Tenet (film)

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Tenet
No, that's not paradoxical architecture again.
Directed by	Christopher Nolan
Written by	Christopher Nolan
Produced by	Nolan's wife, as usual
Starring	The dude from BlacKkKlansman The hot dude from Twilight Princess Di An Indian cougar Michael Caine, as usual What's-his-name off that thing
Script supervisor	This guy's a hero
Edited by	She's also a hero
Music by	Not Hans Zimmer
Distributed by	Warner Bros. HBO Max
Release dates	August 26, 2020 (inverted release) September 3, 2020 (first release to occur on the absolute timeline of the universe)
Running time	±150 minutes
Country	Estonia
Language	Mostly English
Budget	$+205 million
Box office	$−365.9 million

“Don’t try to understand it.”

~ Clémence Poésy, breaking the fourth wall

Tenet is a 2020 sci-fi action wtf film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The film, which is definitely not Inception, stars the dude from BlacKkKlansman, the heartthrob that all the girls love from Twilight, that Australian chick who played Princess Di on The Crown, Michael Caine (of course), and a few other good actors that you like and will recognize but can't name off the top of your head. The film follows a former CIA agent who, well, it's like really complicated, even by Christopher Nolan's standards.

Nolan took over five years to write the screenplay after deliberating about Tenet's central ideas for more than two hours while sitting on the pot. He stated that his main motivation with this film was to really push the limits of confusing the absolute fuck out of his audience and see how much absurdity his fanboys would let him get away with. Nolan was able to make the plot so convoluted that even the cast didn't understand it. Naturally, this resulted in a "Certified Fresh" score on Rotten Tomatoes and hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.

Nolan created enough backstory for this thing to easily warrant a sequel or two, but having accomplished his goal of receiving heaps of praise for utter nonsense, he began to grow weary of making films that are original, creative, and exciting. He has now moved on to making three-hour "epic" films that chronicle already well-known historical events and rip off millennia-old poems you studied ad nauseum in school.

Plot

Standing around random large open spaces to discuss unnecessarily complicated plans, soooo not Inception.

The film starts off with a crazy action scene in some foreign location. There's lots of gunfire and explosions and stuff, but then it turns out the whole thing was a test to see if the Protagonist is up to the task for something even bigger. This is not Inception. The Protagonist has to travel all over the place, multiple continents, to meet and recruit people who help him with his mission. Did we mention this is not Inception? He is conveniently working with extremely rich and powerful people, so making these trips and procuring all the expensive and ambiguously legal equipment he needs is a given. We can't stress enough that this is not Inception.

Meanwhile, the Protagonist and several other characters are also doing a bunch of stuff, like, at the same time, because they're moving backwards in time. Get it? Well, it's like this, there's this device that allows them to, no not share dreams, it allows them to move backwards in time. No, not like time travel. You step into it, the door closes, and then it inverts your entropy, so when the door opens, you and any objects you took in with you are now moving backwards in time, instead of forwards like normal. Then later, or earlier we should say, you can step into the device again and you're back to normal. Make sense? No? Well, like we said, don't try to understand it. Feel it. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, okay? This makes for some really cool action scenes where a bunch of people and cars and stuff are all moving backwards. You know Christopher Nolan is gonna deliver. This film even won an Oscar for its special effects.

In the end, you know the drill. There will be a big, expensive battle where you can't even tell who's fighting who, while the main characters are also trying to do some intricate secret agent stuff, not Inception. Then a badass female character will semi-unexpectedly shoot the target, which almost ruins everything, but the good guys will still get the job done. Again, this is all very much unlike Inception.

Cast

• John David Washington as the unnamed Protagonist. So cool that Nolan didn't give him a name and you didn't even realize it, right? Okay yeah that one kinda fell flat.
• Robert Pattinson (so hot) as Neil, the Protagonist's handler
• Elizabeth Debicki as Kat. She played Princess Di, so she was the obvious choice for a character whose psychotically abusive husband is trying to destroy the world.
• Dimple Kapadia (yes, you would) as Priya Singh. The Protagonist talks about an arms dealer named Sanjay Singh for like two minutes, but then surprise! His wife is the boss! Yeah that one kinda fell flat too.
• Sir Michael Caine as Sir Michael Crosby, a posh British person who was added to the script at the last minute
• What's-his-name off that thing as Andrei Sator, an omnicidal maniac who treats his wife like shit and has used his unfairly gained wealth to implant himself in London, even though everyone would prefer him to piss off. This character is clearly based on Charles III.
• A man who took his wife's surname as a military commander
• Styr, Magnar of Thenn, as Royalty and Specialist Protection (RaSP) Sator's bodyguard
• Clémence Poésy as Barbara, a Tenet scientist who tries her best to explain the plot to the audience, but she ultimately gives up and says, "Don't try to understand it."

