Tenet (2020)

There are certain movies that are difficult to wrap your head around.  I knew Tenet would be like that going into it.  It’s 2½ hours, which is intimidating enough.  But to know that there are people and objects that are temporally inverted adds a whole new level of things to keep track of.

The lead character, known simply as The Protagonist, starts by trying to extract someone from an opera house.  He gets caught up in something much more complicated.  The first hint of this is bullets that can be fired backwards so that they go in to a gun.  There are other items that ostensibly come from the future, which would imply that people can go backwards, as well.  Also, what happened to cause this?  Was there some sort of war?  How was all of this set up?  What’s the end game?

I’m not going to go into the details of the plot, mostly because I can’t remember most of them.  It was that complicated.  I will say that I found a lot of it confusing.  Yes, people can go backwards in time.  It’s tricky and they have to bring inverted oxygen with them.  To give you an example of what I mean, one character drives a normal car while inverted.  The car seems to go on once the character jumps out, but it’s not clear why.  I’m not sure if the car was inverted or if someone was driving the car before (or is it after?) the other character.

This is not a movie for people who don’t like complicated plots.  I like complicated plots and I think I was able to follow most of it, but I’m not sure.  The movie is heavy on the technical side without really making a lot of sense.  I think part of it is that you have to keep track of what’s going backwards and what’s not going backwards.

We get to see at least one big fight in both directions, which is something to watch.  The question is, though, what can be changed?  Could someone from the future do something different on the way back?  What would that even mean?

Stuff like the fight scene was cool, only because I grasped what was going on.  There were a few scenes that I didn’t understand and I felt like I was supposed to.  If you’re reading this and you’re confused by the movie, you’re not alone.  And this isn’t even something that could be explained in a few sentences.  I’d probably need to watch the movie again with notes to understand a lot of it.  This is one of the few times where I might have watched the movie again with a commentary track where someone was explaining it all.  (I’m good with details, but I’m sure there’s a lot that I missed.)

I wouldn’t recommend watching this with someone else who hasn’t seen it yet.  I was watching it with my parents and they had about as many questions as I did.  I had no answers for them.  Yes, it’s a confusing movie.  Now that the movie has been out for a while, I might look around for some explanations.

 

IMDb page