'Tenet' Is Confusing, but Very Rewarding Once Unlocked

Tenet is a must-watch by mere virtue of being made by Christopher Nolan, whose distinctive brand of cerebral storytelling, imaginative story ideas, and technical filmmaking brilliance has resulted to some of the most incredible movies of the century.  And Tenet turned out being exactly the kind of mind-bending film that you would expect from Nolan.

The plot follows an unnamed protagonist, simply credited as “The Protagonist” (John David Washington), a former CIA operative who is recruited into a secret organization called Tenet.  Tenet deals with a temporal phenomenon called “inverted entropy”, which permits objects and individuals to move backward through time, and seeks the prevention of the end of the world in the future.  Working with an enigmatic spook named Neil (Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist must square off with a Russian crime lord named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who seems to be the catalyst of the upcoming apocalypse.

Tenet is utterly convoluted and knotty by design.  It demands the audience to pay attention, and trusts them to figure it out on their own.  It’s somewhat of a hassle for the brain, yes, and one probably needs to watch it a second time in order to grasp the plot fully and appreciate the intricacies.  I myself had to watch it twice, and had to rewind a couple of scenes a few times (honestly, I might not be able to enjoy it as much as I did if I did not watch it digitally.  Immediate rewatching and rewinds would not be possible in a theater).  But it genuinely makes the patience and work you put into it worth it.  It’s thoroughly exciting once you realize what’s going on.

Indeed, Tenet is an excellent, nuanced plot-driven science fiction thriller.  It features one of most unique and most fascinating time travel concepts ever, and superbly constructs a clever, fitting narrative around it.  Its merits may not be immediately obvious during its first half, especially during first viewing, but this film starts to feel gratifying in the second half.  During second viewing, it feels gripping from the get go, for you have an understanding already of how things work in it and what certain scenes are building toward.

The messages interwoven into its narrative also mightily appealed to me as much as the compelling plot devices.  The theme of self-sacrifice is manifested in several of the key character arcs, and something poignant comes out from at least one of them.  This also plays into the plot’s broader theme, which is to avoid getting tied up to blaming the past generations for the problems of the present, but instead, start working for a better future for the next generation.   But the theme that I found most fascinating is the philosophical connotation inherent in time inversion with regards to fate and free will (embodied in the quote “What's happened, happened.  It's an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world.  It's not an excuse for doing nothing.”), which is somewhat reminiscent to the paradoxical Christian doctrine of God’s Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility.

However, does everything hold up in Tenet?  It’s a smart story for the most part, but I don’t think everything about it makes sense.  One thing that I couldn’t wrap my head around is how a normal individual is able to shoot an inverted gun.  I believe that, based on the rules, an inverted gun can only function in an inverted manner if it’s fired by an inverted person.  Consider this: from the inverted person’s perspective, he’s simply using the gun normally, but since he’s moving backward through time, his actions and the results of his actions, like firing a gun, plays in reverse from the perspective of a normal person.  In other words, the bullet and gun behaves in reverse (from the perspective of a normal person) because an inverted person had acted upon it to draw such behavior.  But how can a normal person draw an inverted action from an inverted gun when he’s not performing an inverted action upon it (i.e. he didn’t pull the trigger while in an inverted state)?  I guess this quote from an early scene needs to be applied to address such conundrums in this movie: “Don’t try to understand it.  Feel it.”

Tenet is an experience.  Its logic may not be completely perfect.  But as an experience, it is extremely stimulating.  It’s such a cool movie.  And it only becomes cooler in your mind the longer you reflect on it.