Nolan’s most oblique film to date — a sprawling, ornate action thriller in which the heroes can invert their passage through time so that they experience car chases and fights and all sorts of other things in reverse — is also one of his most ambitious, and, weirdly, one of his lightest.
There are parts of Tenet that feel like they were crafted as a direct response to those who criticized Inception for being too exposition-heavy. You can almost hear Nolan yelling, “Okay, wise guy, how do you like it when I don’t explain things?” Nolan’s most oblique film to date — a sprawling, ornate action thriller in which the heroes can invert their passage through time so that they experience car chases and fights and all sorts of other things in reverse — is also one of his most ambitious, and, weirdly, one of his lightest. We’re told early on in the film that we shouldn’t try to understand it, but that we should feel it; that’s pretty solid advice. Not unlike The Big Sleep, or The Parallax View, Tenet is a movie built out of brilliant, often beautiful setpieces whose overall placement in the broader puzzle is not always clear. That’s not to suggest, however, that the film is frivolous or meaningless. The idea that our future selves can hold sway over our present-day selves is an adorably Nolan-esque notion that plays out across pictures like Memento, Interstellar, and Inception. And how wonderful it is to see a filmmaker tackle a big modern genre movie in such challenging fashion — and on such a massive scale. Maybe some will call it a flop, but if it is, it’s the kind of flop that only Christopher Nolan could have made. It would have been fun to go back to the theater for repeat viewings during Tenet’s initial run to pick apart the timeline and the story, but the COVID pandemic rendered that pretty much impossible for most of us. That said, Tenet might be the Nolan film I enjoy revisiting the most nowadays.