Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tenet’ on HBO Max, a Blend of Overcomplicated Plot and Ripping Action That’s So Very Christopher Nolan

Now on HBO Max, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was an experiment in a few different ways — in visual and narrative structure, in releasing a movie theatrically during a pandemic, in testing an audience’s tolerance for a challenging brainbender during a challenging time. Results were mixed, as critics and audiences found much to admire and about as much to be confused about, and Warner Bros. reportedly lost about $100 million due to significantly diminished box office returns. (Notably, the release on big screens occurred at the filmmaker’s insistence, and before WB decided all its 2021 releases would debut in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously, a decision Nolan harshly criticized.) Most of us will watch Tenet for the first time at home on our TVs, which probably isn’t ideal. Maybe our experience will be diminished somewhat. Maybe it’ll be too heady and confounding no matter how big the screen and sound system. But mostly, maybe we should be thankful that a studio and director have the credibility and gumption to spend $400 million to make something so audaciously original.

TENET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This is where I’d normally contextualize the story by relaying its setting, but this is Nolan effing with us, so TIME HAS NO MEANING. Or maybe TIME HAS SO MUCH MEANING, it transcends one single linear temporal point. From here, I’m forced to employ gross reductionism, because in this film, a whole lot of stuff occurs, and I hung with it for about 45 of its 150 minutes, the plot winding its way through a maze until it found its own tail and ate it. We can lean in and take notes on the reams of exposition and track this part and that part and see where they overlap and tangle. Or we can decontextualize the piece of the movie’s dialogue that says, “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” and sit back, let it all happen to us and just trust that Nolan made this ouroborosian time-travel shit airtight. I mostly did the latter.

Anyway, we quickly learn that the story’s protagonist, a man known only as — sigh — the Protagonist (John David Washington), is a black-ops-type Bond, James Bond badass, except he doesn’t seem to be as interested in girls. He punches and shoots his way through an opening sequence, helping save an auditorium full of Ukranian symphony-goers from terrorist bombs. Except he’s captured and gets his teeth yanked out and his cyanide capsule is confiscated and he gets another prisoner’s capsule and bites it but wakes up and his teeth are fine and he’s totally not dead. A lot happened while he was unconscious. He’s barely given a moment to gather his bearings before he’s sent on a mission that involves an Indian arms dealer, Michael Caine speaking in riddles in a restaurant and bungee-jumping up a building with Robert Pattinson, which is something that, coincidentally, happens to be on my bucket list.

But the important part is when he visits a scientist (Clemence Poesy) who explains how certain items in this point in time are “inverted,” or sent back in time to now, from the future. Something like that. It involves a very cool special effect in which a person holds up a gun and the bullet flies out of the target and back into the barrel. This is the type of thing, I think, that needs to be more felt and less understood for the Protag. Don’t worry, this is all going somewhere, because there’s this man named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a billionaire who made his money selling black market plutonium, and uses inversion tech to be the bad guy in a movie, which means he wants to annihilate the world, and possibly the entirety of existence itself. This just will not do. The best way for Mr. Protag to infiltrate Sator’s world is through the creep’s long-abused wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who has a vested interest in keeping herself and her son safe, and, by extension, would rather not see her husband render everything we know into its composite atoms. No pressure, Mr. P.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Tenet is like an even more confounding Inception!

To be less flippant (and more fair), Nolan continues to effectively explore grandiose ideas about time and how it can be distorted by perspective. Tenet is a variation on a theme established with many of his previous films — Dunkirk, Interstellar, The Prestige, Memento. His contemporary is Richard Linklater, who takes a more grounded, subtly philosophical approach to time’s passage with Boyhood, Dazed and Confused and the terribly underrated Everybody Wants Some!!. These two filmmakers are a college course just waiting to happen.

Performance Worth Watching: Well, Branagh and his silly Russian accent turn the scenery into a Vegas buffet. So my vote goes to Washington, who proved to be a find in BlacKKKlansman; after Tenet, I’d like to see him once again play less of a non-character.

Memorable Dialogue: I think this is my favorite exchange:

“There’s a cold war.”

“Nuclear?”

“No. Temporal.”

“Time travel?”

“Technology that can invert an object’s entropy.”

Sex and Skin: None. TBNTNICOTTSCTF: Too busy navigating the nigh-infinite complexities of the time-space continuum to f—.

Our Take: Tenet is like a four-dimensional maze, and I worry it only fully makes sense to its M.C. Escheresque architect. I’m sure it’ll all click after you’ve invested 10 or more hours of your life in four or five viewings. Some people will be fine with giving the movie that much attention. Nolan bros and whatnot. You know who you are.

As for the rest of us, well, once may be enough. I’m torn between being blown away by Nolan’s ambition, and cynically dismissing Tenet as a 2.5-hour home theater demo reel. It’s very much the state of the art, a collection of dynamic facemelter action sequences that are so intricately tied to the overcomplicated execution of the overcomplicated concept, they seem almost impossible to fully appreciate. Yes, that’s an overcomplication of an overcomplication. On a rudimentary level, we see “inverted” bullets, humans, cars, etc. traveling backwards while the rest of the world moves forward, and so our heads trip; a sequence in which the Protagonist engages in hand-to-hand combat with an inverted adversary is so convincingly carried out, I gleefully laughed. We just don’t get many how’d-they-DO-that moments here in the CGI era.

Then again, another fight sequence finds the Protagonist wielding a cheese grater in a creative and highly satisfying manner, and sometimes, that’s enough. No time travel, no overlapping mirror-realities, no coded speech, no rules about not touching the other version of yourself in this plane lest you be annihilated — just the visceral imagining of sharp metal moving across human skin. That moment clung to me more than Nolan’s big climactic-crunch sequence that’s designed to really blow our minds the third time through, although I think it blew mine just enough during the first.

Otherwise, Tenet struck me primarily as a reasonably entertaining reiteration of Inception, with its occasional pauses between beyond-impressive action sequences for hefty exposition dumps, but with less engaging characters. At this point in Nolan’s tenure as the blockbuster auteur, we either get a weepy, overwrought close-up speech from Anne Hathaway in Interstellar, or Tenet’s collection of conceptual blank-slate humans. The happy medium for me is still Dunkirk, which more effectively balanced the visceral with the intellectual. It still remains Nolan’s masterpiece.

Our Call: STREAM IT. A Christopher Nolan movie is an event, and Tenet and its extraordinary action set pieces justify such a tag. I’m not sure it’s a puzzle movie worth solving; I’m reasonably sure it’s enjoyable enough if you sit back and don’t bother trying to solve it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Tenet