By: Ben Johnson
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It sure looks like we're dealing with a forwards and backwards action movie here. |
If I cared enough to be embarrassed, I might feel a little bashful to admit I’ve seen at least a portion of Tenet (2020), directed by Christopher Nolan, probably triple-digit times. Stitched together, I’ve seen the entire movie somewhere in the dozens of times. I did see it in the theater one time. But I have definitely been asleep while it was on my TV at least a hundred times.
I’m not sure exactly how Tenet became my go-to-sleep movie of choice. It’s quite loud in parts, with sudden dynamic shifts to gunfire and squealing tires and blaring “bwah bwah BWAH BWAH” scoring. It’s fairly active and tense in parts, with yelling and violence and quite unsleepy vibes. Nonetheless, Tenet has managed to displace the sonorous authoritative male voices of The Hunt For Red October, the old-timey midatlantic accent and clarinet jazz soundscape of The Aviator, and even the dreamy lullaby of Spirited Away as my most trusted night-night movie.
To hazard a guess, I’d say that Tenet has gained this pavlovian light-out status because, to me, it’s a uniquely ridiculous film. Like a long car trip with a logorrheic family member or overhearing a stranger talk about their fantasy football team, Tenet triggers a kind of full-body shutdown whenever it engages me above a certain threshold of energy expenditure. Over time and repeated exposure, that threshold has been reduced to nothing.
This doesn’t make me like the movie any less. Quite the contrary. I have a near-medical attachment to it at this point in my life.
So that’s the perspective I bring to the table when multiple separate people on my Bluesky timeline started to talk about this movie today without seeming provocation. Upon closer inspection, it looks like Nolan’s doing a round of promotional press for The Odyssey, so we’re reviewing his oeuvre, maybe? Some discourse about whether he or his movies are smart or stupid?
I have thoughts on that, specifically related to Tenet, and I feel compelled to share literally every one of them on the off chance that not doing so will prevent me from ever falling asleep again.
So here’s my full, very long, scene-by-scene breakdown of everything about Tenet that is either stupid or smart. Use it as a companion piece for your next watch, or forget all about it and never speak of this again. I’m fine either way. I did this for me, mostly.
It's not the guy, and also the guy!
The Opera House Siege
STUPID THINGS:
The conductor is full of dust? Or the bad guys are shooting dust bullets? Or we’re nerfing the bloodshed like that time when Mortal Kombat console games had to make it look like you were punching dirt out of people’s heads? Either way, mildly stupid.
Maybe a gun guy could explain to me why John David Washington might be flipping a bullet out of the chamber in his sleep the first time we see him. Is there any kind of tactical advantage here, or are we just supposed to be impressed that the dude is a badass based on the criteria that he practices doing little fun gun tricks?
It’s weird that the crowd doesn’t flee. This is all very orderly, even for a staged siege. Putting the whole crowd to sleep only makes them seem like 10% more calm. And several bad guys don’t even put on their gas masks until after everybody else is out. Also the sleepy gas is gone immediately? The CIA asset guy doesn’t even yawn when they go in there.
Zigging and zagging and popping into plain view ten feet away from a guy who’s shooting at you in a curved hallway that you could just walk backwards in to cut off an angle seems like a bad idea, but as established, I’m not a gun guy.
Wait, so the CIA asset guy is smuggling what he believes may be a nuclear device and he’s stopping to sip wine in a box while checking out a performance of Puccini’s Tosca at the local opera house? And he left it at coat check? And there’s a whole fake siege with shooting instead of just dressing up like a coat check person at the opera house? Seems stupid.
The first time John David Washington runs afoul of a guy in tactical black, it goes the way you might expect when an enemy combatant discovers an infiltrator. The second time? The second guy, in contrast, says “walk away, you don’t have to kill these people” in English while there’s 24 seconds on the loudly beeping bomb that John David Washington is clearly trying to remove. Ummm, mixed signals much? Walking away seems like it would exactly kill these people? If you’re dressed in black tactical gear at this siege, you could have any of a wide range of opinions about these bombs. This second guy is an avowed bomb centrist.
Also how do you build a concrete riser in an opera house with a backwards bullet lodged in it? Did some low-level gopher in the Tenet organization have to sit around in a backwards shipping container for several decades to dig the bullet… in? Are Ukrainian construction crews just used to a certain amount of loose backwards bullets being in their stuff, and don’t really sweat it when they’re building an opera house and there’s one in the pour?
SMART THINGS:
Stomping what appears to be a very nice cello is a good way to communicate “these guys mean business even though they’re using dust bullets.”
“Lady in distressed repose, with saxophone” is a strangely fetishistic Balthusian shot composition, but it does kind of set up the whole “we tend to ignore any potential threat posed by well-bred lanky blondes” achilles heel of our world’s specific bad guy culture.
Baseball sliding under the coat check counter is a cool move that I want to try if I ever end up vacationing in Estonia (where this sequence was shot).
John David Washington is pretty good at assessing the situation and changing plans on the fly in the little opera house dish room.
