Film review: Tenet

Hello readers! A few days ago I watched Tenet, a 2020 science fiction thriller from Christopher Nolan. If you made the perfectly reasonable decision to avoid cinemas that year, there’s a chance you haven’t heard of it. Tenet didn’t flop, but it didn’t make much of a splash, and although its ripples were scrutinised by a discerning online community, its memory exited the public consciousness almost immediately.

Was Tenet worth watching? That’s difficult to say. My friends told me that I would hate it, but having endured the 2.5 hour runtime and mulled it over for a few days, I might not go that far. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to the average viewer, but if you enjoy pulling things apart to see why they are broken, Tenet will provide you ample entertainment.

WARNING: From here on out, this post will contain spoilers (unless you’re experiencing this review in reverse).

What I knew going in:

Christopher Nolan has made a lot of films. Some of them are very good. Many of them will be remembered and rewatched for years to come, like Inception and Interstellar, but personally, I have never understood why Nolan has such a fanatical fanbase.

Much of Nolan’s best-known work revolves around the exploration of a mind-bending concept, such as the ability to enter and manipulate dreams, or having gravity and love distort time and space. Tenet presents itself as the new member of this family. Its central, mind-bending concept is that objects and people can be “inverted” so that they experience time in reverse.

Plenty of people went to see Tenet when it released – partly because they wanted to see another clever, action-packed Nolan film with big vehicles, big explosions and big sound effects, and partly because there was nothing else on offer. However, many people left the cinemas in a state of confusion. Some were placated by the bombastic action sequences, but many were not.

What had gone wrong? Nolan appeared to have gone a step too far, presenting something so clever that it had inverted and become stupid. The dialogue was so muffled that it was impossible to understand, and of course, this didn’t make the convoluted plot any easier to follow. People had no idea what was going on, and yet the dialogue was inexplicably heavy with exposition. The final popular complaint was that the characters, especially the women, were offensively shallow.

Naturally, I wanted to experience this disaster for myself. There’s nothing I like better than getting pointlessly angry over shallow sci-fi, so allow me to present a run-down of what I perceive to be Tenet‘s six biggest problems.

Problem 1: Time travel shenanigans

Early in the film, a scientist tries to explain the mechanics of the film’s central idea: inversion. We see objects that fall upwards and move backwards, including a bullet which dislodges from a wall and returns to a gun when the trigger is pulled. Watching this, my mental alarm bells had already started ringing. I could hear logic hammering on the door, begging me to let it back in – but I shut it out, to give Nolan a chance to explain himself.

No explanation arrived. The scientist talked about entropy. She said it was reversed, but they didn’t know how. Somebody in the future had done it, and now they were sending objects back through time.

Hmm, thought I. If I ignored the cries of logic, pleading with me to let it back in, I could just about stomach this explanation. However, logic was making some very reasonable points. How could the objects move against gravity? Where was that force coming from?

Here is my understanding, based on the few crumbs of information Nolan deigned to give us. Entropy describes the organisation of a system, and systems always become more disorganised over time. If we put gas in a balloon, the gas will spread out and stay that way. It won’t concentrate back to where it started, because this is statistically unlikely enough to be practically impossible. Similarly, if we fire a bullet from a gun and it lodges in a wall, we expect the bullet to stay there. What Tenet is asking us to do is to believe that entropy can be reversed: that a system can be made to work backwards from chaos into order. We must believe that, somehow, the gas can concentrate back to its source, and that the bullet can return to the gun.

Hmm, I thought again. I could just about stomach this explanation, but beyond the locked door I could hear logic having a tearful breakdown.

You see, Tenet is a little hazy in its terms and conditions, and this leads to some classic time travel shenanigans. In order for the bullet to return to the gun, it must have already been fired from that gun. It needs a starting point to return to, and this simple fact necessitates that everything is pre-destined. We see the bullet in the wall. We see the gun. We know that the bullet has only ended up in the wall thanks to someone firing the gun. We know that the entropy of the bullet is reversed. Therefore, we are moving towards a future where the bullet will extricate itself from the wall and end up back in the gun – and this cannot be avoided.

Pre-destiny is a problematic concept in the field of time travel shenanigans, often leading to plot holes. At its most cliche, we can be presented with a dark vision of the future, only for a character to struggle and fail to stop it from happening. However, Tenet actually steers clear from this minefield. Nolan appears to have fully embraced the “everything is pre-destined” paradigm, though he never acknowledges this it explicitly. Perhaps it was an intentional artistic choice that the characters would lack depth? In this world, by Nolan’s rules, no character has agency. Is he a genius after all?

Problem 2: Physics shenanigans

I may have talked myself around to accepting the pre-destined time travel shenanigans of this film, but logic was still out there, trying to convince me to let it back in. It had stopped crying a while ago, but now it was whispering at the keyhole with an unsettling level of confidence. You see, the inversion concept might make sense at first, but once you start thinking about its implementation, things start falling apart – and they don’t put themselves back together.

Consider this. The only way for that bullet to return to that gun is if the entropy of the gun was also reversed. The explosion must be reversed, and so the recoil in the arm of the shooter should also be reversed. But where does this stop? Must the entropy of the shooter be reversed, and the ground on which they walk? The problem here is the interaction between inverted and non-inverted (verted?) matter. Once the gun has gone off in reverse, and the bullet is back inside, is the bullet still inverted? The film tells us it is, but then it doesn’t make much sense that we could pop it out of the gun and drop it on the floor, because it shouldn’t be falling under gravity. It only moves backwards.

