Tenet (2020)

Starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Michael Caine
Grade: A

“Lying is standard operating procedure”.

This guy gets it.

Summary

In Kiev, Ukraine, the National Opera House is infiltrated by a group of unknown terrorists right before a performance is about to begin. A man we only know as “The Protagonist” (Washington) leads a group of troops inside to stop them. They wait outside the door for a moment, and we see a group of troops sending a knockout gas through the air vents to take out the audience inside, with the “terrorists” putting on gas masks. Basically, this was a staged attack. The real mission was for the Protagonist to break into one of the upper box seats to confront some guy (Jefferson Hall), and he lets the man know this was all a setup for whoever is leading this group, to kill this man. The Protagonist tells him he has two options: bring him in or kill him. The guy accepts his help and lets him know “the package” is in coat check. From the box seat, the two jump into the theater. Another soldier notices the Protagonist performing a different mission entirely and is about to kill him, but one of the Protagonist’s fellow agents saves him and shoots the guy. The Protagonist leaves the man he saved with the other agent and runs to retrieve the package. It’s this small silver trinket referred to as an “encapsulation”. He sends some agents with the man to use his escape tunnel and takes one of the guys with himself to hopefully stop the bomb that’s about to go off, even though it’s not a part of their mission. They start picking up the charges everywhere, but one soldier points a gun to the Protagonist’s back.

It’s hard to say whether he’s accusing him of placing the bombs there, or the fact that he’s trying to take them all and get them out of the building.

As he stays put, he sees a bullet hole on a chair disappear and the man pointing the gun at him getting shot. On the way out, one agent tells the Protagonist this wasn’t their guy. Even so, the Protagonist launches a duffel bag with all the bombs onto the upper deck and they all go off, saving the audience. The two run back into the van but are captured by some bad guys who torture them for information. The Protagonist plans on taking his suicide pill, but the bad guy finds it and throws it away. The other guy who’s on his deathbed shows the Protagonist he’s holding one in his hand. When the bad guy’s back is turned, the Protagonist jumps to the ground, takes it, and dies.

…or so we think.

The Protagonist wakes up from a medically induced coma in a hospital bed on a boat. The suicide pills were fake, with an agent Fay (Martin Donovan) telling him it was like that to test the Protagonist. Fay lets the Protagonist know his team is dead, but he’s given credit for choosing to die over giving up his colleagues. Later, he meets with Fay on the deck of this ship and tells him he resigns, but Fay counters with the fact that since he’s “dead”, he doesn’t work for them (being the CIA). Fay moves on, telling him about a potential Cold War about to happen that will transcend national interest. He’s very cryptic and tells him a very important word to use carefully: Tenet. This is all he knows. On this ship, the Protagonist starts training and getting back into shape. Sometime after, he leaves the ship and shows up at some facility, trying to sneak his way into some room. A scientist named Barbara (Clémence Poésy) approaches him but after he mentions “tenet”, she lets him in and debriefs him. Beforehand, she notes there will be no small talk, nothing that will reveal who they are or what they do.

Now, it’s time to get down to business.

Barbara tells him they’re trying to prevent World War III and whatever they’re facing is worse than a “nuclear holocaust”. She has him shoot this empty gun, but when he fires, the bullet goes in reverse and re-enters the gun. She shows him this bullet is inverted and its entropy runs backwards, so to our eyes its movements are reversed. The agency thinks it’s a type of inverse radiation triggered by nuclear fission. Someone is manufacturing these bullets in the future, and they’re streaming back at them. She has him try picking up one of these bullets by holding his hand in the air. After he has some trouble, Barbara tells him he had to have “already dropped it”. Believing this, he holds his hand out, and it jumps into his grasp. Apparently, it can move before he touches it because from his point of view, he caught it, but from the bullet’s point of view, he dropped it. When he shoots a gun powered by these bullets, he’s technically catching the bullets in his gun. After seeing the ammunition in full effect, the Protagonist realizes he saw this bullet in the opening of the film. He pries deeper but admits he doesn’t see “armageddon” approaching because of it. Barbara counters by noting that since these unknown people have figured out a way to invert bullets with mostly similar materials, they could invert anything, including a nuclear weapon.