EARWORMS:
The way the one guy says “That’s not our mission” about diffusing the bombs like he’s a street tough from 1950’s Brooklyn.
DIAGNOSIS: COOL BUT STUPID.
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| Spare yourself, once they clear. |
Torture Session in the Train Yard
STUPID THINGS:
I’m not sure it’s stupid, exactly, but it’s funny that the one guy is just standing there playing Candy Crush on his phone.
It’s definitely stupid, but I always find myself wishing that somebody would cast me as a goon in an action movie whose entire job is to say exposition as menacingly as possible.
Why didn’t they double check if the guy who “didn’t last eighteen minutes” actually lasted more or less okay enough to hold a fake pill? We’ve already got a lot more questions than answers here. I’m usually asleep by now.
SMART THINGS:
It’s more confusing than it needs to be, but the whole “we have to set it back one hour” thing to establish that they’re just going to keep torturing does at least have its own internal logic, and it echos the whole idea that some kind of thing with time is going to be happening along with “we don’t know how old it is but it’s the real deal” and, I don’t know, a backwards bullet going through a guy. Maybe this is actually a stupid thing?
I guess if you work at a Ukrainian train yard, you learn to ignore stuff like this.
EARWORMS:
The torture guy is a walking earworm and I love him, but “GET IT OUT” is the winner.
DIAGNOSIS: SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF WORK FOR A SETUP.
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| Please, Mr. Mysterious Suit Man was my father. Call me Jim. |
Welcome to the Afterlife: Boat Chat and Lighthouse Sequence
STUPID THINGS:
Mr. Mysterious Suit Man keeps saying two things at once, like “to even know its nature is to lose” and “it’ll open the right doors but some of the wrong ones too” and “that test you passed, not everybody does” which is both unnecessarily convoluted and seemingly very Mr. Mysterious Suit Man of him.
SMART THINGS:
“You’ve been in a medically induced coma while we got you out of Ukraine and rebuilt your mouth” is a pretty smooth way to explain why John David Washington has veneers instead of CIA-salary teeth.
John David Washington stoically crying right away is a nice way to reassure us that he’s actually a very good actor (he isn’t, but the reassurance is nice).
Doing pull ups at the top of the light house ladder instead of the bottom seems unnecessary, but there’s probably some utility to it in an “action under fire” kind of way.
EARWORMS:
“You don’t work for us, you’re dead.”
Also: the whole rest of the scene.
DIAGNOSIS: MR. MYSTERIOUS SUIT MAN IS MY REAL DAD.
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| You're in a movie with some backwards stuff, okay? |
A Trip to the Backwards Lab
STUPID THINGS:
Here’s the first major “backwards thing” logic problem. This hunk of concrete in the lab has backwards bullets lodged in it, which means they somehow found a slab of wall riddled with bullet holes and knew they were backwards holes and not forwards holes.
Maybe the concrete is from the shootout in Stalsk 12, which they would know involved backwards bullets. That would make it easier to do the whole process of elimination where you shoot an empty gun at stuff until a reverse bullet comes back. So maybe they did that to find the right bullet-riddled chunk of concrete, but left some bullet holes in it, and then brought it back to the lab. We don’t know if they have some kind of a “yeah that’s a backwards one” detection technology. That would help.
More likely, some Tenet people in the future went backwards and shot a bunch of guns at some concrete and left the bullets in there, and it was all in the lab already. In which case: why concrete? Seems effortful.
Regardless, John David Washington, in this lab, is using a regular forwards gun to catch a backwards bullet. I wouldn’t do that. You’d want to do this with a backwards gun. You probably don’t want to deal with a backwards backfire. Also, not sure where the casing is, but it would have jumped off the ground into the chamber. Did Tenet Incorporated have to shop for giant lab spaces that have a bunch of backwards bullet casings lying all over the place?
Or is it this woman’s—I’ll call her “Dr. Backwards Lady” because I assume she has a doctorate in Backwards Stuff—job to grab some backwards casings and toss them around whenever she has guests who might need to learn about backwards bullets? Looking around for all the backwards stuff and then backwardsing it into forwards drawers seems like a shitty job. No wonder she’s salty.
SMART THINGS:
Another incidental beautiful thin blonde woman, in Dr. Backwards Lady herself. She has a nice meaty speaking role, only she’s not here for what, she’s here for how, so she stays isolated to this one sequence. I’m starting to get the feeling that beautiful thin blonde women who are just kind of stuck where they are is going to be a recurring thing.
For the sake of seeming smart instead of stupid, it’s smart to refer to backwards stuff as “inverted” instead of “backwards,” even if “what if a buncha stuff was inverted” is just as stupid of a premise. In honor of the stupidity, I will be using “backwards” a whole lot.
In addition to the first backwards stuff logic puzzle, we also have our first “fuggedaboudit” from Dr. Backwards Lady. When she said “just feel it,” I felt that. This movie seems pretty invested in explaining the details of fake impossible science, but it’s nice to know even it has its limits.
