Tenet isn't worth risking your health for

 

One of the great misquotes about filmmaking is that you should show and not tell. This is not true, the actual quote from the great Alexander Mackendrick is that films show then tell. Mackendrick’s point is that dialogue should be a commentary on action not a description.

If Christopher Nolan ever read Mackendrick’s standard text On Filmmaking, I can only assume he turned over a couple of pages at once. In Tenet, Nolan tells and tells and tells and finally shows you something you’ve long since given up on. I have never seen a film with so much pointless exposition; I assume Nolan also missed Francois Truffaut’s comment about whatever is said instead of shown being lost on the viewer. This is two and a half hours of being talked at.

Tenet is a long collection of action set pieces to no real purpose. Nolan is an excellent technical director, so the action is expertly staged but as the film goes on – and it does go on, and on, and on – there is less and less reason to care and an increasing feeling of disconnection.

Given the length of time we waited for this film, if this is genuinely the saviour of cinema then we are in bigger trouble than I thought.

At this stage I would normally recap the plot but, if I’m honest, I don’t think I could if my life depended on it. It’s about temporal manipulation, parallel timestreams, and a magic word that seems to always work but we don’t really know because they only use it the once. There is also a lot of stuff about Freeports which should please Rishi Sunak.

One of the narrative conceits is that time flows in different directions, forwards and backwards, but I’m afraid that watching the movie it felt like time stood still.

I’m not a fan of the opinionated Will Self but I cherish his description of Nolan’s Inception (2010) which he described as a stupid person’s idea of a clever film. I feel that way about a lot of Nolan’s work, but especially Tenet.

Nolan always needs to remind you how clever he is. He made a film based on papers from Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne after all. That’s why in Tenet superspy sidekick Robert Pattinson has a Masters degree that allows his dialogue to sound like he’s rehearsing a TED talk.

And yes, it is all a bit meta on narrative structure. That’s why the protagonist is called The Protagonist (John David Washington) and never stops telling people he’s the protagonist. There is even a scientist who, in the first piece of major dialogue, just dumps all the information on the audience they didn’t know they needed or indeed wanted.

Despite all this mumbo jumbo there is no getting away from the fact that Tenet is just horcruxes with added techie porn. The alleged cleverness is always so glaringly obvious, even in the nature of the title.

The film is at its best in the action sequences, there is undoubtedly a Bond film in Nolan desperate to get out. The set pieces may be overblown but they are easy on the eye and the lack of any emotional attachment to anyone means they can be watched with a certain detachment. Generally, you can feel impressed by their execution without having to engage emotionally. That said, the only moment where I did engage was in a simple fight in a hotel kitchen which might be the best action scene in the film.

Robert Pattinson is probably the best thing in the film. John David Washington is a bit of a charisma vacuum, befitting a character with no personality. The normally watchable Elizabeth Debicki is saddled with unspeakable dialogue and, as the villain, Kenneth Branagh continues his mission to make it increasingly difficult to believe he was ever considered the best of his generation.

All the craft choices seem odd too. Nolan’s favourite DoP Hoyte van Hoytema shoots most of the film in close ups so not only are people yelling at you they are doing it into your face. Happily, the sound mix in a non-IMAX version is so muddy you can’t make out what they are saying.

There was so much invested in Tenet it is intriguing to consider what it means for movies in a post-COVID world. This is a film with a budget of more than $200 million which means it needs to take in around $400 million to be in profit. Plainly it will not do that in socially-distanced cinemas. However, it was supposed to stimulate interest to get us back to the movies and I struggle to see it doing that.

Unlike, for example, The Sixth Sense (1999) there is no compulsion to see it again to spot how you were fooled. Tenet is one and done and I can’t imagine the buzz lasting much beyond that lifebelt for a drowning man scenario of the opening week or two.

Tenet ultimately is a mystery box without a mystery. Since I’m in a quotey mood, let’s end with another. Monroe Stahr, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, was, we are told, one of ‘not half a dozen men who could keep the whole equation of pictures in his head’. I suspect even Stahr would have struggled to know what was going on in Tenet.