5 years later, Christopher Nolan's most divisive movie is better than you remember |
Christopher Nolan, the director behind the Dark Knight trilogy and science fiction epics like Inception and Interstellar, nearly always hits a winner with his films, commercially, critically, or both. The one blemish on an otherwise impeccable resume is Tenet, the 2020 sci-fi thriller that, depending on who you ask, falls somewhere between an ace and an unforced error. Tenet is arguably either a jumbled mess or one of Nolan’s best movies — but really, it’s both.
Tenet isn’t necessarily a time-travel movie, but it centers around the idea that the flow of an object or person through time can be reversed. For example, when fired, a gun “catches” a bullet that was already embedded in a wall. With that established, the film follows John David Washington’s character (unnamed, and who declares twice in the film he is “the Protagonist”) and the organization Tenet as they fight something of a time-bending Cold War against Kenneth Branagh’s villainous Russian oligarch Andrei Sator. The film is a lot.
It’s difficult to discuss Tenet without first discussing the context around its original theatrical release. Tenet was originally supposed to come out July 17, 2020 (the date being a cheeky palindrome like the film’s title: 7/17), but, of course, it didn’t. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic happened and the film industry struggled to survive amid the shutdown of movie theaters across the globe. Some underrated films were dumped in theaters where audiences were tiny. Others landed........