NOLAN GOES OVERBOARD WITH BAFFLING ‘TENET’
Director’s latest mind-bending film hits home video
Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” is gorgeous and flabbergasting, an action extravaganza that’s nearly impossible to decipher. It’s about time (maybe?) and saving the world (sure!), but mostly it reveals Nolan to be a guy who’s too caught up in his own air and would do well to come back down to Earth for a heat check.
Nolan is our foremost architect of articulate blockbusters, and the mind-boggling “Inception” and his success with the “Dark Knight” trilogy gave him a pass to do pretty much whatever he wants. “Tenet” is a bridge too far, and after all its globehopping, tailored suits and backward naval gazing, it comes off as a sharp but empty exercise in showoffiness.
John David Washington shows he can carry a blockbuster in the lead role. He plays a CIA agent known only as Protagonist, Nolan’s on-the-nose nod to the nature of storytelling, and the fact that we’re all the stars of our own stories.
The movie begins with an audacious sequence set in an opera house; it literally opens with the sound of an orchestra tuning up, which is also Nolan’s way of cracking his knuckles and getting ready to let ’er rip. The set piece is a stunner, the kind of bravura scene most blockbusters would stage at the climax, and it shows a visionary director working at the peak of his game.
It’s not long, however, before “Tenet” is awash in confusion, with a time
traveling plot, characters who freely come and go (as the Protagonist’s overseer, Robert Pattinson drifts in and out like he’s visiting the movie between other projects), and an overacting Kenneth Branagh in the villain role as a Russian business tycoon with his hands in future-bending technologies. Where it’s all headed is as much a guess as where it all began.
It’s the kind of movie that will be dissected and decoded on the Internet for eons by devotees of Nolan who are convinced he can do no wrong. But that doesn’t take away from the feeling of hollowness at its core, its lack of human connection, and the sense that Nolan, for all the movie’s bells and whistles, has nothing to say.
For a movie that plays with the concept of going back and doing things the right way, “Tenet” could use a do-over.