“Tenet,” the latest project from blockbuster movie director Christopher Nolan, is one of the most frustrating movie experiences I think I’ve ever had. It has a wildly interesting concept that can leave your imagination shattered with its possibilities and put you on the edge of your seat for one moment; the next moment, you’re confused, bored and wondering if anything said during the movie actually matters. The movie has a terrible ability to be just interesting enough to entice the viewer to continue forth in the hope that your patience will be rewarded, but it never fully satisfies the viewer’s expectations. The movie has a problem being a functional viewing experience.

“Tenet” is about a CIA agent, whose name is literally “The Protagonist,” tasked with defeating a villain who is disrupting the present by reversing the entropy of objects. Basically, if a man from the future shoots a bullet at a wall and then returns to the past and sees the bullet where he left it, he can reverse the bullet’s momentum and have the bullet return to his gun hitting anything in its path; essentially, you can reverse the momentum on any object so that it does whatever it’s previous motion was. You can apply that reverse entropy to any object in the movie, even people. Everything is fair game. My advice for understanding it is don’t think too much about it; you won’t harm your movie experience if you don’t understand it. Just let the movie handle the science and you enjoy the cool stuff. This concept is amazing. The amount of cool matrix-like tricks that are possible with this concept is prodded by the introduction of certain elements like reversing your dodge roll to avoid a punch. These elements make your imagination run wild with the endless possibilities presented by reversing the momentum of an object, but they never run wild with this central concept. The reverse entropy is present in virtually every scene, but in execution, the concept is head-bangingly underwhelming. “Tenent”  presents viewers with complex opportunities for science to go crazy. At one point, the characters have to hijack a plane so they can infiltrate highly secure vaults. Now, take a moment, and think about all the physics-breaking stuff you could do with a plane with reverse momentum. It’s tantalizing; you could have the plane fly and crash into the vault, steal whatever you need, get back in the plane, have the plane’s momentum be reversed, and have it take off in the path it crashed from. Unfortunately, the plane doesn’t even do anything close to as interesting as that. What they actually do is hijack the plane and crash it into a hanger by driving it (not flying, driving) into a hanger as a distraction. They don’t do anything with the plane after that; they just leave it crashed in a hanger. And I don’t even understand what the point of crashing it even was, because it didn’t seem to help them steal anything at all. That’s not to say every scene is as disappointing as that; there are a good amount of scenes that are visually incredible. They never punctuate any of the scenes with something crazy, though. 

“Tenet” has a problem that basically ruins the entire viewing experience. The movie is about 80% dialogue and about a half of it is jumbled garbage. Everyone in this movie speaks in a monotone hush that’s almost a whisper and dialogue is exchanged so quickly it’s a chore to just keep up. Then the soundtrack comes in. The soundtrack consists of loud synthesizer pangs that attack the audience every chance they get, and it’s constantly in a tug-of-war for the audiences’ attention with the dialogue. The soundtrack ruins so many scenes: the dialogue will be playing out and then the soundtrack will explode and you will miss tons of context for the movie because you can’t hear the dialogue over the soundtrack. There were countless times where I was paying close attention to what was occurring on screen, but then I missed a word due to the soundtrack being too loud and it would throw off the rhythm of my listening completely, to the point where I was playing catch-up the entire movie. It’s a shame because the soundtrack matches the movie perfectly. The soundtrack uses this heavy-synth orchestra to give the movie this menacing nature as if you’ve been teleported to this bizarro world where anything is seemingly possible. However, it is inexcusable that the soundtrack looms over almost all conversation for the first half of the movie. This is not a problem with my ability to pay attention either; the person I saw it with complained that he would miss entire scenes too. Apparently, this is a consistent problem for Nolan films. “The Dark Knight Rises” was criticized for Bane being basically incomprehensible for many scenes due to the soundtrack and the combination of the actor’s delivery.

The story of the movie is just bland. The main antagonist wants to destroy the world for seemingly no other reason beyond just because. The rest of the characters don’t seem to know what’s going on in the movie either. They just meander from scene to scene stitched together by poor explanations. The story is trying to be this very meta break from conventional story-telling. Instead of saying that everything in the movie matters and that events definitely happened, the story decides to make the audience question whether anything in the movie matters by introducing soft time-travel elements and multiverse theory. It also directly calls out The Protagonist, saying that his actions may not matter in the story and that he should just play his part. Surprisingly, it makes a little bit of sense despite all the audio problems and constant interruption of context. The movie’s speaking to the feeling of being inconsequential to your own life; that you can’t really impact the world, you’re just a viewer on a predetermined ride and despite anything you do, time will still march on leaving your actions in the dust. It’s powerful, but very hard to take away from the movie because it is crammed in between messy dialogue and confusing sci-fi stuff. 
 

I give it 1 star. 
 

Honestly, it’s somewhat hard to give this movie a one-star review. I left the movie theater with the impression that I had enjoyed myself and I thought it was a 3-star movie. But on second thought, “Tenet” feels like a mash of better Christopher Nolan movies. It has the reality-grounded action of “The Dark Knight” series, the mind-bending power of “Inception,”and a dash of science and philosophy from “Interstellar,” but it never out does or even matches those movies’ ambition. Should you go see “Tenet”? Probably not. Unless you feel the walls closing in during this pandemic, you have no reason to go see “Tenet.”