150 min | PG-13 | September 3, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A nameless operative learns that bullets can fall back into the gun. He gets pulled into a war fought across the timeline against an oligarch who can erase the future. The plot is impossible to follow on a first watch, and Nolan dares you to feel it instead.
The Protagonist is a CIA operative who survives a torture and wakes into a secret war. An organization called Tenet teaches him that certain objects and people move backward through time. Their entropy runs in reverse. He has to stop a Russian arms dealer from assembling a device that threatens everyone who has ever lived. Tenet is a spy thriller built on a physics conceit, and the film cares more about the conceit than the spying. It is a puzzle box that prizes its own mechanism over the people moving through it.
John David Washington plays The Protagonist with athletic calm and zero interior life. The character has no name and no past, and Washington fills that void with physical command rather than feeling. Robert Pattinson plays Neil, a loose and amused handler who sips drinks and knows more than he admits. Elizabeth Debicki plays Kat, the estranged wife of the villain, and she towers over every scene with a brittle desperation that is the only real emotion in the film. Kenneth Branagh plays Andrei Sator as a dying oligarch with a snarling accent and a need to drag the world down with him. Dimple Kapadia plays the arms broker Priya with cold authority, and Michael Caine turns a single lunch scene into a clinic on exposition delivery.
Christopher Nolan writes and directs, and he stages action that runs forward and backward inside the same frame. A highway chase moves in two directions at once, and a climactic battle splits a squad into teams advancing and retreating through identical minutes. The editing has to keep both vectors legible, and it mostly does. The practical effects carry real weight because Nolan crashes an actual jetliner into a hangar rather than rendering it. The sound design works against all of this. The score and the inverted whooshing sit so high in the mix that the dialogue drowns, and the plot mechanics get explained in words you cannot hear.
Tenet is a machine that admires its own engineering. The inversions are ingenious and the set pieces are genuinely new, but the people stay flat under the weight of the structure. Debicki’s Kat is the lone character with something to lose, and the film keeps cutting away from her to explain its rules. Nolan builds a thriller you have to watch twice to follow, and once you follow it, the emotional payoff is thin. The spectacle is real. The feeling is not.