Tenet exemplifies Christopher Nolan’s brand of filmmaking at its best and worst, as grand scale cinema fuelled by big ideas is undercut by frustratingly poor storytelling and a dull lead performance by John David Washington.
The release of a Christopher Nolan movie has become an event. With his style of big visuals and big ideas, Nolan has cornered the “thinking man’s action movie” market, as personified in Inception and Interstellar. Nolan’s latest release, Tenet, has all the hallmarks of a great Christopher Nolan film, but instead proves to be the opposite. Convoluted, contrived, and lacking those big-time stakes that usually makes Nolan’s films worth their while, Tenet is the result of a film invested in an idea, yet lacking the story or personality to make that idea work on screen.
Essentially an espionage movie, Tenet stars John David Washington as The Protagonist, a CIA operative tasked with uncovering a secret organisation named “Tenet”. His investigation leads him to Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a powerful Russian arms dealer who has access to a futuristic technology that can reverse, or “invert”, the process of time and anyone and anything within it. With help from fellow spy Neil (Robert Pattinson) and Sator’s neglected wife Kat (Elizabeth Debikci), The Protagonist must stop Sator from using the inversion technology from destroying the world.
Well, I think that is what is happening. While Nolan has reportedly taken 20 years to conceive the ideas for Tenet, with five of those years dedicated to the writing of the screenplay, Nolan has forgotten to create a sensical or engaging story, opting instead for one filled with bland characters that do not engage with the audience, let alone one another. If there was ever an example of a filmmaker in need of a writing partner (or even an uncredited script doctor), Tenet would be it. The dialogue is especially cumbersome and robotic, so pre-occupied with exposition drivel fuelled by the fact that Nolan is so incredibly in love with the ideas presented, rather than is characters. Tenet may pose as a film, but is instead a TED talk lost in its own importance.
Needed was a movie star to cut through the drivel and engage on a personable level. John David Washington is indeed a fine actor, but brings a low, lumbering energy to his dreary spy brought back from the dead and stuck in a time loop. Washington delivers on the action hero front in well-choreographed and (mostly) well delivered action scenes (the films lone saving grace), yet his hero is a man of little presence.
Fairing better are Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki, both adding a magnetism to underwritten characters. Pattinson especially something of a miracle since he too is laboured with much in the way of that cumbersome dialogue, yet manages to deliver such things with style and charisma. Kenneth Branagh meanwhile is ho-hum as a Russian crime lord, repeating essentially the same role he delivered in 2001’s undervalued Jack Ryan reboot.
It all amounts to a colossal disappointment on Nolan’s part. Nolan has essentially followed the path of fellow wunderkind filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. He got caught living inside his own head, resulting in a movie only he can decipher. Time is too precious to waste on it.
