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Posted on 2022-03-06
(spoilers ahead if you care)
After a discussion with friends about the merits of Christopher Nolan movies, I decided to finally give _Tenet_ a watch. I should not have -- I should have spent the bloated 2.5 hours watching something more interesting like _Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy_ instead.
The characters are paper thin. The plot is uninteresting, despite all the contrivences. There is not a single character you care about -- the protagonist is a blank slate, the villain is mustache twirlingly evil, the only possibly interesting relationship is unexplored, romance/eroticism is prudishly absent. The only redeeming quality is the VFX, which are undeniably excellent. This seems like a movie tailor made for redditors who look down on Marvel, but are still too intellectually stunted to read literature or watch an actually challenging movie.
I won't go too much into plot details, as those are easily searchable on the Web and would take far too much effort to summarize.
But perhaps it's worth it to look at some of the interesting tensions that run throughout the movie.
Sator, the antagonist, is an Anglo-Russian billionaire oligarch. He got his start by trading stolen plutonium during the fall of the Soviet Union. He is evil. And he is evil because he is a vengeful, abusive husband, who would rather see the world burn than see a happy world without him.
Notice that he is not evil because of of _how_ he accumulated his wealth, he is evil because of his personal character flaws.
Interestingly, the movie goes out of the way to point out that the Future Baddies specifically chose Sator not because of his character flaws, but because he was "at the right place at the right time" -- he was an impoverished teenager during the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union. There's almost, almost, a materialist analysis there, but the line is forgotten as quickly as it is said.
I think that that analysis is abandoned because it is in direct conflict with the plot. The Future Baddies don't rely on Sator because he is an agent of global capitalist plunder, they rely on him because he is a deranged madman. Real capitalists will not end the world because of spite, they will end it because of pure indifference.
The movie makes some limp gestures at anti-elitism. The Protagonist (who is as vacuous as his non-name) is portrayed as an everyman who wears Brooks Brothers suits and is naively unaware just how little 9 million dollars means to a billionaire. However, having made this disavowal, the film delights in glorifying the splendors of wealth -- every character wears tailored suits, lavish dresses, partake in yacht races.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with depictions of wealth in themselves -- I love James Bond just as much as the other guy. But this tension between what the film says and what it does reveals much about its ideological framework.
_Tenet_, the organization that recruits the Protagonist, operates not just outside of governmental control, but outside of time itself. They are beholden to no one, and use deceit and manipulation on both enemies and allies. This is seen as an unambiguously good thing by the film.
"Ignorance is our weapon", says multiple characters throughout. It's a very mid-2000s Iraq War era type of sentiment, echoed in perhaps its most memorable form in 2012's Zero Dark Thirty. Morally abhorant actions are good, as long as the ends are justified. And if the ends aren't justified...well, look how cool and badass they are! That must justify it, right?
One of the genius moves of Nolan's arguably greatest film, Inception, is the creation of cannon fodder that feel okay to kill, both inside and outside of the fiction. Faceless mooks are nothing new to action films of course, but as a conscientious watcher, you still feel a twinge of uncertainty, even when you try to turn your brain off as hard as you can. But in Inception, the faceless hordes they destroy with extreme prejudice are dream characters -- they can never really be hurt, as they were never real, not even in the fiction.
_Tenet_ culminates in a big shootout between the good guys and the bad guys, complete with RPGs, helicopters, humvees, and exploding buildings. Who are these bad guys? It's never explored. From the text, I think we must conclude that they're Sator's hired mercenaries -- that is, real people, with real histories, real motivations for why they're in the middle of a desert, shooting at other unmarked guys.
However, despite that being the only conclusion from the text, I believe that _Tenet_ is trying to pull the same trick as Inception. What the film is trying to imply is that these enemies belong under the same category as the Real Baddies, that is, the Baddies From The Future who are pulling all the strings. These are conscripts from a future war, which, as it hasn't happened yet, we do not have to feel bad about killing. This explains the complete lack of explanation of who they are. They are virtual, just as dreamlike as the armies of Inception.
Finally, the film must grapple with what every time travel movie grapples with. What does travel into the past imply about free will? A character writes it off, saying "don't try to understand it", but it's clear that _Tenet_ pushes a sort of compatibilist metaphysics of free will. On one hand, "what happens happens", but on the other hand, what happens is guided by "intention" or "intuition.
This proves to be an insurmountable obstacle to the film's moral framework when you look at it for more than a second. If the future really is determined by the intentions of the present, then the future time war depicted is a direct result of the intentions of our main characters. Not only is in inevitable, the characters are actively collaborating with the Future Baddies to bring about this devastating war. From that standpoint, why is it really so unreasonable for the Future Baddies to attempt to stop the actions that led to the end of their world?
_Tenet_ tries to explain this away with the line "every generation must fight their own battles" (or something similar, can't recall off the top of my head). Is that really true? Because it seems to me that every generation must fight not only their own, but also the ghosts of the battles of previous generations. In the logic of _Tenet_, there truly is no free will, no way to avoid the dystopian future that awaits. All you can do is make damn sure it arrives.
_Tenet_ feels like a pale, self-plagiarized recreation of Nolan's previous movies. His obsession with creating the illusion of depth through "complex" plot machinations finds its logical end here -- in a movie that many audiences had trouble following, but says absolutely nothing under the surface. It undermines itself at every turn, with every possibly interesting idea turned into gray mush by the desire to keep you from thinking too hard about anything except "what the hell is happening".
If you want an actually interesting movie about time travel and compatibilism, watch _Arrival_.