Tenet: A fan's review

Christopher Nolan is a director whose work I have loved and admired since I first saw Inception. So when I heard that he’s working on a film with a similar premise, my excitement knew no bounds. Once again, Tenet deals with time, one of Nolan’s most significant muses, and introduces the concept in a spy thriller setting. John David Washington plays an ex-CIA operative who joins a covert organization called Tenet, which seeks to prevent World War III. He learns about a technology called time inversion, through which events occur in a manner that is opposite to nature. Tenet is up against Andrei Sator, a Russian arms dealer who manufactures time-inverted weapons. The rest of the film is about how Tenet counters Sator.

The movie’s plot is very convoluted to be conveyed in layman’s terms, something familiar in the more recent Nolan films. If you’ve seen some of his previous work, like Inception and Interstellar, he weaves an engaging screenplay by keeping an emotional core at the heart of a high-concept film. Tenet lacks emotion, making it difficult for the viewer to be engaged with the movie throughout the runtime. The screenplay spends more time in action sequences and explaining scientific paradoxes rather than fleshing out characters. “Ignorance is our ammunition” is often mentioned in the film, and Nolan goes meta with this idea.

Tenet isn’t a bad film by any means, being very strong in technical departments. It has some breathtaking visuals by Hoyte Van Hoytema, who marks his first collaboration with Nolan. The scenes involving inversion are stunning, with the interlocking of linear and reverse timelines. The ensemble cast’s performance is impressive, with Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki being the standouts. Kenneth Branagh plays a stereotypical Bond villain let down by a weird Russian accent. It is refreshing to see Dimple Kapadia play a vital role in the film, and her character is instrumental in pulling strings. The background score by Ludwig Goransson, seemingly on a home run after Black Panther and the more recent The Mandalorian, is excellent. The tracks “Rainy Night in Tallinn” and “The Plan,” featuring Travis Scott, are pure earworms. All the aspects work reasonably well except for sound editing. I found it particularly hard to hear the dialogues in some scenes. Although the film is two and a half hours long, I felt a longing for some more exposition. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind an extended cut.

Overall, Tenet is a good film that might take some time to sink in fully. It’s more of a concept film than an action thriller with Nolan’s timestamp on every scene, and if you’re a fan, that’s all that matters.

⚠ The author is a 3rd-year Undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering. When he’s not pretending to be a film critic, he likes to watch and discuss films.