So far as I can tell, the premise of Tenet is nonsense. It’s no wonder that the film doesn’t stick to its own rules, because there can be no rules. It’s a free for all.

What does it mean to invert the entropy of a whole human being? Humans operate via a series of chemical reactions; for example, taking in oxygen and food and then burning them for energy. If our entropy was reversed, we might perceive our life passing in reverse, with memories being unmade, and signals in our nervous system travelling the wrong way. Our food would be undigested, and our energy would be un-combusted, leading to us exhaling oxygen by reverse-breathing and bringing up food by reverse-eating (don’t think too hard about the downstairs extension of this process).

To a verted individual, someone inverted would not just appear to be moving backwards, but to be absorbing sweat, spitting up pure Dr Pepper into the can, and regurgitating and assembling entire pepperoni pizzas in their hands. It would be quite a sight to behold – but they certainly wouldn’t be in any position to make decisions or partake in “temporal pincer manoeuvres”.

The film takes great lengths to inform us that inverted characters can’t breathe verted oxygen, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t just be breathing in reverse – taking in carbon dioxide, and breathing out oxygen. Also, how they are comprehending anything is beyond me. All electrical impulses are travelling the wrong way within their brains.

To me, the most annoying problem is the interaction between inverted people and their surroundings. Every action undermines reality; for example, light must be travelling backwards out of their eyes, but what happens when the inverted photons make it back into the verted world? Annihilation? That was a much more enjoyable film.

My final complaint regarding the physics, before I abandon this line of enquiry and let logic back in, is that the film had the audacity to try and patronise me. The scientist with the half-arsed explanation insists “don’t overthink it”, while Robert Pattinson has the nerve to suggest that he understands everything thanks to his master’s degree in theoretical physics. Characters dump jargon on us in the most meaningless ways (electrons, positrons, annihilation, etc.), making the “science” about as convincing as a Goop product description.

Problem 3: [inaudible]

This won’t take long to explain. The film has numerous scenes where the dialogue is muffled, or far too quiet to understand, and this is inexcusable. Nolan is on record saying that he sometimes makes dialogue quiet to amplify the loudness of the surroundings, such as inside the spacecraft in Interstellar. However, although some of the muffled dialogue in Tenet is a clear artistic choice, much of it feels like a mistake. Take the scene on the racing yacht, where characters have headsets in order to hear each other, but we’re left unable to discern anything over the crashing waves. Even if this was intentional, the fact that it feels like a mistake makes it clumsy – and why do this intentionally? The inaudible dialogue means that crucial plot points are missed… Which leads me onto my next complaint.

Problem 4: Plot

Nobody will dispute that Tenet has a convoluted story. However, the problem isn’t that the plot is complicated, but that the audience is left confused through no fault of their own. The opening of the film lurches around the world, throwing names and places and dates at us so quickly that taking notes would have been impossible. I felt as if I was constantly on the back foot, wondering who characters were, what they were doing and why they were doing it, and after a while I just gave up. I accepted that I couldn’t understand what was happening, so I just tried to enjoy the action sequences (there’s a really cool one with a fire engine where the music goes BWWWWAAAAAAAH).

I have seen people defending this film online by claiming that it requires multiple rewatches to fully understand the plot and appreciate its majesty. This may well be true, but… Ugh. Maybe the film is more enjoyable the second time round, but Tenet gave me no incentive to endure it again. I don’t want to understand it. We are parting ways here and I am never coming back. Don’t you dare try and reverse my entropy.

Problem 5: Exposition

One of the reasons that the plot is so hard to follow is that it gets explained to us via dry monologues. Rather than conversing normally, the characters take it in turns to read out the cells of Nolan’s movie timeline spreadsheet, often while sitting in high-end restaurants, walking down inexplicably noisy streets, or hanging off the edge of inexcusably loud yachts. At the start of the film, we sit through multiple fancy dinners in order to be subjected to backstory that may or may not be imperative to the plot. It’s exhausting. And the protagonist doesn’t even eat anything. Not once. Nothing annoys me like food waste, I tell you – nothing.

The best kind of exposition is the kind that you don’t notice. Audiences can just about handle an exposition monologue when it comes from a scientist explaining the premise of the film, because both we and the protagonist are ignorant and wish to be informed. However, being sat down and given a list of the antagonist’s negative traits and miserable backstory is not an engaging way to introduce him. Sadly, this sort of exposition is littered throughout the film, and it sticks out like a forest of sore thumbs.

Problem 6: Characters

It is difficult to create convincing characters when they are restricted to expositional monologuing. Conversations feel unnatural when motivations are given in bullet point lists, and emotions feel fake when presented in spreadsheet format. Although we don’t require our secret agent protagonist to have a back story, we need some sort of insight into his thought process. And of course, it would be easier to understand his thought process if we had the first clue what was going on around him.

The shallowest character of them all is, unsurprisingly, a potential love interest. Tenet follows the classic cliche of having the protagonist stop at nothing to rescue a damsel in distress that he only just met. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so annoying if we had been given any reason to root for said damsel, but she has only three modes: getting captured/abused, declaring hatred for husband, and declaring love for son. She repeats this last one so much that it sounds as if she doesn’t believe it herself. The only upside is that it led to the funniest line of the film – which became the highlight for all the wrong reasons.

In summary…

I didn’t like Tenet. The fact that I divided this review into a list of problems speaks volumes – and speaking volumes was something that this film got very wrong indeed. I won’t go as far as to call Tenet an irredeemable waste of time and energy. It was just an unapologetically stupid misunderstanding of time and energy. Watch it at your peril. Remember, once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it – unless you figure out a way to reverse entropy.