The recent brouhaha created by the upcoming premiere of The Odyssey serves as a stark reminder that Christopher Nolan remains the most successful and most influential filmmaker of his generation. For the past quarter of a century, Nolan has cultivated a commercial and critical hegemony that has fostered a cult of personality, manifesting in online armies of devotees who proclaim each of his films a masterpiece and insist that the director can do no wrong. However, this narrative of infallibility is punctured by the existence of genuine missteps in his filmography, most notably the 2020 science fiction action thriller Tenet. While often interpreted through the lens of external catastrophe, the film stands as a significant commercial plateau that ultimately contributed to the dissolution of his decades-long, mutually lucrative partnership with Warner Bros.
The commercial failure of Tenet was not merely a creative underperformance but a disaster that forced a massive $100 million write-down by Warner Bros. in 2021. It is tempting to attribute this outright failure entirely to the force majeure of the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated the global cinemagoing paradigm. Released amidst crippling lockdowns and a populace terrified of public spaces, the film faced an audience that simply wasn't there. However, even when the initial enthusiasm of critics was accounted for—many of whom were slightly divided by the film’s ambition—the box office results suggested a deeper disconnect. Tenet became the victim of its own timing, a blockbuster designed for the collective experience of the multiplex dismantled by social distancing.
The plot, written entirely by Nolan, initiates a labyrinthine narrative centered on an unnamed Protagonist (John David Washington). The story kicks off in Kiev, where Washington’s CIA operative orchestrates the terrorist takeover of the National Opera House. This action serves merely as a cover for extracting a VIP, but the operation goes awry. The Protagonist is captured by a mysterious organisation known only as "Tenet," who reveal a terrifying secret: someone in the future has harnessed inverted entropy, allowing for travel backward in time. As inverted objects begin materialising in the present, the organisation fears a cataclysmic future if the process is not halted.
The mission to stop this future involves a globe-trotting pursuit led by Washington’s handler, the enigmatic Neil, portrayed by Robert Pattinson. Their first major detour takes them to Mumbai, where they encounter arms dealer Priya Singh (Dimple Kapadia). She reveals that the inverted ammunition is being sourced from Russian oligarch Alexei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Sator, though terminally ill with cancer, is desperate to collect various pieces of weapons-grade plutonium to assemble the Algorithm—a device capable of reversing entropy and ending all existence. To get to Sator, the Protagonist and Neil must infiltrate life of his estranged wife Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). She is being blackmailed by her violent, older husband using a forged Goya drawing.
Critics and audiences have long described Tenet as a James Bond-style action film infused with mind-bending time travel concepts. Nolan, ever the cinephile, also injected narrative techniques inspired by his previous works, specifically Memento and Inception. The result is a script that is undeniably ambitious and intellectually stimulating, yet it demands an exhausting amount of attention and patience from the average viewer. The film is dense, relying on the audience to piece together the logic of its mechanics rather than spoon-feeding them exposition.
On the technical front, Nolan delivers his usual superb skill as a director. The film is a visual feast, featuring spectacular and elaborate action set pieces that are aided by excellent editing and stunt work. The atmospheric score by Ludwig Göransson and the brilliant cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema ensure the movie is easy on the eyes. Locations ranging from the sun-drenched streets of Italy to the industrial landscapes of Estonia are put to excellent use, grounding the abstract concepts in tangible reality.
However, the film’s structural integrity begins to fray somewhere around the halfway point. Nolan attempts to visualize time travel by showing the very same scenes from multiple perspectives, with characters literally going back in time to interfere with their past or future selves. While this is visually impressive, it becomes deeply confusing. The director’s attempt to explain these paradoxes through expository dialogue—specifically mentioning the grandfather’s paradox only muddles the waters further. The narrative complexity reaches a fever pitch in the final battle scene, which employs a "temporal pincer movement" involving two groups of soldiers—one battling forward in time and the other backward. This sequence, meant to be the film's climactic spectacle, often feels like a chaotic mess of temporal logic rather than a coherent conclusion.
This all-inclusive complexity contributes to the film's running time of nearly two and a half hours, a duration that many viewers would find excessive given the uneven pacing. Had the narrative been tighter, the runtime might have felt justified, but as it stands, the film drags in places where intellectual engagement could have been maintained with more economy.
Nevertheless, the film retains a measure of quality, largely due to its cast. John David Washington continues to emerge from the long shadow of his father, Denzel, portraying a Bond-like protagonist with charisma and physical presence. However, his character remains complex but slightly underwritten, preventing him from fully utilising the skills he demonstrated in Blackkklansman. Robert Pattinson is comfortable in the role of the second fiddle, providing a cool, detached competence to the proceedings. The greatest praise, however, should be reserved for Elizabeth Debicki. She shines in a role that could have been sidelined by the science fiction spectacle—a woman attempting to escape an abusive marriage, doing so even while risking the actual end of the world. Her performance grounds the film's absurdity in genuine humanity.
Kenneth Branagh, conversely, is slightly miscast. He plays another stereotypical role of an evil Russian oligarch, a trope he has revisited in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Furthermore, he fails to convey a sense of physical danger against Debicki, who is visibly taller and more imposing than him on screen.
Tenet, despite its commercial failure, served as a sort of test run for Nolan’s subsequent, more ambitious, and ultimately more successful project, Oppenheimer. It was a misstep in terms of execution, a bloated experiment in time, but it revealed the director’s willingness to push boundaries, even when the audience couldn't quite keep up.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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