John David Washington going “Instinct. Got it.” instead of a whole backwards stuff training montage seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, but since this is the guy who did a cool baseball slide under the coat check counter, I guess I’m willing to believe him.
EARWORMS:
“Whoa” is a strong Keanu Reeves impression.
“You have to have dropped it.”
DIAGNOSIS: NOT BAD FOR A SCENE THAT ONLY EXISTS TO BE IN THE TRAILER.
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| Fine assumption. Deduction, then. |
An Audience With Sanjay Singh
STUPID THINGS:
John David Washington stays officially dead for like 8 minutes before calling an old CIA buddy to announce his aliveness, which is quite Macgruber of him.
“We live in a twilight world” stays the code for “I’m a CIA person” too long for my taste. I’m still allowed to worry about national security even if my duty transcends national interests.
The Singhs seem not at all perturbed by the fact that one of their household guards was shot (and presumably killed?) by a fellow Tenet ally. Even if they’re complete sociopaths with no feelings on the matter, they’ve got to spend the rest of their night pretending to be upset and talking to the cops and giving a statement and demanding an investigation. Call me old fashioned, but I’d be pissed.
It shouldn’t bother me that dialogue like “I have a contact who’s out of Sator’s reach” isn’t enough information for John David Washington to act on. He could call Priya up later and be like, “Hey, who’s this contact, by the way, I forgot to ask before I bungee jumped out of your house.” But… actually, that’s fun to imagine.
SMART THINGS:
It’s nice that John David Washington has a spy buddy now and can talk about spy friend things. Also, Teen Vampire Batman already knows your drink order and general drinking preferences, dude. Get wrecked. Get absolutely demolished.
Robert Pattinson must be some kind of a dang math whiz to calibrate the bungee cords exactly right for the precise amount of flinging they needed to get up to the balcony without breaking their backs or launching directly into a pylon. But you know what, I buy it. He’s smart about other stuff too. Maybe he spent some extra backwards and forwards time off screen figuring it out through trial and error. I bet that was a fun day.
A little break-in action sequence is a nice way to disrupt the steady exposition-only diet we’ve been getting since the title card.
Break time is break time, and you definitely shouldn’t let the fact that your coworker has been murdered keep you from finishing a hot meal.
A masculine front in a man’s world does have its uses. I use mine all the time.
“To get anywhere near Sator would take a fresh faced protagonist, and you are fresh as a daisy” is a strategically sound approach. Maybe we could name the John David Washington character, though? It kills me that the credits just say “Protagonist” and that’s the only word people use to refer to him in the movie. You’re telling me there was never a “Hey Buddy” in any of this?
EARWORMS:
“But I am the man people talk to” has some really nice pause-laden stank on it.
DIAGNOSIS: I AM OFFICIALLY READY TO START WATCHING THIS MOVIE NOW.
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| Same for me. I'm also this guy. |
Sir Michael Crosley’s Lunch
STUPID THINGS:
I can’t tell if it’s smart or stupid that this tension-laden interaction with a snooty maitre d is the closest we’re going to get to addressing race in a film that stars a Black man. I don’t have a take and appreciate that I don’t have to. I’m putting this bullet point in both the stupid and smart sections to hedge my bets. I will say that it’s a little stupid that “can you box that up for me?” is about the closest this entire movie—which is predicated on sometimes things are backwards as its premise—gets to a joke.
How many different places do we have to go to learn things before anything actually happens?
Honestly never noticed it until this close watch to remind myself what happens in sequence, but when Michael Caine says, “Rumor has it that she and Areppo were close” and John David Washington responds with a simple vacant, “Uh huh,” that “Uh huh” is a 100% accurate distillation of how I feel about learning more new things at this point in this movie. It’s been 20 minutes since the title card, and only two out of the eight characters with speaking roles we’ve met in that span will ever reappear in any of the rest of the movie. No wonder it puts me to sleep.
SMART THINGS:
Perfect casting for the guy who plays the snooty maitre d. There’s an exact type of person who rises to the level of “I will remain in this position until I retire at this post” in the upper echelons of the service industry. They are equally invested in both bootlicking and gatekeeping. Kudos to Jeremy Theobald for nailing it.
I can’t tell if it’s smart or stupid that this tension-laden interaction with a snooty maitre d is the closest we’re going to get to addressing race in a film that stars a Black man. I don’t have a take and appreciate that I don’t have to. I’m putting this bullet point in both the stupid and smart sections to hedge my bets. I will say that it’s “smart” that the movie frames this tension as a uniquely British phenomenon to help me, an American white guy and therefore a representative of both the major funding stream and “in the bag for Chris Nolan movies” demographics, avoid any feelings of complicity for the past enslavement and ongoing oppression of Black Americans.
