Blaine: “Tenet” is a bit challenging to understand and Christopher Nolan is known for making movies that can challenge you. But this review should explain how things work in “Tenet”.
Plot (Spoiler Alert)
A CIA agent, The Protagonist, is after a Russian terrorist, Andrei Sator, and he must fight him while time is reversing itself.
Blaine: The spy genre is one of Christopher Nolan’s top favorites. Christopher Nolan grew up loving the James Bond movies, and for a while there was talk about him being the next guy to direct James Bond after Sam Mendes. And Chris was open minded to that. But that came to pass. Chris did want to do the spy genre though and he decided to create his own spy film. Chris will give you something new that you’ve never seen before. Chris had combined action and sci-fi before with his 2010 film “Inception”, only that was about dreams. Chris decided to mix his spy movie with time travel. Christopher Nolan is like a scientist because he knows a lot of scientific things and the dialog he writes is like listening to an intelligent language. Christopher Nolan is also a master at making things extreme in his movies. You see things in his movies that make you go “wow!” As soon as “Tenet” begins things already start off extreme.
The lead character of “Tenet", The Protagonist, is a very physical character. He jumps off a building, he hangs on to a firetruck ladder, he’s fighting bad guys, things James Bond would do. Christopher Nolan chose John David Washington to be his James Bond for “Tenet”. John David Washington is known as an actor, but he also has done a lot of physical stuff in his life. He used to be a football player. It was tricky for John David Washington to understand what he was reading in the script. Reading a Christopher Nolan script, like “Inception” and “Tenet”, is probably like reading a science book. “Tenet” was going to introduce entirely new fighting moves and John was lucky to be the first to experience them. Like one of the fight sequences has John fighting a mysterious figure who is going the opposite way. John also put his football skills to good use again because the lead character is running all over the place in this movie, only he’s holding a gun instead of a football. John David Washington has got a lot of guts because he did a lot of his own stunt work. Of course John still had one thing to face and that was his fear of heights. There’s a scene where he budge jumps off a building. All the other characters in “Tenet” have names, but John David Washington’s character doesn’t. He’s just called The Protagonist.
People of the future have discovered time travel and they send it to the past as a gift. The enemy has it, but the agency manages to get their hands on it too. Professor Barbara gives The Protagonist a lesson on the objects he is looking at. Telling him they all go in reverse and that you have to use your imagination in order for them to come to you, like pretending you’re firing a gun or dropping an object. It’s like using the force.
The lead character of a Christopher Nolan film never works alone. Batman had Jim Gordon, Alfred and Lucius Fox in “The Dark Knight” trilogy. Leonardo DiCaprio had people with different dream skills in “Inception”. In “Tenet”, The Protagonist likes to work with a crowd. He partners up with a handler named Neil, who I would describe as the Watson to The Protagonist’s Sherlock. And then other times The Protagonist will run with a S.W.A.T. team.
Robert Pattinson, who plays Neil, locked himself in a room so he could be alone with the script for “Tenet”. Some of it was hard to understand as he was reading through it, but the other stuff blew him away. There was stuff written in the script that made, not just Robert, but everyone question how they would create these sequences. All the actors had a hard time following along what was going on in each scene they shot. They understood a few things, but the rest had them scratching their heads. They knew things would make sense later on when the movie was all put together. And they had Christopher Nolan as their guide to tell them what they needed to do and Chris is a guy who always knows what he wants. Listening to the actors say dialog written by Christopher Nolan is almost like listening to a different language. The actors might not understand the words that are coming out of their mouths, but they say it in a professional way.
The Protagonist needs to get to the Russian bad guy, Andrei Sator, and Sator’s wife, Kat, is able to help. Chris Nolan had seen Elizabeth Debicki in Steve McQueen’s “Widows” and her performance in that film was what Chris was looking for in the character, Kat. Kat is in a marriage she wants to be free from. Her husband, Sator, is very stubborn and he would make her life a living hell if she left him. It’s like she is his precious jewel, that no one else can touch. Sator knows Kat is unhappy being married to him, but he doesn’t care about how she feels. Anything that belongs to Sator no one else gets.
Kat’s not happy with her marriage, but it’s not like her life is completely miserable. She has a son she loves very much and he is the only thing that brightens up her life. The Protagonist shows up wanting to help her. The thing they have in common is they want Sator to be stopped. Kat is afraid to be going up against her husband, but if she wants peace in her life she is going to have to fight for it and The Protagonist will have her back. Another way of describing Kat is she is the Bond girl of “Tenet”.
Christopher Nolan has been an inspiration to Michael Caine for fifteen years after they first worked together on “Batman Begins” because Chris’ way of making a movie is so fascinating to Michael. Every time Christopher Nolan asks Michael Caine to be in one of his movies the answer is always yes. Michael Caine couldn’t understand what “Tenet” was about. Of course Michael didn’t have to think too hard on what he was apart of because he’s only in one scene. Michael Caine’s appearance in “Tenet” is like a cameo. You see him in one scene and that’s it. At his age, Michael Caine wouldn’t be able to do all those intense scenes, but Chis always manages to find a spot for him and other legendary actors in his movies.
