Director Christopher Nolan brings yet another brain-aching story to the cinema, as he did previously with Inception (which I see I scored 75% here). This time the plot concerns our hero, a CIA agent who refers to himself as "The Protagonist" (played by African American John David Washington), who must the save the world from destruction. The high-concept of the film, without going into too much detail, deals with what physicists call "The arrow of time". Not being a scientist myself, as far as I understand it, these scientists believe that there is no reason in physics why time must travel from the past to the future. In the world of The Protagonist, there is no more arrow of time. Here, the future and the past and the present can, and will, collide. The fate of the world is at stake. I hadn't realised that I scored Inception so well and I thought that I got more out of this film. I think it's a 70% kind of movie but I'm bumping up my score by 5+% to reward Nolan for being so ambitious with his choice of subject matter, which puts the film into 8/10 star territory here on IMDB.
The high-concept of the film is something that I have pondered myself and the parts of the film dealing with this are ideas that I had formed myself, namely, the notion that information can hypothetically be able to be transmitted from the future to the past (and how that would benefit people receiving that information). The film takes that one step further than I would want to, which is what makes it an interesting action film.
Now, I'm not convinced that physicists would countenance the world of this film, as far as there being localised instances of this high-concept, as opposed to time's arrow just moving in one direction or the other. Perhaps the film smuggles in instances of parallel worlds or time travel and they don't really fit in or make sense when used with the core high-concept of the film. In some ways the time travel aspect is more complex than that of another film dealing with that specific idea, Primer. I've reviewed Primer here and noted how you really need a notepad and spreadsheets to keep tabs on what is happening. Or you could just ask the scriptwriter(s) to explain what the Hell is happening. In that way, Tenet is nowhere near as brain-aching and mentally taxing as Primer...but I would still question Nolan (as well as Kip Thorne) to see whether the scenarios are plausible, which I doubt that they are.
A general problem with time travel stories is that I just don't believe them. I don't find them coherent. This feeling isn't dispelled by Tenet but that in no way detracted from my experience of it. If you don't think too much about the high-concept high jinks, there's pleasure to be had watching all the action unfold. Not finding these kinds of stories coherent, I wouldn't be the kind of person who would watch the film again believing that it will all make sense on a second viewing. Personally, this isn't the kind of film that would make me want to see it again just because I found it entertaining. For that reason, I wouldn't see it again just for the sake of a faint hope that everything will make sense on another viewing of it.
One way in which a repeat viewing might help to make sense of things better though is that although the film is helpful with regard to the frenetic action of the finale by colour coding combatants, my problem was that I forgot what the two colours used signified! It's for these less than high-concept reasons that I can see value in seeing the film again. But I won't.
To be relevant in an opaque way, whilst pondering the significance of the film's title, it occurred to me that it was a palindrome. That's kind of a primer for the film. You get little teases for the high-concept in action but Nolan does make you wait a while before throwing it at you in Hollywood action set pieces, which would be the calling card for it.
This brings me to a criticism of the film: at times, people just struck me as being idiots, in the way that characters in Ridley Scott's sequels to Alien struck me as being stupid (I've said that in my reviews of those films here). There were two instances of this that I noticed: firstly, the people in a security vehicle in a heist sequence (and let's not forget the police who appear in a car later in that sequence) and, secondly, a set piece where there is a fight between a man in a gas mask in a corridor and The Protagonist. When this sequence was revisited, I was wondering why on Earth the man in the mask would try to shoot The Protagonist. It's Ridley Scott level stupidity.
Another criticism of the film is more practical: at times I found it hard to understand the dialogue for various reasons. Things like people speaking with thick accents, people speaking whilst wearing gas masks or just being off-centre as far as microphone placement goes, I suppose. I didn't quite catch what the Indian woman said right at the end of the film. What was that last thing that she said? Maybe nothing too great is lost by not hearing it. But it would have been nice to have heard it clearly in any case.
I can't help thinking that in current times, with what's happening or has happened in America (the #MeToo movement and the police murdering African American civilians), that audiences may resonate with an African American action hero and a key woman in the story. It should be noted that that there is no romance to be found here.
Lastly, I thought Daniel Radcliffe was in this film. Wrong! It's another former teen franchise idol.
Oh, I forgot to mention, maybe this film is a bit like the video game "Braid"? I never finished that...it got too brain-aching for me!