There is a strong thematic undercurrent of expensive wastefulness in this film. Stomped cellos. Brooks Brothers not cutting it. Crashed airplanes. Jibed boats like this. All this is easy (and fun) to write off as part of a vibe I’ve often thought of as “horny for billionaire shit.” But this stuff does at least serve the thesis Sator will later deliver about why the people of the future would start a war with the past. (We get into some stuff. You’ll see.) For now, let’s just say that putting Michael Caine in this scene and only this scene works more effectively to communicate extravagant waste than any over-the-top set piece.
Come to think of it, wasting this much 70mm IMAX film, or whatever, on exposition is also pretty effective in that regard.
EARWORMS:
“Certainly not.”
DIAGNOSIS: I WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED IF THE NEXT SCENE WAS SUIT SHOPPING.
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| I'm actually free right now if you want to hop on a call. |
Katherine Bartlett, Eldest Niece of Sir Francis Bartlett
STUPID THINGS:
Man oh man does this woman ever suck at authenticating Goyas. Can’t she spot a forgery by a guy who no longer walks or talks on the phone but with whom, rumor has it, she was close. Classic British establishment international auction house nepo baby.
“He threatened me with police, prison, the works.” Ummm but aren’t you the eldest niece of Sir Francis Bartlett? Don’t you have some strings of your own you could pull? I’m sorry, but the whole embittered surly damsel routine is a little less believable when you’re the eldest niece of the Sir Francis Bartlett.
We’re literally busting out the string section for her sad tale. Not that it isn’t sad! It’s just less sad than, I don’t know, maybe the Kiev Opera House Saxophone Lady?
SMART THINGS:
Ohhh I get it. This is the final boss of incidental beautiful thin blonde women. It goes Kiev Opera House Saxophone Lady (elevated tastes and cultural capital level), Dr. Backwards Lady (top secret accomplished academic level), Elizabeth Debicki (eldest niece of a sir who works at Shipleys and has a billionaire husband level). Okay. Cool, great.
I do like a “I dream of just diving off that boat” setup in a movie with potential for La Jetée-style time loops. We’ll just have to see if it ever pays off in this little tale of a physics-defying war between forwards and backwards time.
“They won’t kill you, Andrei dislikes tangling with local law enforcement on that level” is a smart way to explain why the goons in the kitchen don’t have guns, although I’d imagine that permanently crippling a man with a meat mallet is also a fairly serious charge in London. Probably about as frowned upon as cheese-grating a dude’s face.
EARWORMS:
“I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago.”
DIAGNOSIS: I, TOO, FEEL AS THOUGH I ORDERED MY HOT SAUCE AN HOUR AGO.
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| Please, Mr. Bwuh Bwuh is my father. Call me Jim. |
The Freeport Break-In
STUPID THINGS:
(to the tune of “bwuh bwuh BWUH BWUH”) Here’s a BIG PLANE.
I’m a little fuzzy on the whole “we need to pick the lock but also we need to type the door code in” thing that happens during the heist. That wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t played up for “uh oh we can’t breathe” suspense at one point when the lockpicking tool breaks. For all Nolan’s work to emphasize the in-theater experience, there are brief windows when this movie is utterly incoherent without the “subtitles on” option.
So did the crew who installed the “proving window” glass at the Freeport have any questions about why they had to use a pane with four bullet holes in it?
Forwards-backwards fight continuity error detected. The gun is established as a backwards gun, but backwards John David Washington kicks it away from forwards John David Washington, which to him would feel like blocking with his foot, and it falls backwards in space, but in forwards time instead of backwards time. I felt a need to write this entire sentence using real-life words.
Also at the very end of the fight, the backwards John David Washington grabs his backwards gun back from forwards John David Washington before getting sucked through the garage door. This means that the backwards guy got blasted through a door and then immediately handed his gun to forwards himself.
SMART THINGS:
The “shit is about to happen” section of the Tenet score by Ludwig Göransson is elite. I couldn’t be more pumped for this heist sequence, even if it started playing the Home Depot “less talking more doing” commercial music.
The Freeport steward is another perfectly cast gatekeeping bootlicker role, this time paying the appropriate level of deference to Robert Pattinson, who just happens to be a British white guy. Pattinson perfectly adopts the persona of a high-level functionary operating at 20% stupider than he thinks he is in order to pump the obsequious guy for case-the-joint details. Is this the role he was born to play?
Guy on the heist crew who pockets one gold bar? That’s worth at least $600k and isn’t super traceable? That guy is smart. He might be my hero.
I see you, the one ambulance in the background that drives away instead of toward the emergency.
EARWORMS:
“I think they’re all vegetarian.”
DIAGNOSIS: I’M ALREADY ASLEEP, BUT AM OTHERWISE FULLY BACK ON BOARD.
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| Well, I'm ready to continue being in this movie. |
Tea Time With Neil, Priya Walking And Talking
STUPID THINGS:
After a crazy heist where you did not steal anything but did get in a big fight with a backwards guy, it’s always nice to have a little unarmed chat over tea with your new spy buddy about how and when you’ll have to kill him due to all the secret backwards stuff the two of you just saw.