Kenneth Branagh had worked with Nolan on “Dunkirk”, and when it came to “Tenet”, Christopher Nolan went to Kenneth asking if he wanted to be involved in it. Kenneth had to read the script several times because, again, “Tenet” was something that was hard to understand. But Kenneth knows how brilliant of a man Christopher Nolan is and he knew you would be in good hands as long as Christopher Nolan was in charge. Kenneth plays the Russian bad guy of the film, Andrei Sator. Sator feels like the type of bad guy who can't easily be stopped because he is always one step ahead of you. He’s the type who is challenging to take down. The reason he is tough is because he has the technology to rewind stuff. He also has eyes everywhere. Like his men keep a watchful eye out for anyone who gets in the way.
Sator is pure evil. He’s like villains you've seen in other Chris Nolan films, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in “The Dark Knight”, and Tom Hardy’s Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises”. Those characters wanted to see the world burn. With Sator, he wants to set off a bomb that could rearrange the world. You can’t kill Sator unless you know where the bomb is. If he dies then it’s the end of the world. Killing him is like pulling the trigger. The Protagonist has to figure out where it is. Time travel can change a lot in the past, but there are some things it can’t change, like getting cancer, unless there’s a cure for it in the future. The people of the future have been giving Sator reversible things, but their time hasn’t found a cure for cancer. Sator has pancreatic cancer and he doesn’t want to die without gaining victory. His way of dying happily is by destroying the world.
There is nothing more Kat wants then for Sator to die. Kat has never taken a life before, but taking Sator’s would be acceptable. But it’s not easy because again Sator will have millions dead if he goes down. Sator won’t go down a loser. Also it’s hard when it’s you’re first time killing someone.
James Bond will go undercover, but the bad guy will suspect something about him and know he’s no good. Sator is someone you can’t easily fool. He doesn’t take a liking to new faces. The Protagonist is able to cover his identity whenever he’s wearing that S.W.A.T uniform. The uncover thing works better when you’re wearing a mask. It’s just like Batman. At the beginning of “Tenet”, you see The Protagonist and other men go in undercover wearing S.W.A.T uniforms to blend in with the Russians who have invaded an opera house. They need to get to someone, who has something valuable, before the Russians do.
There’s a lot of running in “Tenet”. Everyone is running around places, mainly because they’re trying to get to something before the enemy does.
In “Tenet”, when you travel back in time you need to wear an oxygen mask because the air works differently. It’s going in reverse like everything else. It’s like going into space.
Christopher Nolan likes to work closely with the cinematographer. Chris knows how he’ll want to see the scene and the cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, will have to figure out how it should be shot. They put the camera in all sorts of places for this film. There’s a lot of action shots. The people in front of the camera are really working on their cardio and the camera has to stay on them and go at the same pace as them. Christopher Nolan has been using IMAX cameras on his films since “The Dark Knight” and IMAX cameras are big and heavy, so getting every shot for “Tenet” might not have been easy. But Christopher Nolan has handled these cameras fine after having twelve years of experience with them.
There’s a scene where The Protagonist is being held by Sator’s men and he watches Sator on the other side of the glass holding a gun on Kat, while time is reversing. The tint in the room The Protagonist is held in is red, while Sator’s is blue. The moods of those tints is past and future. Red is future, while blue is past.
There’s also the shots of a catamaran that The Protagonist, Kat and Sator are on. They shot that catamaran in many different places. There’s an overhead shot and there’s also a shot where the catamaran is coming in from the side and passed the camera.
Another thing about Christopher Nolan is his action movies include a lot of intense car crashes and trucks flipping over. In “Tenet”, it’s not just the cars you see crashing, you see an airplane crashing into a building, from the ground, as part of a distraction, so that The Protagonist and Neil can sneak their way into something. Christopher Nolan would use money from the budget to buy an actual plane to do that scene. My guess is they only shot one take of that plane and that they put a lot of valuable time into the plane before having it crash into a building that they constructed themselves. The plane goes on for a few before it hits it’s target. They shot that plane at every angle. There’s close ups of the engines and other parts to the plane. There are wide shots and a bird’s eye point of view of the plane. They must have put multiple cameras around that thing in order to get every shot of that it before it got damaged.
Hans Zimmer had been Christopher Nolan’s music composer for every single film from “The Dark Knight” trilogy, to “Inception”, to “Interstellar”, to “Dunkirk”. But Hans couldn’t do the score for “Tenet” because his hands were full with these other movies he was writing music for. He had a choice between “Tenet” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and Hans chose “Dune”. So Christopher Nolan had to hire another composer for his spy movie. He went with Ludwig Goransson, best known as the composer for the Marvel movie, “Black Panther”. Ludwig’s music score for “Tenet” has the type of style Hans Zimmer uses for a Christopher Nolan film. The score for “Tenet” sounds like you're going into another dimension.
