Christopher Nolan’s Tenet may be the first of the filmmaker’s logic puzzles and cinematic mind-traps in which he is so concerned with his own gamesmanship and trickery, the cools things he can do with cinematography and special effects, that he has forgotten to tell a compelling story. Yes, there are some interesting ideas floating around the film’s two and a half hours, but they never settle into anything as meaningful or substantial as Nolan would like you to believe them to be. For a film that explicitly tells you to stop overthinking things and just “feel it,” the dialogue is overweighted by heavy-handed exposition (buried by Nolan’s concussive sound design) and the overall experience is emotionally cold and soulless. Character relationships that are meant to be moving or intended to set up the narrative stakes never quite connect because we never see those relationships develop onscreen – either because Nolan is too eager to show off his clever time inversion nonsense or because he’s too busy setting up his action set-pieces to focus on the the smaller, more intimate character-driven moments that could actually give the narrative its stakes and drive. That said, I did appreciate the fact that the film uses its villain to skewer toxic white masculinity’s sense of self-importance as we discover more about the villain’s plot to destroy the world. Plus, John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki all give fantastic performances considering what they had to work with. It’s just too bad they’re situated within a disastrous film from a director who believes he’s making a deeply profound masterpiece.
