My thoughts on Tenet

There’s a quote said by Bill Murray’s character in the film Tootsie where Murray’s character, a struggling director, says “I hate when people come up to me after one of my shows and says, I really loved it, it made me cry. I want them to come up to me the week after they see it and say what happened?!”. And I think that’s essentially is what Nolan is aiming for with Tenet.

First of all let me say that I am huge Nolan fan and I think it would be difficult to disagree that he has staked his claim as the most influential and important filmmaker of the 21st century. And whilst I was desperate for this film to be another master stroke, I felt it fell short of what we come to expect from Nolan. (Warning: Spoilers ahead).

Whilst the concept is both phenomenal and ambitious, the actual narrative is somewhat disappointing. It's hard to realise what we are rooting for, besides the obvious this guy is the hero and this guy is the baddie. The driving forces that make inception and interstellar so gripping is the element of the protagonist being a father wanting to overcome something incredibly difficult for their child. We root for Leo in Inception and Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar because they’re doing all they can do for their family.

However, that isn’t the case for our protagonist in Tenet. As good as John David Washington’s performance is, we are offered no real reason to root for this character. Nolan does incorporate his theme of family but it is merely in the form of a side-character/love interest, and whilst we feel empathy for her because of her situation, she doesn't have to achieve the impossible to escape that situation. In fact, for her to get out of her situation she is tasked with the minutest of roles in the films climax, and she can’t even do that.

I do not think that relating to the characters is the downfall of the film. I think that the downfall comes in its third act, where we are promised a clever, intertwining climax that completely fails to deliver. For all the intricacies and manipulation that we have endured in the films set up, the climax of the film seems to me on first viewing, that the bad guy wants to end the world (like a bad superhero movie premise) because he is dying. He has seven or so special items that will allow him to do this with ease. In fact it’s so easy that he leaves his only henchman in an underground vault to do all of this work, whilst he enjoys a happy moment on his yacht with his wife. Luckily, our heroes devise an expertly choreographed army-style, two-team strike to achieve the incredibly hard task of picking a lock and killing one henchman. All whilst the heroine is tasked with keeping the baddie alive. Oh no wait, she’s killed him. Never mind, it all still worked. Thank goodness.

It's got a couple of phenomenal sequences (one particularly that stands out), and the acting and casting choices were fantastic - but it completely fails to deliver an ending fit for such a promising, daring and unique premise. Perhaps on second viewing it will get better but it wasn’t the film’s complexities that disappointed, merely it’s simple ending.