The Vibes Are Immaculate: Revisiting Christopher Nolan's TENET
A video essay prompts a reappraisal of Nolan's thorniest blockbuster
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is a film I really didn’t care for the first time I saw it back in 2020, bagging mainly on the script and declaring it a film that, for all its sound and fury, was ultimately ‘about’ nothing. Still, for a movie I pretty loudly wrote off in the moment, it’s one I must admit I’ve never been able to fully shake, with certain images and sequences and ideas burned in mind for the past two-and-a-half years. What prompted me to finally give it a proper revisit was Patrick H. Willems’ recent video essay “Tenet and a Celebration of Vibes Movies,” where he skillfully gives definition to a kind of movie that lots of people in online movie spheres, myself included, have been obsessed with lately. Tenet is the film that opens the door to that discussion for him, and in so doing proves that the quickest way to make me personally interested in reevaluating a movie is to compare it at length to Michael Mann’s Miami Vice and the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible series.
Having watched the film again, my opinion has definitely changed: Tenet is, indeed, pretty fantastic, and it’s almost certainly the most interesting film Nolan has made to date. It is easily one of the most audacious and demanding blockbusters of the 2000s, and it is such a masterclass of craftsmanship that it’s worth grappling with whether one “likes” it or not. But I also have a better understanding of why I rejected it the first time around, and a big part of that is that despite the film being covered in Nolan’s fingerprints – from a twisty, complicated narrative, to simultaneously booming and garbled sound design, to copious amounts of stupendously clear IMAX photography – it is, on a fundamental level, pretty different from anything he’s made before, at once both more cerebral and more emotive than his past features, a movie that is essentially experimental in its structural conceit, and that asks the viewer to stick with it for a long time before it makes a real emotional connection. The vibes are, indeed, immaculate, and they are in fact more important than following any specific plot point; Willems is onto something when he compares this to Miami Vice, even if Tenet ultimately goes about things quite distinctly and is playing a very different game with the audience.
What Tenet plays like, to me, is a sort of Hollywood blockbuster version of a structuralist film, where the basic ideas of narrative, time, sequencing, and causal logic itself are put under the scalpel in increasingly interesting ways. It is, at its core, a James Bond movie with a lot of the personality and legibility hollowed out; John David Washington’s main character doesn’t even have a name, referred to only as ‘The Protagonist,’ and his only real personality trait is a commitment to the mission and to those he forms connections with along the way (and most of those connections are more theoretical or tactical than they are truly emotive – his reasons for saving the female lead rest mostly on ‘vibes’, and certainly not on any sexuality or chemistry between the two, which is nonexistent). The plot is often illegible, and intentionally so, both through obvious things like Nolan’s sound design choices – which force the viewer to put in real effort just to hear the dialogue, let alone interpret it – and through aspects that reveal themselves in time, like the fact that The Protagonist knows, at most, bits and pieces of why his mission even matters in the first place, let alone the actual mechanics of what he has to do. I see why Willems honed in on the word ‘vibes’ in his analysis – despite the complexity of the film’s temporal mechanics, the characters in the movie are primarily running on feelings, and the viewer must as well.
The film is, in short, a defamiliarized version of an extremely familiar genre – the spy/action film – whittled down to a bare, almost unrecognizable skeleton, which Nolan then turns on its head and starts spinning and contorting in increasingly weird, surprising ways. One of the most basic aspects of the spy film is cause-and-effect, the basic chain of logic that sets the hero off on their path and sends them from point A to B to C and so on; consequence and retaliation is, in a sense, the backbone of the entire genre: James Bond gets a mission briefing, and then he executes on the orders; a bad guy runs, and 007 gives chase; a bomb is about to go off, and the hero sets about disarming it. This is what Tenet is most committed to defamiliarizing, especially in its gonzo second half, where cause, effect, and consequence are all present, but occurring out of sequence and in increasingly strange patterns before our very eyes.
The film does take some time to ramp up to something interesting, and even on this second viewing the first half again tested my patience, overwhelmed as it is with wall-to-wall dialogue expressing intricate plot mechanics that only sort of matter, especially as there are large gaps in information, for both The Protagonist and The Viewer, that make truly understanding any of this nigh impossible. But there is a method to Nolan’s madness, and I think it all comes together in a key sequence right around the halfway point, where The Protagonist and Kenneth Branagh’s Antagonist are locked in a deadly interrogation within a temporally divided room, one of them moving forward and one of them moving backward. In that moment, the film fully locks into gear, hitting that sweet spot where it is both confusing and thrilling, confounding and exhilarating. It ceases to be a purely intellectual exercise, and becomes an engaging and embodied one, moving the viewer straight to the edge of their seat.
And it only gets better from there, as The Protagonist makes the choice to go back into the world with his entropy reversed, sending him out into a temporally-backwards version of the events we’ve seen so far. The structure is suddenly clarified: the dry, unemotional, plot-heavy first half of the movie is revealed to be a space Nolan was constructing for the action of the second half, a battlefield onto which The Protagonist is unleashed, now with more information at his disposal – and the viewer’s disposal – than the spy typically has, because these are events he has seen, though not always for what they truly were.
