Christopher Nolan's PG-13-rated Tenet, a time-travel thriller that faces off a team of faceless soldiers and soulless heroes against the threat of World War III, contains all of the features likely to become prototypical of the new decade's blockbusters for adolescents: a trailer premiere on the online video game Fortnite, a theme song by Travis Scott, a color-coded key for comprehension, and nary a sexual spark in sight. The latest by Nolan (whose impassioned defense of the theatrical experience now faces even more pushback during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis) does demand every inch of the big screen, if only to witness the size and scope of its blueprint. Tenet's meticulously choreographed battles play out in both forward and reverse motion, the latter a technical move first accomplished by the Lumière brothers in Démolition d'un mur (1896). The scale of its spectacle suggests innovation; but Nolan's combination of the reverse motion with the cross cut, which he's dressed with trivial exposition, has all been done before. (Spoilers ahead.)
Because of its lean focus on military operations, Tenet especially lays bare the basic mechanics behind Christopher Nolan's vision for humanity's future, typified previously by sharp sequences (Batman's race to find the Joker before he bombs two ferries in The Dark Knight [2008]; Cooper's contact with his daughter Murphy in Interstellar [2014], which allows for the global population's exodus to a new planet) that cross-cut between individual fate and responsibility with those of the collective. But the clockwork arrangement of Dunkirk (2017), which overlaps one week, one day, and one hour of the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II, suggested a perspective shift towards one in which mankind collapses into a single entity as the species advances in history. In what seems the reasonable next step, Tenet places at its center the lack of a personality. From its opening sequence, the film establishes that the opacity of its hero—identified only as the Protagonist (John David Washington)—must be a given: seated with his eyes closed, he immediately awakes, dons a mask and places a fake badge on his sleeve before storming into a Kiev opera house. His blankness also grants him an advantage over others, an expedited means of camouflage.
A secret organization named Tenet employs the Protagonist to investigate the mass production of weapons with inverted entropy that have been sent from the future far into the past. Through this inversion process, bullets, guns, cars, and even people, appear to move in reverse as they arrive from the future. Following the introduction of the threat that such a technology poses (World War III, something worse than a nuclear holocaust), details charge at the audience faster than the story itself: The Protagonist heads to Mumbai, where he's joined by a chipper assist named Neil (Robert Pattinson). His warmth suggests they've met before. Arms dealer Priya Singh (Dimple Kapadia), a member of Tenet, implores the Protagonist to track down Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian oligarch linked to a number of inverted materials, who she believes can communicate with the future.
The Protagonist and Neil then meet an intelligence officer in London (Michael Caine) for information on who or what next, and where to. The allure of Inception (2010) and its assembly of human signposts was that such figures were not limited to the task of giving narrative action a necessary push. Rather, every face, every trinket gave itself to the possibility of reemergence in the realm of the subconscious, where their significance would be further magnified. In Nolan's dream-within-a-dream, there would be no throwaways; not a single grain of sand in the hourglass would be wasted. But at this stop, where chit-chat about to-go boxes and Brooks Brothers stagnates an imminent, apocalyptic implosion of time, Tenet plainly points to its throwaways. Nolan assumes charm is a sufficient emotional anchor to carry the weight of the film's high concept, but the disproportion only results in a turgid series of abrupt starts and stops. The line "Don't try to understand it, feel it," said by the scientist Barbara (Clémence Poésy), proves useful to understanding the process of inversion (one of many such tips and tricks strewn about the film). Nolan, however, applies the reverse to the film's human relationships by replacing intimacy with the assignment of a common goal: Don't try to feel it, understand it.
Key references for Tenet include both Hitchcock's North by Northwest and the globe-trotting James Bond films. Attempting to outdo both, Nolan presents an even bigger plane (this one crashes into an airport and bursts into flames) and a meeting of past and future players across the single canvas of the present. But Tenet's visual sophistication cannot make up for what it lacks, particularly the former's humor and the latter's airy eroticism. Through a combination of blackmails, a heist into said airport, and a boating trip on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, the Protagonist finds himself face to face with Sator. His only means of putting an end to Sator's time-warping death wish (by inverting the entire world with aforementioned algorithm) is to befriend Sator's estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) and enlist her help against him. Despite Sator's suspicions and the opportune seconds of silence in Kat and the Protagonist's moments alone together, an affair never does occur.
After catching an inverted bullet in Barbara's lab, the Protagonist notes that his "instinct" in the present compels the future event to have happened. But without the specificity and the risk of desire as a spark for action, the limp momentum of the film fails to pick up speed. Instead, Tenet chugs along with only the motor of Nolan's will for Tenet to have been made. The Protagonist's supreme like of her, and earnest hope for her happiness, stiffens with boyish hesitance before it may erupt into any specific feeling at all. The two instead maintain a very thin thread of chemistry that makes them something more like coworkers. A very faint vapor of desire floats about but never solidifies. The Protagonist's lips lightly graze Kat's neck as he leaves a dinner party, she watches him waddle away with mild concern. And just as the auto-tuned croons of Travis Scott fade in and out, these fleeting moods are only convincing in the precise moment at which they're suggested. David Cronenberg once said that superhero films possess an overly formulaic and adolescent emotional understanding. But even Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy simmered with longing, and ten years later, Inception remains notorious for the trove of fanfiction that it inspired, much of it based solely on brief banter between minor characters. Here, however, to be the Protagonist restricts him to the one duty of saving the world. Perhaps his awkward fidgeting, his nervous laughter, suggests that he's too busy preventing World War III to focus on the rewards of basic human interaction. But would falling in love be such a huge waste of time?
The central operation of Tenet is the "temporal pincer movement," a double-sided flank operation that involves two color-coded sets of soldiers: the red team moves forward and the blue team is inverted, and therefore moves backwards in time (though the term "backwards" still loosely complies to an understanding of time as linear). As if already predicting the "Huh?"s of an audience, characters repeatedly remind us of who has been assigned these designated directions, often in response to the Protagonist's own request for a second or third explanation. (And if you're still lost, you can always check for the flashing red or blue lights.) The last "movement" in Northern Siberia follows the Protagonist as he retrieves Sator's algorithm. This act of extraction is supposed to offer salvation for all humankind. But because Nolan has shielded his characters (and his audience) from any attachment, from a bird's eye view his $200 million war for destiny appears as a simple plaything. The flat characters that Tenet delivers to this battle of tenuous stakes cannot conceal Nolan's banal combination of the reverse motion with the cross-cut, a basic move presented as an achievement in montage for its puffed-up magnitude. It is not that characterization obstructs formal accomplishment, but that new formulae require new forms of characterization: as example, consider that Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma (1970) features only abstract variables (the 24-letter Latin alphabet) to present a complex mathematical proof (that shares the title of the film) in cinematic form with no mouthpieces at all.
Like Candy Crush, the wins of Tenet offer instantaneous pleasure (like when the Protagonist emerges from a ball of smoke with the algorithm in hand), but these scores do not actually translate into real life. In the aftermath of the movement, Neil assures the tearful Protagonist that "what’s happened, happened [is] an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world." The two will surely meet again, for the movement has already allowed them to pass each other several times before. The statement (or more importantly, its placement) is at once refreshing and repelling—to transpose such a pristine framework upon the world requires the reduction of people into uses, their worth into usefulness. For in his projection of humanity as a well-oiled machine, of which we are but little gears propelling in place to save the world, Nolan supposes that there are only lives that cross and lives that pass by. Spontaneous passions are not allowed for those in the Tenet army, forever resigned to a lonely loop. Yes, what's happened, happened—now what?