Following this, the Protagonist is in Mumbai, India, and he calls someone asking for assistance to reach Sanjay Singh (Denzil Smith), a man who never leaves his place. The guy on the phone tells him to meet at the Bombay Yacht Club, and he’ll get someone for him. At this club, the Protagonist meets Neil (Pattinson), the man who will accompany him on his mission. After minimal conversation, they befriend each other fairly quickly, despite their allegiances and motivations being unknown to each other. Soon after, they are able to infiltrate the building. With Neil holding security at gunpoint, the Protagonist is able to talk to Sanjay and his wife Priya (Dimple Kapadia). As the Protagonist holds a gun to Sanjay’s head, drilling him with questions, Priya actually reveals herself as the actual arms dealer, not Sanjay. Plus, she’s in Tenet. After getting the Protagonist to take the gun away from her husband’s head, she tells him the dealer he’s looking for is Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Branagh), a man who made his billions in plutonium. When Priya sold Sator the ammunition, they were normal. However, somehow, Sator has figured out a way to communicate with the future. Now, the Protagonist must find out how Sator is doing this, with Priya offering a contact that can help him. Soon after the Protagonist and Neil escape the high-rise building, the Protagonist goes to lunch to meet with Priya’s contact, Sir Michael Crosby (Caine), a British Intelligence officer. They discuss Soviet-era secret cities and how most of them have been reopened as regular cities with different names, except for the one Sator grew up in.

This one is referred to as “Stalsk-12”.

Despite it having a population of around 200,000, it was believed to be abandoned because of some kind of accident. After this, the city was used for underground tests. Two days ago, at the incident in Kiev, they spotted a detonation in Northern Siberia where Stalsk-12 was. Additionally, they discuss Sator’s wealth and how he has enough money to buy his way into British establishment through his wife Katherine Barton (Debicki), an art appraiser.

To say they don’t have the happiest of marriages would be putting it lightly.

Katherine is the Protagonist’s chance of getting to Sator. To aide him, Michael gives him a fake Goya painting they caught from some embezzler. Two fakes exist, and both were painted by a man named Arepo. The other one showed up at Shipley’s (Katherine’s place of work), was authenticated by Katherine, put on auction, and bought by Sator. Michael isn’t sure if she knows it’s a fake, but he does know she was close with Arepo. To send the Protagonist on his way, Michael gives him his credit card to update his wardrobe so he can look like he hobnobs with billionaires. Sometime later, he shows up at Katherine’s job and asks her to appraise his Goya painting, later revealing that he got the painting from her boy Arepo. Now she knows he’s got ulterior motives. They have dinner and there, he lays out his idea of an arrangement. Essentially, he threatens to blackmail her because he knows she defrauded Sator by letting him buy the painting. He won’t say anything as long as she gets him to meet with Sator. Unfortunately, she reveals Sator knows it’s a fake, and he uses the painting as a hold over her, threatening her with blackmail and forcing her to stay with him forever. Katherine even talks about her recent vacation with him to Vietnam. There, Sator gave her an option to leave their marriage, but only if she agreed to never see their son again, something she couldn’t do. After flipping out and leaving the yacht with their son, she saw another woman jump off the boat, and he vanished. On top of this, Katherine says she truly didn’t know the painting was a fake and Arepo is dead.

Though he offers her a second chance of betrayal, she doesn’t budge, but the Protagonist leaves his number in her pocket anyway as Sator’s boys come by and take him away to the kitchen to kill him. She goes to the car, sobbing, but the driver won’t leave because Sator gave him orders to make sure Katherine sees the damage they do to the Protagonist. Unfortunately for them, the Protagonist beats everyone’s ass and escapes. The next day, after Katherine greets her son once school is over, Katherine calls the Protagonist. Since he was already watching her from a short distance away, he shows up immediately. Katherine explains that the painting is (probably) at a freeport facility at the Osla Airport in Norway. The Protagonist brings in Neil to assist him, and Neil goes in sometime earlier to meet with the guy that manages the freeport, masquerading as some rich businessman to learn of all the security details they have to get through when they break in later. To get in there with weaponry, Neil comes up with the idea of crashing a transport plane directly into it and enlists Mahir (Himesh Patel) for help. The confidence Mahir has is startling too. He tells the Protagonist they’ll throw the guys off the moving transport plane, and they’ll be fine. In the off chance they get caught, there will be a swift extradition at best (since no one will be killed), and they’ll barely make the news depending on the size of the explosion.

