This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Simon Ramshaw’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
I ended up thinking about this film almost every day since I saw it, so I had to question myself: did I actually dislike it as much as I thought I did?
The answer is no actually, but at the same time, it's also not as strong as the film I ended up replaying in my head about 100 times. It's a very strange film, because not only does the concept resonate so physically well, but the potential of it has you imagining things around the story that could in theory make for one of the greatest action/sci-fi films of the decade. Imagine a film where our heroes learn how to move backwards in time and trust their instincts to piece the mystery together by catching bullets back into their guns and throwing the bad guys for a (time) loop with temporal pincer movements and good ol' fashioned espionage.
So, what happened here? I think one of Tenet's central problems is its embarassing lack of grace of writing its own rules. Nolan has never been a writer who can make a slick concept slick, truth be told, but it's always been somewhat saved by a barrage of spectacle that nearly drops into the Uncanny Valley in his strong knack for mixing practical and digital effects. He's always been a very literal director as well; even in his film about the most abstract of psychological concepts (dreams), he ties everything down to real-life references and heist movie plotting. With Tenet, it's by far his most difficult concept to visualise. He constantly asks you to trace scenes both backwards and forwards at the same time, trying to awe you with his pseudo-science while also giving you a limited amount of information at a time to process what the hell is happening. It frequently doesn't work for a few reasons.
One: this film gives you absolutely no down-time to try and orientate yourself. Even the quieter moments on Kenneth Branagh's yacht are still buried neck-deep in impenetrable exposition with flowery dialogue drawing your attention to the construction of plot and character without any of the compelling ingredients to make each part work in tandem with one another.
Two: because you don't have a chance to process anything, you begin to notice that you don't have a chance to process anything. Then you start looking at how this is put together on a shot-by-shot basis and you see that even the characters aren't physically breathing in between sentences. It's just bam-bam-bam without a chance to absorb the mood, the science, the story of each moment before it throws you into the next one. This is not a short film by any means, but it would benefit from being a lot longer in order to tell its story properly.
Three: because you don't have time to breathe and because you're noticing its inconsistencies, you can't track things forwards and backwards at once. I'll say there's one instance where you can, however: the ten-storey building exploding from below and then above. It's a beautifully synchronic, visceral feat of editing and pyrotechnics that packs a really spectacular punch, but to what end? It appears two hours into an exhausting exercise in wrapping a pretty straightforward narrative in knots, so can you really feel it if you don't go "Wow!"?
Those three things combine to make a fairly unfulfilling experience at the end of the day. Some of it feels like a spanner that's been thrown in the works by COVID, and some of it feels like Nolan's pretention becoming his intention. For every choppy edit, there's an "Ignorance is our ammunition" line to remind you that maybe this is just full of shit. Nolan's complaints about being surprisingly conservative about sound are particularly infuriating when you take a look at the steaming mess of a screenplay he's assembled for this, and you begin to question just what he's playing at. Is it all some deluded power fantasy about being able to blow people's minds with time manipulation? Is it an itch he needs to scratch because he can't stop thinking about solving mistakes he's made by being able to go in reverse gear, but through time instead of space? I don't really know, and I don't care, but I wish I did. Ultimately, I just think the story he chooses to tell around this concept is the most boring one, because we know deep down that the bomb doesn't go off, because time is fixed, so how can it? Why doesn't it just have fun jumping around the mechanics of the world, instead of just drawing out the mechanics of the world? It's another classic case of me putting my own movie on top of someone else's, but this one is a case where I can't really be blamed for doing so.