Movie Reaction: Tenet

 Formula: Looper ^ Inception ^ Primer

The last movie I saw in a movie theater was Onward at the beginning of March. That ended a streak I was quite proud of: seeing one or more movie every week since August 2012. I've been struggling to determine when I would get back to theaters. It's a mix of reasons. The obvious one is that I'm still figuring out what feels responsible during the pandemic. The other is that the offerings just aren't great. It was going to take a movie that I knew I'd have to experience in a theater for me to make the 4-minute walk to the nearest movie theater again. Well, Tenet was the movie to bring me back. I must say, despite the mask and eerie emptiness, it was nice to be back. I'm not sure how often I'll be returning quite yet, but they had all the precautions in place.

Tenet is the banner movie of this Corona summer. It began the year as the most anticipated movie of the summer. Christopher Nolan's ambitious enigma following his real Oscar breakthrough with Dunkirk. It was the original, big-budget blockbuster that was supposed to prop 2020 up. And that was before anyone know about Covid. Several optimistic release dates came and went as theaters remained closed until it finally got a whimper of a release a few weekends back. Tenet will lose money. It would've been financially responsible of WB to hold off on this release until theaters were open with full capacity everywhere. For a variety of reasons from "Chris Nolan wants this to come out now" to "might as well test and see what the appetite for movies is right now", Tenet came out anyway.

The plot of Tenet is both unbelievably simple and too complicated to explain. It's a time heist of sorts. John David Washington is a CIA agent who is brought into a secret war between the past, present, and future. There's a mad man intent on destroying the world and Washington must stop him. It's a lot like Nolan tried to make a Bond film but kept turning in drafts that needed an appendix. The word "temporal" is used about as often as the word "the". I'll probably need to see the movie two more times before I really figure it all out. It's dense. At one point in the movie, a character tells our protagonist (Oh, yeah, Washington's character name is literally "Protagonist") that he shouldn't try to understand what's going on. He should just feel it. That's the movie in a nutshell on the first viewing. Future viewings will be about figuring it out. This time was just about experiencing it.

And, the movie is quite an experience. The main reason I was intent on seeing this in a theater is that Nolan made this movie to really take advantage of the theatrical experience. He uses the whole frame. The movie is loud and consuming. It will play fine at home but great on a big screen. For a decade now, I've said that I don't trust any filmmaker with a $100 million budget more than Nolan and that remains true. The set pieces in this are quite dazzling. It looks expensive. It's international. After months of watching movies in the comfortable confines of my living room, this was the perfect reminder why, when all else is the same, I'd rather go to a theater.

I suspect this movie was going to have trouble in the box office regardless of the pandemic. It's still a Christopher Nolan movie, so it was making money. However, it was going to look a lot closer to Dunkirk ($192 million) or Interstellar ($188 million) than Inception ($292 million) or The Dark Knight ($535 million). That's because this movie is Nolan-y almost to a fault. While John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki all give good performances, their characters are thin. The characters actively hide any personal details to remain anonymous. The story and concept are one big puzzle box. I'm sure if you actually map it out, it all makes sense, but it's like Nolan is purposely making it as cerebral as possible*. The movie will give plenty of ammunition for people who are getting fed up with the cult of Christopher Nolan**. It's nowhere close to my favorite of his movies, although that speaks to the strength of his filmography more than anything. It's a movie I look forward to seeing again, and I could even see it growing on me as I've had more time to figure it out.

*I'm not even sure that cerebral is the right word. I'm just trying to keep up with him.

**Side bar: It does annoy me when people complain about Christopher Nolan when they are actually complaining about Christopher Nolan fans. We all do that though in some way.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend