Tenet

I’ve already seen a few people refer to Tenet as being difficult to spoil due to its complexity, however as this is the first post here, and I’m technically going to be spoiling things, this is your warning.

Tenet is undoubtedly a very Christopher Nolan film, it makes the concepts behind Inception and Interstellar seem simple, and I left the cinema feeling like I’d just crammed 9 hours of mental concentration into 2.5 hours – but in a good way.

I’m not going to try and recap what happened or in what order – besides, what does “order” even mean in this film – at this point it’s been two weeks since I saw it in a nice socially distanced early screening, and I’m still not sure I understood significant parts of it.

This is definitely one of those films that you’re going to need to see multiple times to fully comprehend and appreciate. And I like that.

There was a lot of exposition, primarily in the first half, explaining – to the audience as much as to the characters – what exactly was going on, but it’s more excusable in a high-concept like this than it would be for other films.

For me the entire second half of Tenet felt (mostly) like one giant satisfying “aha” moment as large portions of the first half played out in reverse and the puzzle pieces dropped into place.

Some of those moments were more satisfying than others as it started to verify – or debunk – pieces that I thought I’d worked out earlier in the film. The “mysterious other blonde woman” that Elizabeth Debicki’s character saw diving off the boat? Yeah, I was 95% sure that was going to be her.

During the sequence at the airport where Washington’s and Pattinson’s characters are fighting two masked guys – in reverse – and Pattinson removes the mask of one, and then stops Washington from continuing to beat on the other? I was absolutely sure that the one or both of them were the masked guys and they were actually fighting themselves.

And I was about 80% certain that John David Washington’s character was the one that arranged everything, even if he didn’t seem certain of that himself because he hadn’t yet actually arranged it. Right? Or something like that. I don’t know.

Multiple times I found myself questioning “how did they write/shoot/edit this without getting horribly confused?”. I’m still asking myself that question.

Because of the nature of the film and the story, you get to see a lot of the “cool” sequences play out twice. This is where the desire to re-watch Tenet multiple times comes in full force.

At the back end of the inverted – well, I guess both versions are inverted depending on your perspective – sequence at the airport as they’re rushing away in the ambulance, in the opposite direction to the rest of the action, I instantly thought “wait, was that ambulance there the first time we saw this sequence?”

As it is annoyingly common with Nolan’s films, I’m already prepared for the inevitable disappointment of there not being enough special features on the Blu-ray release, because I’m so keen to see what went into the sequences where everything was happening in two directions simultaneously.

How much was done with practical effects? How much was CG? Were they filming things normally and then reversing – sorry, inverting – them? Did they actually perform some of the sequences in reverse?

I want those answers. I want to know if that ambulance was there the first time. I want someone to cut together a version with the first half and the second half running side-by-side, synchronised, to see how well they actually match up.

But mostly I just want to watch it again to see what else – especially in the first half – I missed, or simply didn’t pick up without the added context of the second half of the film.