The only thing that may screw things up is the fact that the transport plane ships treasury gold once a month, and this one will probably have it on board. Unfazed, Mahir says if they blow off the back of the plane and drop the gold on the runway, no one will pay attention to the building when they break in.

Later, the plan goes into effect, with the Protagonist and Neil acting like wealthy businessmen to get into the facility, and Mahir hijacking the plane and sending it directly into the building, getting out just before it crashes. The Protagonist and Neil start getting through the facility when the alarms go off but eventually, they run into two masked men who jump out of a machine and attack them. The one who attacks the Protagonist fights in reverse. The Protagonist ends up getting to his gun first and asks if they’ve been compromised, but the man is able to escape because of the gate opening and the wind whisking him away. Sometime after, the Protagonist lets Neil in on the technology they’re chasing. Realizing this mission is even bigger than he thought, the Protagonist goes back to Priya for answers. She asks him what he found in the freeport, and he tells her they found “two antagonists”, and the one who got away was inverted. Both of them emerged at the same moment though, so Priya deduces they were the same person coming from the turnstile (the machine used for inverting) Sator placed there. He was given this technology by the future, but they don’t know why or how. She suggests the Protagonist go after the plutonium-241. At the Kiev incident, Sator tried and failed to get the only loose plutionium-241 from under the CIA team. Though he killed the team, the Ukranian Security Services got the plutonium, and it’s going to Tallinn, Estonia in a week.

The Protagonist now has to help this evil arms dealer steal weapons grade plutonium and avoid killing him until they know how deep he is in this game. In the meantime, he has to leverage the situation without losing control of the plutonium. Priya says we are being “attacked by the future”, and Sator is helping. The Protagonist has to find out how, and Katherine may be their only hope inside.

My Thoughts:

WARNING: Before you watch this, you’re going to need to do a few things. Get a good night’s sleep, drink a full pot of coffee, turn on the captions, and turn up the volume full blast (the latter two because the sound mixing sucks). It’s not because this movie is amazing. It requires your full, undivided attention because unless you’re a full-blown scientist or extremely well read, you will get lost immediately if you’re not ready for it. It can be that confusing.

Now, Tenet is a challenging watch but a remarkable cinematic experience, nonetheless. I’ll admit, some of the things said will frustrate the hell out of you to the point where it’s comical. I actually laughed out loud at Neil’s explanation of everything once the climax was over because it was so preposterous. This is why Tenet is so hard to grade. On one hand, it’s incredible. It’s a spectacle unlike anything you’ve ever seen before in terms of storytelling and world-building. With this film, Christopher Nolan adds another stunning showing to his catalogue that reminds us of the term “movie magic”. You know the term. It’s when you walk out of a movie feeling like you’ve experienced an event, a feeling that only a handful of filmmakers are able to give to modern audiences. On the other hand, the details of the screenplay are complicated on a whole other level, to the point where you’re forced to watch this two-and-a-half-hour film a few times over to truly understand what’s going on. The refusal to “dumb down” key plot points becomes tiresome because most viewers going into this will have no idea what the hell these characters are talking about when referring to a “temporal pincer movement” or “inverted entropy”. What’s even more frustrating is how accepting all the characters are of these scientific terms most of us have never studied, or would understand, ahead of time. From a viewer’s standpoint, the accelerated pace things are explained at make the narrative nearly impossible to comprehend without hitting “pause” or Googling something during the course of the film.

It could even happen with basic stuff too like when the Protagonist comes up with this elaborate lie for Katherine to remember to tell Sator about how they know each other, going as far as telling her the exact fake date and time when they met, and she doesn’t ask him to repeat anything. Is she a secret agent too? There’s no way a regular person could remember every last bit of what he told her at that fast of a pace, with this much detail.