Priya’s really not that convincing about this whole plan to sell weapons-grade plutonium to an arms dealer with access to backwards-time technology, nor about how important it is to not just kill the guy. Actually, just killing the guy before everything’s ready at the hypocenter would be a good idea.
SMART THINGS:
Neil knowing a lot about backwards stuff theory is a fun little reveal here.
Not sure there’s anything smart happening here? Maybe not sharing the truth at this juncture is a smart way to keep us, the audience, invested in the plot enough to keep watching instead of rolling our eyes at “take the algorithm to the hypocenter” like 45 minutes early?
EARWORMS:
Somehow the way Pattinson pops the lid on the teapot is an earworm.
I’m far from proud of it, but I’m not above being amused by hearing Priya say “plutonium two forty one” with a lilting Gujerati accent.
DIAGNOSIS: WHAT? OKAY, WHATEVER, LET’S JUST KEEP HAVING A MOVIE.
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| Ciao bella! I'm about to be threatened with castration! |
Holiday In Napoli With The Sators
STUPID THINGS:
The violins are back, and that means it’s pretty lady talking time.
For somebody who doesn’t want to let her kid out of her sight, Debicki sure does more sightseeing alone than you’d think. Good for her. Her son is everything, but he’s not the only thing.
Wing-sail catamarans are the apex of horny for billionaire shit. Come to think of it, we’ve also been jetsetting around the globe quite a lot. Kiev, Mumbai, London, Vietnam, Oslo, and Naples so far? Maybe the future started this war because they saw the budget for this movie.
SMART THINGS:
The camera pedestals up to just above Branagh’s eye level as Debicki stands up so our first impression is to see him as a small man. This is awesome, actually.
Brass and eerie illbient synthesized voices are inspired choices for Sator’s theme in the score, even if we’re getting a little Peter and the Wolf at this point.
EARWORMS:
“YOU CAN’T JIBE A BOAT LIKE THIS”
“YOU CAN IF YOU HAVE TO”
DIAGNOSIS: YOU CAN TOTALLY JIBE A BOAT LIKE THIS.
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| Wait, how do I put these gold bars down? |
Back At The Yacht, Intrigue Abounds
STUPID THINGS:
Deus ex helicoptera.
These time capsule gold bars can’t decide if they’re backwards or forwards.
I mean…
Okay, so the gold bars in this scene pop up into Branagh’s hands in backwards mode. So they’re backwards.
It’s semi-plausible that the one gold bar he’s holding is backwards when Sator beats a guy up with it. Gold is heavy, presumably even backwards gold, and at a certain point I’m sure the physics of beating a guy up with a heavy thing are the same if the thing is heavy forwards or backwards heavy. This makes it possible for the beating to not look backwardsy.
Unless “backwards heavy” means that backwards gold is tiresome to hold because it keeps pressing upwards against your hand so hard.
Wait, how do you put down backwards gold once you’re holding it? Do you have to do double-spatula hands on it and press it firmly down onto a table or something? It seems like you should be able to just drop it, but then if it dropped from your perspective, it would be floating from the gold’s perspective, and gold doesn’t float.
Hang on a second…
Maybe this movie about backwards stuff isn’t always telling the truth about what real backwards stuff would really do in real life. Maybe the whole thing is just some kind of make believe, or Hollywood scientific fiction. I am completely devastated. I am… backwards devastated.
Regardless of the fake backwards physics involved, it would also be odd from a storytelling perspective for Sator to reverse-chuck a backwards gold bar at John David Washington and kind of blow the cover on the “things are backwards sometimes” intel.
Also, could you switch yourself to backwards with some gold that was already backwards, and make the gold go double-backwards, aka forwards, and then lock the double-backwards forwards gold in a backwards time capsule with the double-spatula hand technique? Would the time capsule make the double-backwards forwards gold go backwards too, or would the time capsule be empty when a past guy opened it because the double-backwards forwards gold would… not be… yet?
This is why I am almost always asleep by this point in the movie.
SMART THINGS:
I like that the Debicki over the shoulder shot in the yacht cabin is also pointed downward at John David Washington’s eye level instead of putting him on an apple box as the hero. I can’t tell if it makes her seem more “on a pedestal” to the male characters, makes the male characters seem more “scrabbling around like grubby little dipshits” to her perspective, or just simply accurately portrays her as a very tall drink of water. Regardless, it’s telling that the gender dynamics of who gets an apple box are so far skewed that you notice something like this, and I have zero problems with any of the implications. It’s nuanced. I like it!
It’s worth remembering that John David Washington in this scene has already told Kat that “Andrei Sator has all our lives in his hands, not just yours.” Keep this in mind just in case she says something later that some people think is stupid but other people feel a need to defend as not stupid.
Sator sure has a bigass library on his yacht. Doesn’t strike me as a big reader, but hey, fake it til you make it.
EARWORMS:
“He wants to see me without pants?”
DIAGNOSIS: OKAY, LET’S DO THE NEXT ACTION SEQUENCE NOW PLEASE.
