Time After Time
In praise of Tenet's Impressionistic joy ride
Over a year ago, I wrote this ode to Nolan’s misunderstood maybe-masterpiece, Tenet. I never found a proper home for it, but what better time to share it than right before Nolan’s latest nukes its way into theaters? This is one of my favorite pieces of writing I’ve ever done, about one of my favorite movies Nolan’s ever done. Tenet forever! (And back again!)
It’s a fitting punchline for a film about time (and around time, and above time) to have timed its release so poorly. By Tenet’s own quantum logic, it could’ve reverse-rappelled into our lives at any point in history, so how funny is it that it chose the worst one possible? It doesn’t help that the movie we finally got was more intricate than our quarantined-deadened brains could handle.
But if it didn’t go down easy, maybe we were just trying to digest it the wrong way. Christopher Nolan has long conditioned audiences to stock up on yarn and thumbtacks for all the obsessive plot-mapping his movies usually demand, and this one’s no different. But what if there were a baser, more sensorial way to experience Tenet’s pleasures?
Instead of trying to note every passing rose petal from the window of our bullet train, maybe we can simply let the hurricane of movement whip and blur our surroundings into an Impressionistic tableau, one that gestures at specifics but remembers to animate them (and us) with the rush of wind through hair. After all, in a world where one history is only ever waiting to be overwritten by another, there’s always time to go back and smell the roses. Or in this case, to go back even farther and plant them in the first place.
For a director with as much critical and cultural clout as Nolan, Tenet really did seem unusually destined to fail. After marinating in Nolan’s puzzle-addled brain for more than a decade before finally seeing the light of a six-month, intercontinental production, the film was delayed not once but thrice by a years-long, intercontinental pandemic. Further raising the bar for its success was Nolan himself, who bravely/naively proclaimed that Tenet could be the movie to save movies, rallying a weary nation to charge back to their COVID-infested, IMAX-equipped multiplexes. A disjointed release schedule, a disappointing $58 million at the domestic box office, and many middling critical reviews later, it seemed movies would have to wait for their true spider-suited savior. After years of anticipation, Tenet went out with a whisper.
But if you’ve seen any Nolan film, you know he loves nothing more than an impossible challenge, and—as befits a movie about swimming against the stream of time to rewire the past—Tenet’s backstroke wouldn’t quit. After quietly picking up a casual $300 million at the international box office and seeing word-of-mouth positivity slowly uptick, it began to feel like Nolan’s army of inverted Tenet stans were finally arriving from the future and reverting in our present. This Tenaissance culminated with the movie’s streaming debut on HBO Max, sounding the klaxon call for the last of the delayed Tenet appreciators to assemble and pushing the movie firmly into hallowed (if obnoxious) critics-and-audiences-missed-on-this-underappreciated-gem territory.
As with any big streaming release lucky enough to catch the zeitgeist in its palm for a minute, it was hard to parse exactly how much of this new wave of love came from a genuine appreciation of the movie’s artistic merits and how much of it came from a more… aesthetic appreciation of Rob Pattinson, but all attention is good attention in a twilight world of murky streaming metrics. Nearly a year after its initially planned release, Tenet had finally overcome its seemingly doomed fate to garner cheers and—more importantly—chatter. If it hadn’t single-handedly saved movies, it at least saved the corner of YouTube where the hour-long explainer videos live.
But what of the movie itself? Nolan might’ve been moderately clowned for suggesting people would need (or want) to sit through multiple Tenet theater screenings to achieve full comprehension, but what sounds like filmmaking arrogance reads more like understatement once you’ve witnessed the braided palindrome of Tenet’s plot. Though if Nolan does us one favor in the accessibility department, it’s in understanding where our attention should be, and where it shouldn’t. As if responding tongue-in-cheekily to his critics’ claims that his characters lack emotional depth, he says the quiet part loud by naming John David Washington’s Tenet protagonist, “The Protagonist.” Free of the unbearable burden of backstory, the Protagonist is able to glide swiftly through the trapdoors and temporal roundabouts of Tenet’s narrative without having to lug any symbolic weight around—and we’re free to join him.
It’s a move that some took as winking at the cost of storytelling, but I’d argue the opposite. Whereas Inception had its cake and dreamt it too with dizzyingly high-concept action and aching marital tragedy (many would argue the latter doesn’t exactly land, and many would be wrong), Tenet is a different kind of beast by design. It’s not meant to be a melodrama, but a lean, mean, achronological roller coaster. And if you bring too much baggage onto a roller coaster, you end up in the newspaper.