Lee Smith was Christopher Nolan’s long time editor, but he too had his hands full with another project. Jennifer Lane had been the editor on movies like “Marriage Story” and “Manchester by the Sea”, and she was hired to be the editor on “Tenet”. Editing “Tenet” was the biggest project she had ever worked on because editing this movie was something else. But Christopher Nolan was there with Jennifer during the editing process to help her. She was improving her editing skills because of this project. A lot of stuff in “Tenet” winds backwards and I think that was all done by Jennifer. She would take the shots and have them play in reverse. Everything on “Tenet” works fast, including the editing. One thing cuts to another in just a few seconds. Various conversations are going on in different times, different places, in one scene.
“Tenet” required a lot of work, but visual effects feels like it wasn’t as important as everything else they did. For Christopher Nolan you don’t need visual effects all the time. He likes to play things old fashioned, or another way of saying it as real as possible. They brought the effects to life without having to be done on computer. Of course some things needed to be done on computer, like the shots of everything going backwards while people are going forward. For example, a ship is going backwards and it’s closing in on John David Washington doing pull ups forward. So shots like that need to be merged together. Visual effects movies usually have 2,000 shots or less, but with “Tenet” there is only 300. The stunt work, editing and cinematography you could say took over for the visual effects on this project.
There is also all the interesting sounds you hear in a Christopher Nolan movie. The sound department created the sound for Batman’s vehicles in “The Dark Knight” trilogy and “Inception” had a lot of interesting sounds as well. A lot of the things you hear in “Tenet” is reverse gun fire and bomb explosions. The sound department must have recorded sounds of guns firing and, like the editing, have it play it in reverse, sense the bullets are fixing the damage to the object they hit.
Everyone gets to have a experience that is massive when working with Christopher Nolan. The actors, they don’t have to pretend that much because they’re not on a green screen stage, they’re working in the real world. They are in real cars going at a full speed, they are on real ships, real areas.
James Bond has always been traveling through the world going to interesting locations and Christopher Nolan himself is big on traveling. A lot of his movies have been shot in a number of locations in different countries. For “Tenet”, they shot in Ravello, Italy, Hampstead, England, Tjuvholmen, Norway and Rodbyhavn, Denmark.
The plane causes a distraction, while The Protagonist and Neil check something out. They find what I believe is something like a time machine. The Protagonist and Neil are in two different rooms and each one has that same machine. Two masked figures come out. Neil goes after the one that is running, which is going forward in time, while The Protagonist is wrestling with the other that is going backwards in time. The thing about that mysterious figure is they are both the same person from different times. About two minutes I would say.
Spoiler alert, that masked figure was actually The Protagonist from the future. He was going back in time. He wasn’t trying to fight his past self, he was trying to avoid him. The Protagonist couldn’t let his past self get in the way of their mission while he was going back in time and he was doing the best he could not to injure his past self, otherwise he would just be injuring himself. And if he shoots himself dead, he’ll cease to exist.
As I said, Sator is one step ahead of you and The Protagonist, Neil and Kat have to really think hard on finding a way to stop him. The only way to stop Sator is by going back in time. The Protagonist and Neil go after the bomb with an army. They are running through a war zone in order to get to it. Bomb explosions have already gone off and now they are going in reverse. It’s good to know where you can watch your step. The Protagonist and a military commander, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, manage to reach the underground tunnel where the bomb is. There is the dead body of a masked figure lying there, and it’s not The Protagonist.
Meanwhile, Kat’s future self distracts Sator, who has traveled back in time to have his last moment peaceful. He is unaware that the Kat who is with him is her future self. He believes it’s her past self. Kat's outfit in that scene is a lot like Ursula Andress in the very first James Bond film “Dr. No”. I mean she’s wearing nothing but a button top and underneath that is a white bikini.
James Bond has killed a lot of bad guys in the movies, but there have also been times where a Bond girl killed the bad guy too. The Protagonist wanted Sator dead, but not as much as Kat because she has had to put up with him for years and she can’t stand him. He beat on her and put a bullet on her side. She wants to put a bullet in him, but again it’s not easy when it’s your first time killing someone. She closes her eyes and does it fast. But it doesn’t stop there. Sator is not dead just yet, so Kat pushes him over the boat and his body bangs on the side.
One of Sator’s men is in the tunnel and is about to drop the bomb. The corpse of the masked figure resurrects and takes care of Sator’s man in reverse. The Protagonist successfully gets the bomb. Later on, that other masked figure is revealed. Neil has been going back in time having The Protagonist’s back. Like I said your identity is a secret as long as you’re wearing a mask, but what gives Neil away is this red tinket. Neil has been there for The Protagonist and is always there to have The Protagonist’s back. He even sacrifices his life to help The Protagonist succeed. Shows that he cares about his partner.
“Tenet” is the first Christopher Nolan movie to have a song. Music is one of the important elements to a Chris Nolan film. His movies have had music scores, but no songs. The James Bond movies always have a theme song, so why shouldn’t “Tenet” get one. The name of the song is “The Plan”, which is a suitable name for a film that is about trying to figure out a way to defeat the bad guy.
“Tenet” feels like it's beyond the spy genre because Christopher Nolan gave it everything and my rating on it is five out of five stars.
