OVP: Tenet (2020)

Film: Tenet (2020)
Stars: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh
Director: Christopher Nolan
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Production Design, Visual Effects*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Well, after six months (and literally 169 movies caught at home) I have finally seen a movie in theaters since the start of quarantine...well, sort of.  I am still debating, but am probably getting close to the point where I will want to see films in theaters again, even if I time it so I'm going on a day that is less trafficked (and will be pickier about what I catch in a stadium), but for Tenet I lucked out.  A drive-in movie (80 minutes from my house, so appreciate the devotion) was showing this and so I drove all the way and watched this for the first time from my car (I'd never done a drive-in movie).  While I loved getting back into theater mode and enjoying a movie on the big-screen, I will admit that I enjoy traditional theaters better (there's something more immersive than sitting in your car, where it's easier to grab your phone or let your thoughts wander).  Still, even if I'd been forced to watch Tenet with subtitles, I sincerely doubt that stretches of Christopher Nolan's stunning-but-convoluted new epic would've made complete sense.

(Spoilers Ahead) Tenet has a lot of plot, some of which doesn't make sense upon first viewing, and the characters don't all have names but I'll attempt to ground for a discussion.  We have the Protagonist (Washington, who doesn't warrant a real name apparently), who in the opening scenes is in a Russian opera house trying to deactivate a bomb, and in the process is nearly shot by a bullet that "un-fires" and after he grabs a strange artifact, and eats a cyanide pill in order to stop himself from giving secrets to his captors.  It turns out this is a test, and that he is being recruited into a secret organization, partnered with Neil (Pattinson), and together they have to essentially stop Andrei Sator (Branagh), a man who has the ability to commune with the future.  Soon Neil & the Protagonist are communicating with the past, moving back using a weapon to correct or change the past; aided by Sator's wife Kat (Debicki), they eventually stop Sator from destroying the world with a dead man's switch, and in the end it is revealed that Neil has known the Protagonist for some time...and was in fact hired by him, as we learn the operation (Tenet) was the Protagonist's in the future, and he is the actual mastermind behind the Tenet operation.

The movie sounds awesome (with all of the complimentary & pejorative associations of that word), and it is.  The fight scenes early on in the movie, especially the car chase sequence, is well-constructed & impressive, and Nolan knows how to open a movie (the opera attack is thrilling, and a good reminder as to why we should be rooting for movie theaters to work-as this will never play as well on a small screen).  The acting is mixed, with Pattinson taking best-in-show.  Debicki is a brilliant actress, but kind of gets sidelined with the "grieving wife/mother" role that is such a Nolan cliche, and I don't know if Washington is quite up to the movie star caliber that you need to play this part (this is unfair because his dad is one of the great stars, but man it would've been cool to see a young Denzel in this role).

The problems are the same, though, that you'd expect from most Nolan films.  His movies always have the same four issues: bad parts for women, expository plotting, strange sound mixing, and a sloppy final half hour.  All of these are here in Tenet.  We already mentioned Debicki's underwritten part, but the plotting is worse.  The film requires a lot of dialogue explaining the complicated theories in Tenet, a sign, perhaps, that Nolan didn't quite know how to handle even the logistics of a time travel movie (he fell into a similar hole with Interstellar, though I liked Tenet better than that picture).  When you have to have your characters explain every complicated move you watch, it's proof you aren't nailing down the logistics of your film.  This affects the final act of the movie the most, with multiple, repetitive action sequences (it's hard to tell entirely what Robert Pattinson's Neil is doing during this it gets so convoluted), and even an obvious payoff (it's clear that the Protagonist is going to be the mastermind from the first art heist), doesn't feel satisfying we've detoured so much.

Nothing, though, compares to how bad the sound mixing was (I toyed with a 2-star rating just as punishment for this, but decided the movie is too good for that).  Seriously-Nolan's hatred of his own dialogue is bizarre.  There are scenes in the movie where the explosions or action are so loud you wish that the theater had subtitles, and it takes away from the movie because you don't understand what the (helmet-wearing) Aaron Taylor-Johnson & John David Washington are even saying.  This particularly becomes bad in the final thirty minutes, and that's a problem because if you're going to have high-concept detailing in your movie, you've gotta let us hear the explanations & emotions.  I looked past this with Dunkirk because of the hyper-realism (also because other than some spots with the dialogue, this feels like a home run), but this was a serious issue with Interstellar and Tenet it gets worse.  Someone needs to take Nolan aside and just let Willie Burton do his damn job please, because his films are too rare & too visually intriguing to be ruined by something so fixable.