Sci-fi recommendations:
Source code (10/10)
12 monkeys (the film. I haven't seen the TV series)
The thirteenth floor
Dark City (10/10)
Gattaca (10/10)
Edit in, 21/10/2023; I should confess that shortly after seeing this film at the cinema, I did watch it again there shortly afterwards. All that I remember now about that second viewing is that it seemed to me that the scene where you see a woman diving off of a boat seemed to defy the logic of the movie, as in how this action looked. Well, that's my impression in any case. Today I went to a YouTube channel which I recently discovered, called "Heavy Spoilers" and viewed some of its videos on this film. I like the work that it does with films of this nature...i.e. Very hard to follow films.
The high-concept of the film is something that I have pondered myself and the parts of the film dealing with this are ideas that I had formed myself, namely, the notion that information can hypothetically be able to be transmitted from the future to the past (and how that would benefit people receiving that information). The film takes that one step further than I would want to, which is what makes it an interesting action film.
Now, I'm not convinced that physicists would countenance the world of this film, as far as there being localised instances of this high-concept, as opposed to time's arrow just moving in one direction or the other. Perhaps the film smuggles in instances of parallel worlds or time travel and they don't really fit in or make sense when used with the core high-concept of the film. In some ways the time travel aspect is more complex than that of another film dealing with that specific idea, Primer. I've reviewed Primer here and noted how you really need a notepad and spreadsheets to keep tabs on what is happening. Or you could just ask the scriptwriter(s) to explain what the Hell is happening. In that way, Tenet is nowhere near as brain-aching and mentally taxing as Primer...but I would still question Nolan (as well as Kip Thorne) to see whether the scenarios are plausible, which I doubt that they are.
A general problem with time travel stories is that I just don't believe them. I don't find them coherent. This feeling isn't dispelled by Tenet but that in no way detracted from my experience of it. If you don't think too much about the high-concept high jinks, there's pleasure to be had watching all the action unfold. Not finding these kinds of stories coherent, I wouldn't be the kind of person who would watch the film again believing that it will all make sense on a second viewing. Personally, this isn't the kind of film that would make me want to see it again just because I found it entertaining. For that reason, I wouldn't see it again just for the sake of a faint hope that everything will make sense on another viewing of it.
One way in which a repeat viewing might help to make sense of things better though is that although the film is helpful with regard to the frenetic action of the finale by colour coding combatants, my problem was that I forgot what the two colours used signified! It's for these less than high-concept reasons that I can see value in seeing the film again. But I won't.
To be relevant in an opaque way, whilst pondering the significance of the film's title, it occurred to me that it was a palindrome. That's kind of a primer for the film. You get little teases for the high-concept in action but Nolan does make you wait a while before throwing it at you in Hollywood action set pieces, which would be the calling card for it.
This brings me to a criticism of the film: at times, people just struck me as being idiots, in the way that characters in Ridley Scott's sequels to Alien struck me as being stupid (I've said that in my reviews of those films here). There were two instances of this that I noticed: firstly, the people in a security vehicle in a heist sequence (and let's not forget the police who appear in a car later in that sequence) and, secondly, a set piece where there is a fight between a man in a gas mask in a corridor and The Protagonist. When this sequence was revisited, I was wondering why on Earth the man in the mask would try to shoot The Protagonist. It's Ridley Scott level stupidity.
Another criticism of the film is more practical: at times I found it hard to understand the dialogue for various reasons. Things like people speaking with thick accents, people speaking whilst wearing gas masks or just being off-centre as far as microphone placement goes, I suppose. I didn't quite catch what the Indian woman said right at the end of the film. What was that last thing that she said? Maybe nothing too great is lost by not hearing it. But it would have been nice to have heard it clearly in any case.
I can't help thinking that in current times, with what's happening or has happened in America (the #MeToo movement and the police murdering African American civilians), that audiences may resonate with an African American action hero and a key woman in the story. It should be noted that that there is no romance to be found here.
Lastly, I thought Daniel Radcliffe was in this film. Wrong! It's another former teen franchise idol.
Oh, I forgot to mention, maybe this film is a bit like the video game "Braid"? I never finished that...it got too brain-aching for me!
Sci-fi recommendations:
Source code (10/10)
12 monkeys (the film. I haven't seen the TV series)
The thirteenth floor
Dark City (10/10)
Gattaca (10/10)
Edit in, 21/10/2023; I should confess that shortly after seeing this film at the cinema, I did watch it again there shortly afterwards. All that I remember now about that second viewing is that it seemed to me that the scene where you see a woman diving off of a boat seemed to defy the logic of the movie, as in how this action looked. Well, that's my impression in any case. Today I went to a YouTube channel which I recently discovered, called "Heavy Spoilers" and viewed some of its videos on this film. I like the work that it does with films of this nature...i.e. Very hard to follow films.