Title: Tenet
Director: Christopher Nolan
Where Available: In Theaters
Rating:
Summary:
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
Review:
"Don't try to understand it. Feel it."
Tenet is the first movie I have seen in theaters since March. It was officially released in theaters yesterday, but I was able to see an early release at a theater 30 miles away. No theaters around me are open at the moment, but I am patiently waiting because I know as soon as they open my wallet will be dry. Tenet was highly anticipated by me and pretty much every Christopher Nolan fan. It's really difficult to describe this in words, so bare with me. I am genuinely mind boggled by Nolan's script and execution. I mean, he did spend about six years specifically working on Tenet and 20 years pondering the idea, so the fact that the movie is so flawless and thought out isn't surprising. Those who have watched Christopher Nolan's past movies know he is the master of warping time like in Memento and Inception, but neither of these films could have prepared us for the insanity that is Tenet.
A special agent, only known as The Protagonist, must embark on a time-bending mission to stop the start of World War III. Equipped with only the word Tenet and having no prior knowledge of the mission at hand, will he be able to prevent the future from killing the past?
Let's talk about the Grandfather Paradox is. The Grandfather Paradox is a logical problem that asks if you traveled back in time to a period before your grandfather had children and killed him, making your birth impossible, how would you have traveled back in time in the first place?
If you look deeper into the questions, the only way this is possible is with the many-worlds theory. A minority of physicists (we can call them the radicals) seem to believe the universe doesn't have one history, but an infinite number of them paralleled to one another. For every decision made on earth, a new world is created. Now connecting that back to the Grandfather Paradox, you could alter history by killing your grandfather, making you nonexistent, but by doing that, the universe would split into separate branches. One history where you've killed your grandfather, and one from where you traveled that would exist as it did before. The easiest way to compare this to something simple is trains. Time traveling is like hopping from one train track to another, with a new universe/track being created for every action you take.
This interpretation of time travel isn't as supported as the principle of self-consistency. Russian physicist Igor Novikov, the creator of this principle, states that a time traveler cannot change the past because he or she was already always a part of it. You can't kill your grandfather because you're alive to do it. The fact that you exist means this could have never happened.
But, Tenet is not a movie about time traveling. Actually, there is no time traveling at all. It's based around inversion. As Nolan puts it in the film's production notes: "Every law of physics is symmetrical - it can run forwards or backwards in time and be the same - except for entropy." (the degree of order in a system. In the second law of thermodynamics, as time moves forward, entropy can never decrease - it either increases or stays the same.) "The theory being that if you could invert the flow of entropy for an object, you could reverse the flow of time for that object." In the film, our characters are inverted and must live in reverse, pretty much running backwards through time relative to us. This means that they do not jump back a week in the past, but have to live that week in reverse till they reach that point in time. If this all sounds REALLY confusing to you, trust me, you are not alone. Even after researching intensely and watching about 20 youtube videos, I still don't fully understand how the concept works. I don't think I ever will actually, but that's not the point of the movie. The most fun parts watching this were the moments where me and my dad turned to each other in genuine confusion. Neither of us had any idea what was going on, and that made the movie 10 times better. As I said at the beginning of this review in a quote taken directly from one of the characters in the movie, "Don't try to understand it. Feel it.", and that is exactly what me and my dad did.
Performance wise I was BLOWN AWAY. John David Washington, who plays The Protagonist, really outdid himself. (Fun Fact: he is Denzel Washingtons sonHaving played on the Rams as a professional football player, Washington was able to use his athleticism to his characters advantage. Pretty much, this movie would not have been nearly as good without his natural athletic ability. Truly outstanding performance and I can't wait to see what project he moves onto next! I don't have enough words to describe the talent Robert Pattinson has. This man has VARIETY. I have been on a Pattinson movie streak, as I just binged all of the Twilight movies for the first time. Niel, Pattinson's character, is more humorous and laid back than most other roles we have seen him in. If I went into the fan theories about Neil we would be here all day, but let's just say that he is quite the paradox himself. Overall, these two men ROCKED this movie. I'm honestly hoping for some type of documentary about the film making process just to see how much hard work went into creating these characters.
Even though Tenet was plot heavy and extremely focused on The Protagonist and Niel, there was a great supporting cast. Elizabeth Debicki, who my high school friends will clearly remember as Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, plays Kat, the main female character in this movie. She is OUTSTANDING. No one else could have played Kat any better. From playing the whimsical Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Gilderoy Lockhart to a Russian villain trying to end the world, Kenneth Branagh BLEW ME AWAY. I am excited to say that he is directing the upcoming film Death On The Nile, a murder mystery similar to his past directing credit for Murder On The Orient Express.
My feelings walking out of Tenet were the same as when I watched 1917 last year: how the heck did they film that? I could go on and on about the cinematography and choreography in both Tenet and 1917, but we would be here for a while, so I will be brief. For Tenet, everything was pretty much in camera. That means no CG, no green-screens, NADA! Buying a whole 747 airplane and crashing it into the side of an airport in camera is only something Christopher Nolan would do for a movie. (Not to mention the $225 million dollar budget Nolan was given, making it one of the most expensive films ever!)
Now onto choreography. Wow, just, wow. Visually stunning in every way. Imagine having to learn how to speak backwards, walk backwards, fight backwards, do facial expressions backwards, drive backwards, and pretty much act entirely backwards. Well, that is what John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh had to do. Kenneth Branagh specifically had to learn to speak backwards with a Russian accent. There are fight scenes where one actor is moving backwards while another is moving forwards. It was completely insane to watch onscreen thinking the footage was being put in reverse only to find out afterwards that everything was filmed normally but with backwards choreography. It really threw my mind for a loop.
One little piece of information for my readers who will go see this movie and do some research of their own, checkout "The Sator Square." It is a word square comprised of five five-letter words that form a palindrome: SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS. Again, this is another part of Tenet that I could go on for ages about, so I will leave you to check it out on your own!
(I am including the most accurate timeline I could find on the internet for the movie nerds that are going to want an organized chart after watching! It is definitely confusing to read but VERY helpful in organizing information.)
This movie is a piece of art carefully handcrafted by Christopher Nolan. No matter how confusing or intense it got, I just kept thinking about how freaking cool everything was. I'm crossing my fingers to see if Nolan will make another movie to go along with Tenet because it was just truly amazing.
That was definitely a lot of information for a movie review. I usually do a lot of research for everything I watch, but none get close to having as long a search history streak as this one. I would call this post a brain dump of all the information I could pull together in a way that makes sense to my brain. Whether I was watching the movie, reading interviews, or looking at behind the scenes videos, I can't remember a moment where I was not having fun.Once this movie is available to purchase, I 100% plan on getting it to rewatch, but that is not the way you should watch it for the first time. I think there is a reason that Nolan released this movie in theaters even towards the end of the pandemic. It is a whole experience that wouldn't be the same on a TV or computer at home. You aren't meant to be able to pause and rewind to catch something you miss, because "What's happened, happened."
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