The lack of thorough explanations continues throughout. For instance, the turnstile scene in which Sator holds a gun to Katherine’s head to force the Protagonist to give up information is the most pivotal scene in the film to understanding the power Sator possesses, but it’s also easily the most confusing one (and that’s saying something) because not nearly enough is explained, and the explanations given are too fast to comprehend. Maybe someone can help me out with this, but why is Sator asking the same questions when he gets to the other side of the turnstile after already doing the interrogation? Are we watching the scene in reverse? He already knew the answer to everything because we saw him already ask it, but he does it again. Is he cross-examining the Protagonist to make sure he wasn’t lying? These actions already happened because the Protagonist watched it. Are we now seeing it in real time from Sator’s perspective? Wouldn’t we see two Sators in the same scene on the same side? Wouldn’t Sator run into another version of Sator right then and there? Just when we think we understand something, we realize we don’t, and when we look for answers within the narration, they are nowhere to be found. It may have made sense in Christopher Nolan’s head, but it damn sure didn’t translate onscreen. Later in the scene, Neil explains Sator knew their every move because that pesky temporal pincer movement (who’s meaning they barely touched on) was used only through time and not space. Apparently, half of Sator’s team runs forward through an event, he monitors them, and attacks at the end moving backwards.

You can’t sit there and tell me this is understood through a one-time viewing!

Then, Neil gets on the Protagonist for giving up where the piece of the algorithm was, but he says he lied. Okay, so who fucking cares then? Why did the Protagonist flip out on everyone if it’s apparently a non-issue? For some reason, Neil’s suggestion to stabilize the inverse radiation by inverting the patient somehow makes sense, but I don’t get Ives’s explanation as to why they can’t use the same turnstile they just used to get the Protagonist back. He says they’ve only occupied this turnstile for minutes, but before this, it was owned to Sator. For some reason, the only other turnstile they can get to is in Oslo again. Why can’t Ives and the Tenet troops just bust into Sator’s turnstile in the inverted world, guns blazing? There’s no reason they can’t. They have plenty of firepower. No real reason is given though. Ives just says they can’t use this one because it belonged to Sator beforehand.

Why?

On numerous occasions in this movie, we are given these crazy detailed explanations as to how things work and why things are happening the way they are, but for small things like this, we are given nothing to go off of. Going along with this, the Protagonist asks Neil that if Sator threatens to kill Katherine in the past and does, what happens to her in the timeline they’re in. Neil has the audacity to say it’s “unknowable”. Why the fuck is this OF ALL THINGS unknowable? All we’ve gotten for every cockamamie situation happening in this movie is an even weirder explanation as to why it makes sense. Why isn’t there a basic answer for something like this? This is just a sliver of the annoying shit hindering Tenet‘s overall grade. There’s no way you don’t know the answer to something basic like this, but there’s an incredibly easy explanation as to why people are able to invert the entropy of ammunition and nuclear weapons. This back-and-forth trend is frustratingly consistent and further exemplified when it’s established that Sator can communicate with the future. The Protagonist asks how it’s done, prompting Priya to give this philosophic response that answers the question in no way, leaving us entirely in the dark and forcing us to pay attention and listen to every detail to find out. However, because of the bad sound mixing, we can’t hear shit and as you can see, a portion of the details in the script get lost in translation unless you have the captions on. It doesn’t help how complicated the movie is in the first place. Things become even more irritating when it’s very simply explained that Sator buries a time capsule, transmits the location, and collects the inverted materials the future sends.

Well, that’s simple enough.

If it was this easy, why did Priya have to be so cryptic in the first place? Was it because she didn’t know, or was it because this screenplay is that outrageously pretentious? Whether the Protagonist knew this information or not, it wouldn’t have affected the plot at all. It would’ve only helped the audience out. Is that the worst thing? No, Christopher Nolan just wants everything to be mysterious, so he can act smarter than everyone instead of letting the audience in on the fun.

