Movie Review: Tenet (2020)

Tenet (2020) written and directed by Christopher Nolan

As if a spy's life wasn't hard enough, a man (John David Washington) doing his information gathering job gets involved in a much larger, earth-threatening conspiracy...that involves time travel. He has a mysterious employer (who isn't identified till the end of the movie, so no spoilers) and teams up with some seemingly random people: Neil (Robert Pattison), Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), and Priya (Dimple Kapadia). Each has an important but different connection to the conspiracy and more or less helps him along the way. He has to go through a lot of philosophical conversations and action sequences before he can solve the mystery and save the day.

This movie involves a different sort of time travel from other films. In it, objects and people can be "inverted" where they start traveling through time backwards. Clocks go backwards, bullets go back into guns, and dialogue would need subtitles if it weren't for film narrative tricks that fix that situation. The concept is really intriguing to me but as the film narrative tricks become more numerous and occasionally very hard to believe, I started losing patience with it. The characters do mention free will and the possibility of changing events but don't get deep enough into either idea to make the film as intellectually engaging as Inception.

Visually, the movie is amazing. Combining characters moving forward in time and backward in time works well for the most part with scenes depicted from both points of view. Reverse filming is hardly anything new in cinema but it's used well, if obviously, here. The action sequences are fun and exciting and frequent. The soundtrack was a little overbearing--my subwoofer was working overtime and occasionally drowning out dialogue, a problem that's come up before in Nolan films. The actors were all good even when the film cared more about advancing the plot than it should have.

Overall, I'm glad I saw this film and enjoyed parts of it. Other parts were harder to enjoy and it reminded me too much of Inception, which follows a similar story arc and also has a highly-imaginative premise. Inception was just so much better.

Mildly recommended.