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| Let's go say hi to the nuclear device transportation guys! |
Stealing Plutonium In Broad Daylight (And Other Cowboy Shit)
STUPID THINGS:
What a fun coincidence that there’s also a Freeport in the city where they’re moving around this supposed plutonium. That sure makes it easy for everybody.
I bet security details love to openly transport weapons-grade plutonium in places where it can also easily be diverted from the planned route and quickly shipped off to any country in the world. I’m sure it makes them super comfortable to the point where they are fully unconcerned about being surrounded at extremely close range by several trucks for a good long while.
“Yes, I’d like to pay cash to rent a BMW with the backwardsy-looking crack in the driver’s-side mirror? The one the dealership inexplicably installed instead of a regular uncracked mirror? Do you have anything like that?”
Except they’re not transporting weapons-grade plutonium. It’s worse than that, goddamn it! (It’s an algorithm section. Duh. And it’s on the way to the hypocenter. Double duh.)
John David Washington has some strong ass fingertips and buttcheeks to be able to press down on the brake of a car that is speeding in reverse (which would carry his body weight backwards away from the brake pedal as it slows) hard enough to screech to a halt. Maybe he and/or Debicki should have tried the much easier to reach and also quite appropriately named “emergency brake?”
“Blue light means backwards, red light means forwards” is helpful interior design for the backwardsamatron room, and “oxygen mask means backwards guy” is also pretty helpful in the field.
So when you are a backwards guy but you’re driving a forwards car, you put it in reverse and just absolutely redline rev the living fuck out of it. And as long as it was not already a smoking wreck when you got into it, you’ll be fine? All that means is backwards you already safely forwards drove it to where you backwards got in it.
Wait, fuck.
I do not know how the “backwards guy in a forwards car” thing works at all.
So, like, I’m backwards, right? And I start in my house, now, and I walk backwards through time into the past to get to my forwards car that is still out front in the past. So to my regular forwards neighbor it looks like I reversed pretty fast up the block, did the most incredible parallel parking job of all time, and then walked backwards from my car to my door.
But when I, as backwards me, am driving, I have to put the car in reverse in order to see where it’s been. And when I open the front door to my house I have to do the backwards instinct thing where I use willpower to suck the doorknob into my hand.
But my keys were in my pocket when I went through the backwardsamatron, so I have to somehow use my backwards keys to backwardsly lock the forwards front door once I’m outside.
But I only need to worry about locking the door if the place already looks like I’ve been robbed, but even then it wouldn’t matter if they broke in, but maybe I could just reverse wait until they showed up and scare them off with spooky backwards guy tricks and punches.
But if I did that, they wouldn’t have robbed me, so maybe I didn’t already do that yet.
Honestly, fuck this. I don’t care about forwards-backwards stuff anymore. At this point I am literally always either fully asleep or else just gazing uncritically at a random series of moving images synchronized to corresponding sounds.
As if sensing my ”fuck this” breaking point with the premise’s potential to fascinate, here comes the movie’s most patently dumb line to remind me to have fun. I’m no backwards doctor, but I do genuinely believe that “regular air” could “pass through the membranes of inverted lungs” if we all really put our heads together and wholeheartedly decided not to give a shit about that extremely specific detail of backwarddom.
“If your particles come into contact… annihilation.” Sure. Yeah. Let’s drop that little nugget and then totally never explore it. This movie is a masterpiece of the rule of ones.
Not sure how Sator ended up getting the last section of the algorithm after everything that happened, but I definitely do not care.
I do, a little bit, want to think about what it may have looked like to casual forwards-moving observers to see a bunch of backwards-running army guys “rescue” a backwards friend by seemingly shoving their unconscious body into either the smoking wreck or the perfectly fine form (I cannot and will not decide) of either a recently exploded or soon-to-be exploded car.
SMART THINGS:
Branagh really sends it in the “true fucking nature” scene, to the point where you almost feel for the guy for having a tall socialite wife who doesn’t respect him or all the hard honest gun-running work he did to get so rich, which was actually just digging up a bunch of backwards gold from the future and investing it in time machine stock tips or whatever. That is until he kicks and spits on and shoots his very-out-of-his-league beautiful thin blonde wife.
I do like how the forwards versus backwards action sequences progress from fight to car chase to full battle, and the switch to backwards mode is a snappy way to mark the turn from act two to act three. Or it would be if this were merely a fun but ultimately dumb popcorn movie and not the extremely serious work of a very important auteur.
EARWORMS:
“They’re running a temporal pincer movement”
“Regular air won’t pass through the membranes of inverted lungs.”
“Get the other sections of the algorithm to the hypocenter.”
DIAGNOSIS: I YEARN FOR A SIMPLER TIME, MERE TENS OF MINUTES AGO.
 |
| This is the church, this is the steeple, look inside, and there's all the people going backwards. |
A Nice Cozy Shipping Container That’s Just Come Off A Ship From Oslo
STUPID THINGS:
However long it takes a knife wound to heal in minus time is how long John David Washington’s arm should be hurting. This seems kind of late to first notice it.