Production

Writer, director, and co-producer Christopher Nolan with his ninth Saturn Award

Writing and pre-production

The title of the film is a palindrome, meaning it's spelled the same backwards and forwards, and this is a film about things moving through time backwards and forwards, so you automatically have to appreciate how clever that is. The title, along with some names and other important things in the film, is also an allusion to the Sator Square, a 2,000-year-old Roman acrostic word square. Christopher Nolan doesn't have a smartphone (or any mobile phone, or even an email address for that matter), so he has to read ancient poetry while taking a dump, which is why next year we'll all be seeing an exhaustingly long film based on The Odyssey, that poem which should really be considered a novel, since that's what it is. It doesn't rhyme, and it's about 500 pages long. Seriously, how is that a poem?

Filming

To get those grandiose and diverse shots that Christopher Nolan fans have come to expect, principal photography took place in seven different countries, including Estonia, which was not just a stand-in; several key scenes take place in Tallinn. Nolan was paid handsomely by the Republic of Estonia to try to remind the world that Estonia exists. However, this resulted in a rare instance where Nolan truly screwed up. Robert Pattinson's character in this film, Neil, is British. During one of the scenes in Tallinn, Neil says he can speak Estonian, but this is flat out impossible. Brits are well known globally as the only Europeans who can't speak any foreign languages, and nobody speaks Estonian except for Estonians. Tisk tisk, Chris, your inverted entropy concept is more plausible than this blunder.

Music

This is actually the most confusing part of the whole film. Nolan's longtime collaborator, German composer Hans Zimmer, turned down Tenet for Dune. Who turns down Christopher Nolan? Like, come on. Dune was, of course, amazing, especially the music. But for real, Denis Villeneuve is no Christopher Nolan. Did Chris hurt Hans? Is there some spicy hot goss we're missing?

In any case, Ludwig Göransson, a young Swedish chap fresh off his first Oscar win for Black Panther, stepped up to the plate and did a very fine job indeed. He experimented with distorted industrial noise and, to represent Sator's irradiated breathing, asked Nolan to tape his own grunting at the gym.

Release

Theatrical

After Christopher Nolan brought in over $4.8 billion at the box office for Warner Bros., they finally let him have his dream of releasing a film in theaters only, never on home media. Unfortunately, this was completely snafued by the COVID‑19 pandemic abundance of caution worldwide cinematic lockdown. Tenet was released in the United States on September 3, 2020, and Nolan allowed Warner Bros to eventually sell a few LaserDiscs beginning in 2027 to make up for ticket sales lost to the lockdowns. However, in 2021, Warner Bros pulled a power move and released the film on a few of the streaming platforms that you don't have access to.

In response, Nolan inverted his entropy to go back to 2001 before he started filming Insomnia and tell himself to never work with Warner Bros.

But Nolan soon realized he'd be in his seventies by that time, so on August 26, 2020, he said fuck it, threw the "first" release in his native United Kingdom, reverted his entropy, and decided to stick it to Warner Bros by winning a Best Picture Oscar for Universal.

Home media

Much to Nolan's chagrin, Tenet is now available on DVD, Blu‑ray, HBO, airplane headrests, and above the urinals in public restrooms in Estonia.

Reception and legacy

Doesn't it blow your mind that he was able to use all five words?

Critical response

Critics loved Tenet. Most critics wrote favorable reviews, and the ones who didn't were simply confused, which was Nolan's goal from the start. The only outlier was some whippersnapper from IGN who called it "Inception with time travel", which is obviously so far off the mark we can only assume he was reviewing Bad Boys for Life.

Audience reception

Audiences were head over heels for Tenet, with most fans pretending they understood the film and the few fans who actually understood the film overanalyzing it to death and forming a full-blown religion based on the tenets of the film. Nolanism is just the third of four major religions founded by film fans after Dudeism by fans of The Big Lebowski and Hypermasculinity by fans of Fight Club. Mental Retardation was founded by fans of Everything Everywhere All at Once in early 2023. Nolanism quickly evolved to espouse the tenets of all of Nolan's films. Some of Nolanism's most sacred sacraments include the drinking game Count the Neils, the sexual act Cobbs' Knobs, and the initiation rite Batman's Baptism.

See also

• Inception
• Memento
• Confusion