen some people point out a very peculiar historical relic which embodies the entirety of TENET both in its concept and its plot .


It's this simple Roman puzzle known as the Sator Square.

These five words - Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, and Rotas - appear as a palindrome which can be read forwards, backwards, up, and down. Sator - the antagonist; Arepo - the forger; Tenet - the title, organization, and theme; Opera - the opening sequence's setting; Rotas - Sator's security, and Latin for wheel, like the ones used in for inversion. The earliest of these inscriptions were found carved in the ruins of Pompeii - a city mentioned often in the film. And the entire notion of these words forming a palindrome - words read both forwards and backwards - infers the very nature of time warping in TENET.


By Christopher Nolan's own account, he had worked on the screenplay for TENET for many years. I don't find it unthinkable that he would've stumbled upon this historical finding and been inspired, using this as the germ of an idea that would develop into a monstrous time epic that is as visually-stunning as it is bewildering. It's genius.


The irony isn't lost on me.


Nothing that has happened in recent times could have been foreseen, but this - an impossibly complex film about stopping impending doom based on a millennia-old religious relic - seems a bit too close to home to be real. The helplessness and wonder held by the Protagonist and his constituents feels relatable as I try to wrap my head around a thoroughly disorienting concept that pushes this film at light speed both forwards and in reverse. It's a fitting analogy for how we are often living day to day - everything is moving so fast in every direction and there's little you can do about it. Often you even get stuck just waiting to get to a time where you can move forward again.


I found a melancholic peace in the calling card used by the Protagonist and his partners.


We live in a twilight world and there are no friends at dusk.

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