“Including my son” is the line that got everybody riled up enough to either pile on or write and publish a glib defense, and further conversation around this line and Debicki’s role as the “emotional core” of Tenet is what I came across on my timeline today. The idea is that Nolan chooses to frame global tragedy through the personal lens of his characters in order to make the point that global tragedy is actually bad enough to fight against, which seems more like a way to explain human emotions to (or from) a sociopath than a storytelling framework. Or something. To be honest, I only skimmed the Vulture piece before running into a paywall that I am not in any mood or financial condition to jump over.
I don’t think “including my son” is as egregiously stupid as other bon mots like “regular air won’t pass through the membranes of inverted lungs” or “get the other sections of the algorithm to the hypocenter.” It’s also not not stupid. John David Washington did already mention 40 minutes ago that “Andrei Sator has all our lives in his hands, not just yours,” which would include the son just as much then as it does now. But hey, you say weird things when you’re in shock from a reverse bullet that your husband shot you with before he retrieved a technology that would permanently reverse time in a way that Neil also says would instantly destroy everyone and everything that’s ever lived.
Just to be clear, these three reverse people are spending two weeks in a shipping container together, which means to an outside forwards-moving observer, they will be taking turns sucking a big bucket of poop back up into their buttholes.
SMART THINGS:
Pattinson does the Tenet fingers to explain the forwars vs. backwars.
“Does your head hurt yet?” “Yes.” “Try to sleep.” I AM USUALLY WAY AHEAD OF YOUR PROTAGONIST HERE AND I THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN.
EARWORMS:
“Ohhh. End of play.”
DIAGNOSIS: IT’S BACKWARDS FIGHTING YOURSELF TIME.
 |
| "Man versus backwards self" is also a storytelling option. |
We Use The Breach
STUPID THINGS:
I spent a good long while, like several hours spread across multiple years of my own life, thinking about how the time that elapses between backwards John David Washington going forward and Pattinson and Debicki going forward could result in a kind of un-syncing where they’re both going forward at the same rate but on different timelines, like a weird delay on a Zoom call but in real life. I then, eventually, decided the one who’s further ahead would just wait for the other one, and then they’d be fine. I am the stupid thing in this “STUPID THINGS:” list item.
SMART THINGS:
It’s cool that forwards John David Washington and backwards John David Washington are better at kicking each others’ ass at different parts of the fight. Like the forwards version gets the hang of fighting a backwards guy just as the backwards version is beginning to learn, and vice versa. I think this comes across in the fight choreography upon multiple watches. Show don’t tell intricacies like this tend to be much more prevalent in the action sequences, which reveals creative priorities by highlighting an unequal distribution of attention to detail. You just don’t get this degree of slick coyness in the talking parts, with the possible exception of Mr. Mystery Suit Man, who speaks in prophetic tautologies that all come to pass.
The score still slaps when they play it backwards, which double slaps as a creative decision.
EARWORMS:
“We’re the ones saving the world from what might’ve been.”
DIAGNOSIS: I BET IT FEELS GOOD AS HELL TO GET SUDDENLY UNSTABBED.
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| That sounds like a very long movie that's not as good as Barbie. |
Oppenheimer Sneak Preview Walk And Talk
STUPID THINGS:
Priya shares a major plot point from the formerly upcoming film Oppenheimer (2023).
John David Washington is walking like he’s thinking really hard about walking and decided he doesn’t like it.
“You used me” is John David Washington’s clunkiest line read in this, but there’s a very large multiple-way tie for second place. Priya (played by Dimple Kapadia, which is in the running for cutest name of all time) is also a clunky line read artist in this, so the extended exchange of stilted expository dialogue in their scenes together often takes on a bad-actor-off quality not seen since since William Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh squared off in Backdraft (1991). Not that I blame either one of them for sticking to a clunky script in the middle of a big break for their careers.
SMART THINGS:
N/A
EARWORMS:
“You used me.”
DIAGNOSIS: I AM INTERESTED IN THE LANDSCAPE ART IN THE BACKGROUND.
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| 1, 2, 3, 4, we will win the backwards war. |
Backwards Boat (Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past)
STUPID THINGS:
Hold the fucking phone. Sator has inoperable pancreatic cancer? So Debicki has been spending the whole movie doing this woe is me routine about being totally trapped, and wanting revenge more than anything, and trying to kill him on a fiberglass catamaran, and never being able to forgive herself for considering leaving her son with him, and the whole time the answer to her prayers was WAIT FOR LIKE SIX MONTHS? I’d never recommend that somebody in real life remain in an abusive situation one second longer than necessary to maintain their safety, but I would suggest that this terminal illness development does retroactively alter the stakes in this story, and sadly not in the direction of pathos.