Besides, you don’t ride roller coasters for what you can bring with you, but for where they can take you. Tenet takes us to all kinds of places—to a Kyiv opera house, to the Amalfi coast, to Mumbai, to an Oslo “freeport,” to Tallinn, to Vietnam—and then takes us back again. Explaining the exact mechanics of how or why JDW’s Protagonist and Pattinson’s Neil battle their way through these gorgeously varied locales and then duck and weave their way back through the timeline again and again is beside the point (see those aforementioned explainer vids if you’d like); watching them do it is. As suave and slick as they are combatively capable, their good cop/good cop rapport feels as much like a throwback to the zany James Bond/Felix Leiter pairings of decades past as like a throwforward to a future when spies have more than one timeline to worry about.
As simply as I can possibly put the plot (read: not very): The Protagonist is an operative for an unnamed government agency, recruited for his unflinching dedication (he eats a cyanide pill rather than snitching; they like that can-do attitude) to fight on the frontlines of a “war against the future.” That’s not figurative language—not-yet-invented “inversion” technology has allowed unseen antagonists in the future to send “inverted” weapons and ammunition (twice as deadly, we’re told) back in time to their allies in the present. The Protagonist is tasked with uncovering the people behind this plot and preventing their plan to effectively reverse the course of time.
There’s some clever Nolan-y explanatory gobbledygook that involves braiding one’s fingers together (one hand representing the present moving forward, the other the future moving backward), the idea being that some amount of timeline manipulation can be withstood, but if the amount of inversion ever tips past the equilibrium point and overtakes the forward march of time, all of history will essentially be undone. It’s nonsense, sure, but it’s also an inventive twist on the boring old nuclear apocalypse threat that hangs over similar save-the-world romps (and presumably, Oppenheimer). It also allows for the late-act revelation that these invisible villains’ motivation lies in the ecological wasteland our current climate trajectory is leaving for our distant descendants. We destroyed their world, so they’ll gladly destroy ours to allow their kids to live safely in reverse as the planet undestroys. A bit hacky as a motive, maybe, and a lot to ask of the single line of dialogue that mentions it, but nevertheless an interesting wrinkle on a tried formula.
Along the way, we meet Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat, the twelve-foot-tall estranged wife of Kenneth Branagh’s scenery-devouring antagonist, Sator. In order to stop her husband’s alliance with the future, Kat teams up with the Protagonist and Neil, a character who’s been traveling and re-traveling these counter-chronological roads for quite some time. His early banter easily outlaps the Protagonist’s, hinting at a future reveal that they’ve known each other longer than it seems. And there’s that pesky time travel paradoxism, with Neil having memories of a life spent fighting time crime with the Protagonist, a life the Protagonist hasn’t lived yet. At least, to his knowledge; to Neil’s, they’ve lived it many times over.
It’s vintage Nolan: its logic is so elevated as to be unrelatable, but it somehow makes a weird kind of emotional sense that Neil should be great friends with the Protagonist, who should barely know Neil. There aren’t many stories that could give us that kind of relational Rubik’s cube to play with, so as usual, we’re (I’m) willing to forgive this one’s flaws for the transcendent highs it offers us in trade. And for all the continents and dimensions Nolan’s films have traversed, a globetrotting will-they-won’t-they bromance is new territory even for him. It plays.
What follows is at once endlessly complex and primally simple. If you want to get lost in each inversion, there’s ample opportunity. But one of Nolan’s classic expositional characters also explicitly offers the Protagonist (and us) another option: “Don’t try to understand it—feel it.” And for once, Nolan seems to mean it. With Tenet, you get the sense that he made a movie whose clockwork plotting could withstand microscopic inspection by anyone as smart as Nolan, but whose primary objective is to dazzle and thrill instead of provoking deeper thought. Much of Tenet’s plot is superficially complex and illegible (what is a temporal pincer movement?) but feels obvious and entertaining moment-to-moment (it’s fun when some people moving forward in time are fighting other people moving backward in time). You don’t have to understand why this person’s talking in reverse or why that car’s driving backward, but you have to admit that it looks unbelievably cool.
That’s not a hard task, because Tenet is stuffed to the brim with pulse-pounding set-pieces, visceral fights, and elegant CGI. While still clocking in around 150 minutes, it maintains a case as Nolan’s least-plodding film, each scene driving the plot forward with purpose and speed. The unavoidable expositional scenes help us gain our bearings without sacrificing fun (one has inverted bullets un-shooting into guns; another has Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and essentially every other scene features someone running, punching, driving, heisting, or some ludicrous combination of all of the above. Drop that—along with Nolan’s usual visual creativity—in a sandbox where timelines can be stacked like a layer cake, and you get chase scenes with opponents moving in cross-directions through time, battle scenes where squadrons use intel from teams who already lived the battle once and inverted back to now (that’s a temporal pincer movement), people unwittingly fighting their future selves… stop me when you’re having more fun than the last half-decade of action blockbusters even thought fathomable.
