Counterfactual Chaos: Thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”

This time, less would definitely be more.  

I’d like to think that I’m pretty adept at grasping narratives that play with time -- whether alternate histories, time travel tales, or plots that unfold outside of conventional temporal parameters.    In fact, many narratives that fall into this category rank among my all-time favorites: films like Donny Darko, Twelve Monkeys, and Total Recall; novels such as Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow; and comic books, such as Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler.  

Oh yes -- I also loved Christopher Nolan’s films, Memento, Inception, and The Prestige.  

Nolan’s new film, Tenet, however, lost me early on and never regained my full attention.  I watched dutifully as the film’s protagonists (John David Washington and Robert Pattinson) struggled to save the world from imploding due to the forces of “inversion.”  But it was simply too much to absorb.  

Perhaps if the 2 hour and 30-minute film had been produced as an eight-part binge-able streaming series, Nolan could have acquainted viewers with the film’s core concepts at a more leisurely pace.  As things stand, it’s all too much – MUCH too much – to take in one sitting.  At least if you’re going to take the film seriously and actually think through its ramifications. 

There are too many events to remember early on in expectation of their eventual inversion; too many scheming characters with murky agendas to keep straight; and the pace of the film is altogether way too fast to appreciate its intricate plotting.  

There’s also something about “inversion” that just doesn’t work on film.  Watching two timelines unfold simultaneously is extremely disorienting.  It’s one thing to watch a conventional time travel film – say, Back to the Future – and see a time traveler arrive in an earlier era and participate in the era’s events as they unfold in a forward direction.  It’s another thing entirely to watch earlier events be rewound in front of your eyes TOGETHER with new events unspooling in the same visual frame.   

When I read Time’s Arrow and watched Memento back in the 1990s, it was initially a bit of a struggle to grasp the time-altering narratives at their core.  But within a short period of time, I got the hang of it and really enjoyed the mental workout.  Tenet -- to my mind at least – doesn’t reward the same effort, which is too bad since I was all prepared to invest it.  

I get that the film has a parabolic structure, as one critic has noted, and that early scenes fold back in on themselves in the film’s second half.  (And I’m now assuming the film’s palindromic title is meant to illustrate this as well.  Don’t yell at me for not bothering to look this up in already published reviews – I’m sure someone else beat me to the punch).  

But it’s all very clinically presented without much emotional impact.  

For the record, I was also surprised at how much of the film is made up of semi-cliché action scenes involving car chases and battle sequences.  Sure, they are “inverted,” but I didn’t find them to be that interesting visually, seeing as how they are essentially just conventional actions clips run backwards.  (Combining these scenes together with forward-spooling scenes in the same visual space is probably a technical achievement, but that’s too inside-the-weeds for me to appreciate it).  

What about the film’s counterfactual elements?  In a nutshell, they are pretty pedestrian.  “We have to save the world from what might have happened” (or whatever the exact quote was) is all well and good.  No objections from me there.  But repeating it as a phrase several times in the film doesn’t really make it come alive.  I never felt any emotional dread from the prospect of “inversion” as I would, say, from the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, zombie apocalypse, or a (!!!) global pandemic.  

I felt the same way about the repeated use of the phrase, “whatever happens, happened.”  I get the point.  The usual phrase, “Whatever happens, happens” implies a kind of fatalism about what the future holds.  “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be,” and all that.  Nolan’s witty tweaking of the phrase suggests that whatever lies in the future has already happened in the past.  I suppose that’s true as far as it goes, but the phrase is pretty ambiguous and – like the film overall – doesn’t really reward further interpretation with a deeper payoff.  

In the end, Tenet feels and looks like a “big” movie about “big” ideas.  But it comes up short.

Like I said, sometimes less is more.