I go back to this a lot, but we need a character like Joe Miller from Philadelphia in this film, asking the others to explain things like he’s “a six-year-old”. The screenplay has way too many ideas that send us in too many directions, without a character or an event to make us fully realize if we understood what happened or not. To pile on to the already confusing details, we are given numerous instances of other philosophical questions only further complicating your overall outlook of the movie, like when Neil and the Protagonist discuss the problem of the grandfather paradox, which essentially shoots a hole in everything the unknown future bad guys are doing. Neil explains that since the bad guys believe in what they are doing (obliterating the past) will solve their problem, even though there’s a possibility it can destroy them too, it’s whatever. There’s no answer as to if they’re right. This is why it’s a paradox, so why even write it into the screenplay? The sheer mention of the grandfather paradox made it seem like these unknown villains are incompetent morons because destroying the past would do exactly that. If the past is gone, there’s no future to get to. Everything is gone. It’s well known the algorithm can invert the entropy of the world and destroy everything. How does this help the future then? There’s nothing for them to build on if nothing exists. How have these future villains not come to this conclusion either?

Later, Sator reveals this whole thing also involves the future’s problem with how the past handled climate change, which seems like a bit of an overreaction. Obviously, climate change is a big deal, but the fact that these villains are willing to destroy everything on the planet as a response to how the past handled FUCKING CLIMATE CHANGE seems a bit much, no? Continuing with the Protagonist’s introspective questions that make us question the entire plot, following the whole grandfather paradox conversation he asks, “This reversing the flow of time, doesn’t us being here now means it never happens. That we stopped them?”. Neil is hopeful of this but admits that “in a parallel worlds theory we can’t know the relationship between consciousness and multiple realities”. Is this entire conversation meant to be a red herring to confuse the audience further, or is the Protagonist correct because the grandfather paradox essentially dispels this? Does Nolan even know the answer, or is this some Stanley Kubrick-type shit where he writes something so confusing and ambiguous, he decides to leave it up to the audience to figure it out and never elaborates further like with the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey? A conversation like this opens up a world of questions, but it feels like Nolan is just showing off the research he’s done rather than this idea being essential to what’s going on. If we’re being honest, I felt like the Protagonist’s initial question is the answer. However, if he’s correct, then we know the heroes will succeed, right? So, remove the scene altogether! We shouldn’t even be discussing what we think is the obvious answer before the climax commences.

Neil is only bringing up points of discussion that are purely theoretical. They are technical possibilities, but it’s clear the conversation happens just to throw us off. In reality, the entire scene is completely unnecessary. Again, it just seems to be added because Nolan wanted to prove to everyone that he did his homework on his screenplay, despite this “pivotal” conversation not changing the story at all and only confuses an already confused viewer even more.

On the other hand, I did enjoy the characters playing with concepts that actually affected the thought process of the characters like free will versus fate. Though neither the Protagonist nor Neil know for sure if they have either, they proceed with these ideas in mind during the real pivotal moments of the film. The Protagonist does try and play with it here and there when following the “hero” path, but the question always looms over him, and us as the audience, if his actions were meant to happen, or if he’s changing the status quo and could screw up everything by doing so. Neil operates in the idea that “fate or reality” has to happen. As a result, he goes and does exactly what is needed to ensure the outcome needed by Tenet, even if it affects him personally. The thrill of this potentially unknown result adds to the suspense of the plot in a major way.

I hate that the Protagonist only asks Neil to be “more precise” once. If these characters were any shred of normal, they would be constantly asking “What?” or “Why?” throughout the film. Then again, we know these people aren’t normal from the opening line of the movie when the Protagonist points a gun at some guy and says, “We live in a twilight world”. Right away, we know we’re walking into something off the wall.

With the way he was written, Andrei Sator felt like a generic Bond villain. The ambiance and Kenneth Branagh’s performance made the character very menacing and believable enough, but he’s still as generic and predictable as every other Russian villain we’ve ever seen. In addition, I just don’t understand why he’s willing to work so hard to help the future destroy the Earth. What is he getting out of this? Sure, he’s dying of inoperable cancer. I get that, but he still needs more of a reason as to why he goes to such lengths to make sure everyone dies, including his son. Also, why does he want Katherine in his life so badly? Why is he forcing her to stay with him? At one point, he literally says something along the lines of “If I can’t have you, no one will” which is the most basic bad guy line ever. What does he get out of it other than the fact that he’s an evil bastard? It seems like we’re going with The Dark Knight idea of “some people just want to watch the world burn”, but you can only get away with this in very rare cases. Here, with a story so detailed and thought out, it seemed weird that the villain was this underdeveloped with this little of motivation. It’s weird he would work so tirelessly to help these unknown people to destroy everyone and his own life. The only thing we’re let in on is that he was the “right guy at the right time” because he was approached after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Really? This was enough to influence his decision? I don’t buy this. There has to be more to it.