Because this all might not add up to the complex human drama that The Prestige and Interstellar aim to be, it’s tempting to pigeonhole Tenet as a dumb jock, but that’s not quite right, either. The movie’s athleticism is undeniable, both in the acrobatically choreographed action scenes and in JDW’s fullback of a lead performance. But while that adjacency to (gladiatorial) sport proves a convenient jumping-off point for a brawn-over-brains argument, to reduce Tenet to a mindless jaunt through time risks minimizing the riches buried just underneath the infinite momentum of its surface.
A friend once compared the Atlanta rapper Young Thug and his penchant for mumbled, oft-unintelligible lyrics to the artistic stylings of a 19th-century Impressionist painter. We might not understand everything Thugger sings, he argued, but that just leaves more room for interpretation. Rather than limiting our understanding of—and ability to relate to—his songs to a single narrow reading (boring!), his ambiguous vocal delivery acts as a broad brush, painting with more blurred hues and freeing our minds to associate his music with a wider spectrum of human emotions and experiences. There’s a liberty to mumbling along with an upbeat banger without having to know all the lyrics, or to appreciating a crepuscular painting without picking out all the details. In both cases, your subconscious shades in the blanks with your own memories. When you’re listening to Young Thug or looking at a Claude Monet, your feelings get to be temporary co-authors.
That’s a rather generous appraisal of an artist with a song called “Harambe,” and yet it doesn’t ring entirely untrue. And if you can buy Thugger as Monet in a recording booth, maybe Nolan as Thugger with a camera isn’t too far of a stretch. Or at a minimum, perhaps Impressionism isn’t the worst lens through which to view Tenet’s intentionally obfuscated delights.
For instance, when Nolan stages an opening siege without clueing the audience into even the most fundamental basics (who am I watching, what do they want, why are they fighting), what else is he doing but using an Impressionist’s quick, darting brushstrokes to capture the essence of his subject instead of its exact facsimile? If you want a movie where the characters didactically lay out their plan in advance, Nolan’s made a few of them, but this isn’t that. This is the one where John David Washington shoots some people and then says, “We live in a twilight world,” and we have no idea what that means but it sounds abstract and beautiful.
Elsewhere, Tenet pits JDW against his inverted self in a hallway brawl every bit as physics-defying as Inception’s. In the same way that an Impressionist painter might allow complementary colors to sit in adjacent juxtaposition—the simultaneous contrast tricking our brains into compositing the shades into something more complex and living than a simple blend would offer—Nolan places two opposite forces in impossible contact, elevating simple fisticuffs into something more.
Our brains aren’t as evolved as Nolan’s cameras, but even without being able to simultaneously track forward JDW’s movements and inverted JDW’s, we still manage to grasp a primordial comprehension of the scene: he, fight, him. Our eyes flick to one JDW, then to another, not fully comprehending either but processing them as a strangely graceful mirror performance, a man dancing with his reflection. Perhaps that’s a portal into another reading of Tenet’s ambitious presentation: action as interpretative dance, the choreo opaque but not unevocative of grander forces and ideas. At the very least, the output is unlike any other fight scene put to film, the parts we don’t understand counterintuitively augmenting the parts we do by making them feel like ellipses pointing at a bigger world; all you’re seeing isn’t all there is. That’s a vertigo-inducing feeling—exactly the kind you’re paying for when you strap into a roller coaster.
The overlap between Nolan’s cinematic ambitions and the Impressionists’ experimentation with painting techniques doesn’t end there, either. See also: their “impasto” style of painting, which involved thicker applications of paint that rendered the brushstrokes visible to the naked eye. This effect amplified the diffusion of colors and shapes that gave these paintings their shimmery, real-but-not illusion, but it also served a greater purpose: textualizing the artists themselves. Intentionally or not, this technique extended the paintings’ scope into a third dimension by freezing the painters’ movements in amber, collapsing art and the process of making art into one seamless form.
Tenet, too, takes smarmy joy in shattering the illusion of the invisible auteur. Nolan’s brushstrokes are more than visible here, echoing in the straight-from-the-creator perspective of Pattinson’s director stand-in and in the way Nolan seems to be raising an elaborate middle finger to his critics with the very construction of his film. Oh, my movies are just fodder for dorm room theorizing? I’ll make one that’s nearly impossible to break down, and I’ll have my characters straight-up say so. What, my protagonists are too one-dimensional? Well this one is called “Protagonist” and has literally no dimensions, only quips and vibes.
