Tenet

I finally got a chance to see Tenet.

It’s unfortunate that the virus nerfed Tenet’s performance, but a lot of unfortunate stuff happened recently, and I suspect that moviegoing as a concept was in trouble anyway before 2020.  In 2019, I went to a movie theatre exactly three times, and I haven’t been to a theatre since December 2019.

The problem is that all the trends are against it. It’s much more comfortable to watch a movie at home, with the ability to pause and use the bathroom. Additionally, in a movie theatre that seats 200 people, all it takes is one of those people acting badly to ruin the movie – phone calls, loud conversations, children running up and down the aisles and shouting, etc. And in any group of 200 people, there’s a good chance that one of them will act badly. If that happens, you’ve dropped $20 (or more, probably more) on movie tickets for the privilege of listening to someone’s conversation about how “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IS HAPPENING” and “WHO IS THIS GUY AGAIN?” or “SO HELP ME GOD, IF YOU DON’T STOP HITTING YOUR BROTHER YOU’RE WAITING IN THE CAR!”

And that was before the virus, which made sitting next a coughing stranger an even less attractive proposition than it was a year ago. So I suspect the future of visual storytelling might be shifting away from movies like Tenet and more towards streaming series like The Mandalorian. Maybe it will be like how people used to read and publish short stories, but the cost of paper went down after World War II and novels became more popular and short stories more of a niche form.

But, anyway, digressions. Back to Tenet!

I really liked Tenet. The concept is that the main character gets recruited by a covert agency that’s fighting a temporal cold war. Humans in the future have figured out how to use a technology called “inversion” that reverses the flow of time for a specific object or individual. Using that technology, the future has declared war on the past by sending weapons and technology to the past (our present) to advance their goals. The main character gets sucked into a spy thriller plot, except in addition to the usual skullduggery and spy tricks, there’s also temporal trickery. A couple of different battle scenes have some characters fighting the battle forward in time and others fighting it backwards.

I don’t usually like time travel stories. I’ve written a bunch of time dilation stories, but people have understood that concept for a long time – the Bible talks about how a thousand years is a day in God’s sight, and there are all the various myths about a man who spends a day in the faerie realm or the Otherworld only to return to Earth and find that a century has passed. But time travel is trickier, since one of the roots of fiction is characters having to deal with the consequences of their decisions, and time travel lets them undo their decisions until they get it right.

That said, a limited form of time travel works, especially with defined rules. The “inversion” technology of Tenet has clear rules and limitations which come to bite the characters several times.

I definitely liked Tenet, and I like the Christopher Nolan formula of “thriller movie, but with exactly one science fiction element added.” Some of the spectacles in the movie are amazing – some shots seem like they must have cost a million dollars a second. That said, you definitely have to pay close attention, and it’s the sort of movie that rewards multiple viewings.

-JM