One chaste peck on the cheek is all this guy’s gonna get here, huh? Not that everything has to be sexual, but when the dynamics at play involve a Black man reversing the flow of time to cater to the exact whims of a wealthy white woman who, again, COULD HAVE JUST WAITED FOR HER TERMINALLY ILL HUSBAND TO FINISH DYING, a single dry smooch of mild appreciation on the cheek seems a little on the underwhelming side of even platonic gestures of gratitude. I suppose he is patently asking her to return to and prolong an abusive situation, so maybe a chaste cheek kiss is too much actually. A good hard slap in the face might be more interesting.
How does the vertical turnstile work? Like a big rock tumbler for backwards army guys?
SMART THINGS:
I’m glad the backwards army is training in forwards vs. backwards combat.
EARWORMS:
“No, you’ve missed the point.”
DIAGNOSIS: LET’S WRAP THIS FUCKER UP.
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| We've been over this backwars and forwars, you guys. |
Temporal Pincer Movements at Stalsk 12
STUPID THINGS:
The red and blue armbands sure must be helpful to the bad guys.
Getting sealed into a wall by a reverse explosion doesn’t seem all that likely, unless the architects of Stalsk 12 were like, “Let’s do one building with a little English backwards skeleton in it.”
“You don’t believe in God, or a future, or anything outside of your own experience!” is actually the second clunkiest John David Washington line read. Ad lib a little, my guy. Nobody can read this shit.
“You’ll like it!” is a really believable thing to say to a guy who’s currently trying to end the world and also has never had sunscreen rubbed into his back before.
One second doesn’t seem like a ton of lead time for safely escaping a nuclear blast, and a countdown clock tied to a dead man’s switch seems a little predeterminative.
SMART THINGS:
Seems like a good plan to have backwards army guys and forwards army guys at the same time.
Double backwards and forwards exploding a building is a good visual diversion for a few seconds, I’m just not sure how necessary it is.
Rubber Branagh buggy bumpers!
EARWORMS:
“Need to know and you don’t.”
DIAGNOSIS: WAIT, YOU FOUND A WAY, WE’RE OKAY RIGHT?
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| Glad to go be dead now, as long as I get to say some cryptic nonsense first! |
Neil Leaves The Field And Other Loose Ends
STUPID THINGS:
Can’t they just half backwards and half forwards the pieces of this algorithm thing and throw them all into a volcano or several separate volcanos? Why do they have to be so dramatic about killing each other if they ever see each other again?
What’s happened’s happened, and sometimes the only way to make sure we save the world, the only possible action available to a person armed with perfect foreknowledge and all the time in the world at their disposal, is to stop a bullet with their face while opening a door.
“I’m the protagonist of this operation” said the actor credited with the role of “Protagonist.”
Nolan has an occasional tendency to end his films with a voiceover that says some odd cyclical platitude that sounds like “the movie you just saw is the movie you watched.” Not all of them are terrible, but it is much better when he does not do this.
SMART THINGS:
I think we’re about out of time here, my friend.
EARWORMS:
“Probably nothing.”
It's all about plutonium, and by that I mean beautiful thin blonde women.
FINAL DIAGNOSIS:
This is a smarter than usual stupid movie, not the other way around, and to the extent that it’s smart at all it’s smartest at finding the means to be financed at great expense while also advancing a fairly straightforward moral argument of “we should kill all billionaires to protect the species.”
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily genius-level in that regard, because the methods it uses to get away with this particular heist disqualify the authors from the moral high ground. The movie’s potential seriousness as a statement about the viability of the human species and what to do about it is almost entirely outdone by its intentionally disorienting premise, needlessly detail-oriented expository dialogue, hoarder-like obsession with production value, and general horniness for sociopathic billionaire shit, including fetishizing the exaggerated helplessness of an abuse victim. Most egregiously, it steadfastly refuses to entertain for long stretches, which is no way to win over the people.
None of which qualify as a reason I don’t like it. I actually love it all the more for its flaws, but only when it’s framed as a movie that exists to deliver on a premise of technical filmmaking. The inciting creative challenge behind Tenet is to justify intercutting forward and reverse footage. It seems to start with that interesting avenue to explore, and exist only secondarily as an exercise in hanging it on a story with ambitions of being good enough without any editing suite experimentation.
I feel justified in my opinion that the story, centered as it is around the emotional arc of a kept woman of presumably independent means who is routinely stuck in and reinserted back into the plot in much the same way as she is in her own abusive marriage, fails in the sensitivity of its execution to outshine the attentiveness of the forwards/backwards production experiment.
There is a version of that movie, A Doll’s House in a floating tax shelter, that could be compelling. This is not that movie. This is the forwards/backwards action movie experiment with a Doll’s House extension tacked on as an auxiliary consideration to both the methodology and the implied excess it also critiques. It is not a layerless movie, it’s just much better at delivering the icing than the cake.
The world needs big dumb movies that bite off more than they chew (or chew more than they bite, which is what Tenet often feels like). Especially when the big dumb movie in question isn’t based on established intellectual property.
Bless this mess.
Be seeing you in my dreams, Tenet.
And that, my friends, is the longass article you just read, but not the short book you did not read.
