In my review of Dunkirk, I praised Christopher Nolan's commitment to getting original ideas on movie screens. I probably should also have mentioned his commitment to keeping movie theaters open, because if there's one movie that should be seen in engulf-o-vision, it's definitely Tenet. Not just because it's a defining example of Nolan's idiosyncratic crafting of visuals and sound to create an awe-inspiring spectacle, but you can't pause or turn on subtitles - and thus have no time to stop and actually wonder what the hell it is you're watching.
I could argue, like many have, that this is Nolan's take on a Bond film, but he's so determined to complicate it with heady concepts and off-kilter action scenes - trying to turn substance into spectacle - that any logical throughlines are quickly obliterated. The plot ultimately does make sense on its own terms, but the telling of it never engaged me the way his best films have while also feeling like puzzles to be solved. It's more exciting than Dunkirk, but somehow even more impersonal, because this time Nolan can't hand wave away his weaknesses with characterization. Not giving John David Washington's protagonist a name seems like an in-joke until you understand it's indicative of how little anyone was interested in him as a human.
Once again the actors are the ones bringing these archetypes to life, yet Nolan continually undercuts them with mountains of exposition needed to make sense of anything, to the point that few if any impressions are made. Elizabeth Debicki gives her rather thankless role everything she has, but the clear MVP is Robert Pattinson, infusing his sidekick with a dash of wry humor the film desperately needed to offset its crash-course intellectualism.
To be clear: there are few directors working today with the level of inventiveness and sheer craftsmanship that Nolan has, which can never not be a good thing. But it has come at an increasing cost of anything recognizably human, and when I said that was a compromise I'd accept up to a point, I hadn't yet realized Tenet comes dangerously close to going past that.
I could argue, like many have, that this is Nolan's take on a Bond film, but he's so determined to complicate it with heady concepts and off-kilter action scenes - trying to turn substance into spectacle - that any logical throughlines are quickly obliterated. The plot ultimately does make sense on its own terms, but the telling of it never engaged me the way his best films have while also feeling like puzzles to be solved. It's more exciting than Dunkirk, but somehow even more impersonal, because this time Nolan can't hand wave away his weaknesses with characterization. Not giving John David Washington's protagonist a name seems like an in-joke until you understand it's indicative of how little anyone was interested in him as a human.
Once again the actors are the ones bringing these archetypes to life, yet Nolan continually undercuts them with mountains of exposition needed to make sense of anything, to the point that few if any impressions are made. Elizabeth Debicki gives her rather thankless role everything she has, but the clear MVP is Robert Pattinson, infusing his sidekick with a dash of wry humor the film desperately needed to offset its crash-course intellectualism.
To be clear: there are few directors working today with the level of inventiveness and sheer craftsmanship that Nolan has, which can never not be a good thing. But it has come at an increasing cost of anything recognizably human, and when I said that was a compromise I'd accept up to a point, I hadn't yet realized Tenet comes dangerously close to going past that.