So the big action set piece at the airport, which is an impressively mounted but also sort of awkward and halting sequence from the film’s first hour, suddenly becomes extremely visceral and clarifying in the second, as it is the point where both The Protagonist and The Viewer really get a sense of what is going on, what the possibilities of this film and this world truly are, and what is at stake on both a personal and global scale.
It also opens the door for some of the most creative, elaborate, and stunningly staged action set-pieces as you will find across the sweep of film history, finely choreographed clockwork kineticism based on action that is moving both forward and backward, a series of action scenes that are occurring on top of themselves, actions layered over other actions to the point where John David Washington can be both The Protagonist and the person The Protagonist is desperately fighting, depending on which half of the movie we’re in. What Tenet is going for, when it really starts cooking, is something I have never seen any other film attempt, and that’s an extremely rare virtue not just now, but at most points in the history of filmmaking – what is special about this film makes the movie utterly unique unto itself.
But lest it go unsaid, these virtues really are all the more impressive at this moment in time, when the average Hollywood blockbuster – mainly superhero films – are so visually uniform and uninteresting, actors standing in front of green screens or giant TVs surrounded by poorly-rendered images that are filled in later. Tenet belongs to that rare but vital class of high-budget multiplex releases that truly value location shooting, production design, cinematography, color, and motion, qualities it shares in common with the Mission: Impossible or John Wick films, and which it complements with a set of seemingly impossible visual ideas it executes on crystal-clear IMAX and 70mm film stock as though it’s all a naturally-occurring phenomenon.
Tenet is not a perfect film. Kenneth Branagh is too much of a scene-chewer to impart the degree of menace or pathos the film seems to want that character to contain, and I imagine another actor could give a smaller, subtler version of this performance that would make much of the film even more compelling. I also think the first half could be trimmed or tightened; while Nolan’s sound design certainly signals that we’re not supposed to hyper-fixate on the dialogue, the sheer amount of conversation in the movie’s first hour sends an opposing signal that complicates things. The film lacks the equivalent of that incredible moment in Miami Vice – mentioned also in Willems’ video – where the sounds of a plot-heavy conversation disappear entirely as Colin Farrell looks out the window to the endless expanse of ocean, and contemplates the distance between his narrow existence and the space of the world outside. That scene might be Miami Vice’s most crucial gesture, a clear suggestion by Michael Mann as to how this film should be read and experienced, an indication of internality and sensory overwhelm amidst what is otherwise a dry scene of narrative dot-connecting.
Tenet does have emotion and internality, but it’s a longer fuse to get there – as noted earlier, so much of the film’s first half, in particular, is about draining the personality out of the spy film framework, abstracting character and motivation to an extreme and provocative level. Viewed this way, the film’s clumsiest moment of writing – Pattinson explaining that the big temporal weapon will “mean the end of everything or everyone that’s ever lived,” and Elizabeth Debicki idiotically replying “Including my son?” – becomes part of the structural experiment, a signal of how stripped to the bones the whole idea of characterization and motivation has become, how everything we are being asked to care about is purely theoretical, with a kid we have never and will never truly see (outside of a few extreme long-shots) serving as the emotional anchor for the film’s plainest statement of its stakes. When I first saw the film, I tweeted “What hard object hit [Nolan] in the head repeatedly to cause him to write something this deeply, profoundly, fundamentally stupid?” I understand my past self’s frustration – and I do think the moment is the closest the film comes to stepping over the line into ridiculous self-parody – but in terms of the film’s structural experimentations, I do see what Nolan was going for. There is an interesting critique embedded here in the entire idea of how movies like these personalize stakes that are, in truth, irreducible to the individual, forcing us to confront our own need to understand the detonation of a bomb through the narrow lens of the smallest and most pitiable person caught in its blast radius.
That said, I do think Tenet has a heart, and I do think there are emotions that come through, in the end. The film’s final scenes, particularly in the relationship between Washington and Pattinson’s characters, is maybe my favorite emotional beat Nolan has ever pulled off, because it reveals what an act of love and trust the entire arc of the film up to this point has been. It’s a bit of a magic trick Nolan has pulled here, conditioning us to read things through this heady, structural lens, before pulling out the rug and revealing that amidst all the twists, amidst all the backwards-and-forwards sound and fury, is rooted a profound act of friendship. A friendship that, despite being experienced completely out of temporal sync, is so strong that one man will willingly walk off to his death to ensure its existence, while the other will continue living to experience something he knows is doomed and finite. In the moment the characters and the audience fully realize what is going on, the emotions land, and for my money at least, they’re overwhelming. Perhaps the most interesting structural question Nolan winds up asking is whether or not you can backfill a film’s worth of emotion in a single scene; it turns out, if you’ve laid out the breadcrumbs carefully enough, you absolutely can. The vibes are, again, immaculate.
Support my work at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuff
Subscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our podcast about the wide, wacky world of anime: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation
Subscribe to The Weekly Stuff Podcast on all podcasting platforms: https://weeklystuffpodcast.com
Follow The Weekly Stuff Wordcast newsletter for regular updates and extra content!