And where third dimensions are concerned, Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema rode their trusty IMAX cameras into the ground, making sure every inch of every airbus crash and fire engine collision could reach out and rattle our optic nerves. They also carried over Dunkirk’s shallower depth of focus, giving these beautiful actors’ faces uncommon (for an action film) clarity against artfully abstracted backgrounds. It all looks sensational; compared to the hollow rainbow of something like The Gray Man, Tenet does more with fewer brushes, making its gray and brown palette look like luscious silver and gold.
We could play this art history game with Tenet for days, but that might be using our brains for a job better suited to our senses. Nolan’s clearly having so much fun here, so why shouldn’t we? That’s really the point of Tenet, as I see it; everyone seems to be missing the forest for the trees, or the pointillist masterpiece for the individual dots of paint. And granted, Tenet’s got a lot of dots, moving quickly and forwardly and backwardly. But in trying to find meaning and logic in each one, we miss the wide-screen landscape of friendship and beauty Nolan’s trying to paint for us, one where we’re never truly out of time—for our world, for our friends, for ourselves.
“For me, I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship,” Neil tells the Protagonist before walking one last time into the past to lay down his life for the Protagonist and the world. “But for me, it’s just the beginning,” the Protagonist replies, as he now knows he’s the one who will eventually go back in time to recruit a younger Neil into the whole endeavor—and into a long, fruitful partnership. It’s paradoxical, but what time travel movie isn’t?
The so-called Grandfather Paradox central to all time travel tales involves the logical impasse of affecting the past in a way that would’ve prevented you from making it to the future in order to affect the past; a time machine makes loops, then gets lost in them. But while the fact that available scientific knowledge won’t allow the logic in these movies to ever fully click forces each one to either half-heartedly explain the gap away or blatantly ignore it, Nolan turns that bug into a feature by having some fun in the blank space. Neil says, “I don’t know,” when the Protagonist asks him about the paradox, but Nolan has an idea. Rather than a magic portal that teleports people back in time, Tenet’s “turnstiles” invert people’s entropy, meaning they have to live out the time they’re traversing in reverse until they “revert” again in the past.
That may seem like a minor distinction, but its implications are massive. Instead of just magically popping up in the past, the Protagonist and Neil have to actively march back through time, passing everything and everyone (including their past selves) still moving forward through it. This means that rather than undoing things that already occurred, they’re just “weaving another past in the fabric of this mission,” as Neil puts it. Or elsewhere, “What’s happened, happened.” In fitting with the Impressionistic theme, those are two beautifully abstract phrases, oblique enough that we can’t directly argue them. But it does make a strange kind of sense, that each inverted path simply stacks on top of the existing histories—not “changing” them, per se, but altering their shared future.
It’s not a perfect explanation, because one can’t physically exist, but it captures the essence of the subject. And it offers a playground for never-before-seen marvels, from the specific action scenes referenced above to the very arc of the movie, which goes forward for ninety minutes and then folds in on itself, mirroring the palindrome of its title by showing us an inverted reflection of the movie we’ve just watched. Try hanging that in a museum.
Perhaps most of all, Tenet’s impossible temporal logic offers an impossibly optimistic reading on the very nature of time itself: rather than being pointless or inaccessible or forgotten, even the most mundane paths we’ve taken to our present don’t crumble in our wake. They’re always available to revisit when we better understand their significance, their reflection pools shining with glimmers of all the futures we still have time to live.
If there’s poetry to be mined from all of Tenet’s calculus, it’s this: that you’re there and I’m here and sometimes the opposite, but we’re always together at some time, where we’ve been or where we’re going or where we always are. What could better inspire us to cross the distance to an old friend or bridge the gap to a new self than watching the Protagonist and Neil run back and forth along their own intertwined histories, finding treasures buried in their pasts and futures? An opportunity missed here, a moment of unrecognized revelation there, but all a part of The Story—you know, that thing every Protagonist has.
Early in Tenet, Kat speaks of envying another woman she saw dive off of her abusive husband’s boat—not for the woman’s hold on Sator’s affections, but for her freedom from his cruelties. By the time we realize at the movie’s climax that the woman Kat saw diving was her own future self, we don’t know whether the superimposition of her lives has registered with Kat or whether she only dove in her future because her past self watched her do it. There’s logic in the illogical, the snake eats its tail, the afterimage of our future inspires our past. It doesn’t have to make sense to make sense.
“What’s happened, happened,” is a convenient way to write off a plot paradox, and an even better way to free ourselves from the shackles of would’ves and could’ves and just live, just enjoy our friendships and our futures, suspended in golden, crystalline light.
Don’t try to understand it—feel it.