Another maddening part is the Protagonist’s response to Barbara when she starts dropping these convoluted bombshells on him and is go-to responses are these philosophic mumbo jumbo questions that no one would ask in a normal situation. Barbara is showing him bullets that GO IN REVERSE, and he responds in the most unnatural way possible saying shit like, “…but cause comes before effect” and “What about free will?”. Is that really the first thing you would ask after seeing something as revolutionary as inverted ammunition? Any normal person would probably react like, “Holy shit! This is crazy! Wait, can you explain whatever the hell you just said one more time? I’m confused on the last part. Inverted entropy?”. Obviously, responses like this would blow the seriousness of this film out the window, but his odd responses were already doing that for me anyway. Then, you got the moment where he catches a bullet back into his gun for the first time, and he asks why it feels strange. Why the fuck do you think? Did you think this would come natural to you? This whole situation is strange!

This is how Tenet brings you into this world Christopher Nolan has created. Despite the complexity behind it, everyone is in on the science or understands it with a very basic explanation, and we are just supposed accept whatever is thrown at us. For the most part, we do. It’s all we really can do. Even then, the action is so invigorating, and the plot is so mysterious that you hang onto every last bit of this runtime. Though you may not understand it all in the first go-around, you’ll enjoy this thing and be hooked from start to finish because of how engrossing the experience is. Try your hardest to keep up, but don’t feel discouraged if you can’t. Tenet takes a little while to fully uncap. As it’s even said in the film, “Don’t try to understand it, feel it”. This is the approach you should walk into Tenet with. If you do, you’ll really enjoy this fantastical venture.

The love and lore coming from this world of Tenet shows. Nolan commands our attention with his storytelling abilities, and the stuff we do understand is fascinating, giving us an enriching presentation. Things like the proving window and how you have to see yourself reverse-exit the machine to prove you will survive going into it is a captivating idea in a screenplay full of them, making the suspense of the second act even more gripping once you start to retain a lot of information like this. Next, there’s the outstanding sequence when the Protagonist decides to invert to find the part of the missing algorithm. It feels like he’s entering space itself. This woman starts to spout details at him and in this convoluted mess, things start to make sense.

1. She explains he needs to breathe through this mask with his own air because regular air won’t pass through the membranes of inverted lungs. All things considered in this crazy world, this makes sense.
2. Everything is essentially the opposite, meaning when there’s fire, ice may form on his clothes (he even gets hypothermia from a gas explosion).
3. Lastly, it’s understood he is inverted, the world he’s entering isn’t.

This is wild. Once they close the door on him and let him loose, we feel as disorientated as he does. Despite it being the normal Earth that we’re accustomed to, it feels like something we’ve never seen before. This how well the world-building in this screenplay is achieved by Nolan. There are so many mesmerizing scenes (like the re-do in Oslo) and revelations about the plot and characters as the film moves forward, especially when we learn the gravity of the situation after Priya compares the original scientist who created the algorithm to Oppenheimer. It sets up a breathtaking, balls-to-the-wall third act, and a climax that truly feels like everything is on the line. You know how well something is written when every character’s role matters and is pivotal to the mission. The extra conflict with Sator and Katherine added even more suspense to the finale, and you stay on the edge of your seat as you watch in anticipation. The real details of the science may be lost to most, but the exhilaration of a groundbreaking sci-fi film is still there.

Tenet is a spellbinding story and trying to unpack it can be loads of fun. At the same time, its details are so complex, you’re going to be irritated to the point of insanity. It’s a tradeoff very few films offer. It is special though. I can’t deny that. When you add in incredible visuals, great performances (officially solidifying John David Washington as a leading man), an innovative narrative, an abundance of imagination, and a soundtrack that encapsulates it all, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is hard to forget. Years down the line, I could see some considering it a masterpiece.

It’ll take a while for it to get its flowers though, including from me.