2020's Lone Summer Blockbuster

This weekend could be said to be a momentous one in movie theaters around the United States: the "big movie" is coming out of hibernation. After more than a year in which the expected $100 million movies would either release simultaneously for streaming or not be released at all, A Quiet Place Part II is arriving only in theaters to a hopefully eager audience.

But there was one movie that dared to show up only in theaters during the pandemic, that optimistically poked its head up last summer only to flop: director Christopher Nolan's latest event film, Tenet. Did it fail because few people were willing to go to a movie theater in September of 2020? Almost certainly. But now that I've been able to catch up with the movie, I posit that Tenet was going to fall short of expectations in any case. It's not a bad movie by any stretch. But I've seen all of Christopher Nolan's full-length features, and it is the "worst" of the lot.

A few things about the movie are just plain good. You get many of the striking visuals that are now the signature of a Christopher Nolan movie. And in between the most eye-catching visuals (like a building assembling-then-exploding again-in-a-different-place all in one shot), there are a lot of very subtle shots that are actually quite difficult when you pause to think about them. There are many tricky scenes where you will think "oh, they just ran the film backward there"... and sometimes, they did. But plenty of shots mix forward and backward elements together, defying such a simplistic solution. In an age where one assumes a computer can do anything, it's nice to still be wowed with a "how did they do that?" moment.

I also hope this movie marks the official arrival of John David Washington as action movie hero -- at least, if he wants it. His father Denzel, throughout his career, flipped back and forth between prestige pics and popcorn movies, and it seems to me like he has the same chops: he's great at the action, while also clearly showing more going on beneath the surface. (It's actually a good cast throughout, though it features many members of Nolan's "repertory company" of favorite actors.)

But there's also a lot about the movie that's middling -- chiefly, how the plot pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of being both terribly predictable and utterly incomprehensible at the same time. Unless you are asleep at the wheel as a viewer, you are going to know every single "plot twist" of this movie before it happens. That's the nature of the story here, telegraphing all the moves in advance... and it's simply not as subtle as, say, Memento is at hiding things in plain sight. Yet even when you know what a future scene is obliged to be, the moment-to-moment logic of getting from one action sequence to the next is impenetrable. I'm someone who never understood the need for all those internet articles and info-graphics meant to explain the seems-pretty-straightforward-to-me plotting of Inception. But compared to that, Tenet is a crazed conspiracy theorist's wall loaded with photos, newspaper clippings, and red yarn. The major organs are all there; the connective tissue is weak and cannot bear the load.

Then there's the just plain bad: chiefly, the audio mix. I'd forgotten hearing complaints on the internet about the sound in Tenet, but if anything, it's worse than advertised. About 20 minutes in, we turned on the subtitles and just left them on; this was validated as the right decision with dozens of instances of inaudible dialogue we'd have to read, and supposed noises like laughs and grunts that I would swear on anything are not there. It's as though Nolan raised Inception's BWAAAAANG with Interstellar's deafening pipe organ, then just pushed all in here with composer Ludwig Göransson's all-encompassing score. I can't even decide whether I think it's a good score. (Is all the backmasking of instruments clever or obvious? Why not both?) In any case, I feel sorry for anyone who actually did see this in a theater; it's hard enough to follow even when you do know all of the dialogue.

Still, if you don't really mind much how you're getting from one action sequence to the next, there's a lot of fun to be had in watching Tenet. Fist fights, car chases, stealth infiltration, all-out military engagements... Tenet has it all, as big or bigger than a James Bond film. But would I ever watch it again? No, I can't imagine I ever would. So I'll give Tenet a C+. Christopher Nolan completists will need to see it at some point, but here's hoping that the re-opening world of blockbusters we're about to enter will serve us up better action fare.