Tenet is the ultimate rebuttal to the idea that Christopher Nolan is a “no fun” filmmaker

Christopher Nolan was an acclaimed filmmaker before he made Batman Begins, but it was certainly his gritty, hard-edged superhero movies that made him one of the definitive blockbuster directors of all time. Partially because of his Dark Knight trilogy, and the way those movies took Batman “seriously,” Nolan has developed a reputation for making Serious Movies. Inception and its elevated tone could also be seen as an attempt to class up action movies, and Interstellar really wants you to think it’s a hard sci-fi movie about real science stuff until that stops being true. Then there’s Oppenheimer, a mega-budget crowd-pleaser about a broken man reckoning with the fact that he may have ruined the world. But while his Serious Movies reputation isn’t totally unearned, it’s also an overly reductive interpretation of Nolan’s filmography. You only need to look at one movie, Tenet, to see that.

Tenet is the most underrated—maybe even flat-out forgotten—movie in Nolan’s filmography of blockbuster breakouts, mostly because of its bungled release. Set to come out in the summer of 2020, the movie was repeatedly bumped because of the COVID-19 pandemic and was ultimately dropped into theaters that fall before most Americans were ready to risk going back to the movies. If people saw Tenet at all, most watched it at home, much later. Warner Bros. is looking to at least rectify that a little bit by returning the the film to theaters as well as giving it an IMAX re-release for one week, starting on February 23. So for anyone who didn’t bother with Tenet the first time around or still hasn’t accepted the fact that it’s Nolan’s most delightfully fun feature, now’s your chance.

The film’s most lasting impact on culture, beyond at least one funny bit of jargon that we’ll touch on later, is that it is ostensibly very complicated. That was one Peloton instructor’s takeaway, at least, which she casually brought up once during a class that she had no idea was being attended by Nolan himself. But the thing about Tenet is that the complicated stuff doesn’t actually matter. It’s not like Inception, where you want to understand what’s happening as you descend into each dream level. Tenet is closer to Nolan’s version of a thrill ride, and it’s better if you just hold on and let it take you where it’s going.

Not to say it’s a “turn your brain off” movie, because the plot is interesting. It’s just that the mechanics of Tenet aren’t really necessary to understanding it—and, in fact, they may make it harder to follow (that’s why the countless YouTube essays trying to map out the action sequences are often bullshit). Nolan himself recently acknowledged that “you’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet.”

All you really need to understand is that Tenet is Nolan’s shot at a James Bond movie: It’s about a cool, charming spy guy on a quest to stop a villain (Kenneth Branagh’s Sator) who has sights set on global catastrophe. It just so happens that the global catastrophe involves setting off a bomb that will kill all of time forever through the use of “inverted” technology that causes things to go backward instead of forward.

What does that mean? How does that work? It’s not totally clear, but that’s a neat little trick Nolan pulls to put you in the head of John David Washington’s character—known only as “The Protagonist.” He doesn’t know what it means or how it works, he just knows that it works and that his mission is to save the world from it. “Ignorance is our ammunition” is a phrase brought up in the movie between various people in the temporal espionage world. But it’s not about secrecy, it’s about literally not knowing what happens in the future in order to preserve the existence of (or illusion of) free will. Leave it to Nolan to make “this doesn’t make sense” a plot point.

That’s similar to why concepts like the film’s somewhat-infamous “temporal pincer movement” are so funny out of context—and maybe in context. A big aspect of the second half of the movie is the introduction of machines that can invert people so they move backward in time, which the good guys utilize when attacking the location of Sator’s bomb. Aaron Taylor-Johnson discusses a “temporal pincer movement” as if it makes perfect sense and requires no explanation, like any number of weird sci-fi concepts (nobody asks Han Solo what it means to make the Kessel Run in order 12 parsecs), but also it kind of does make sense.

A pincer movement is when an army attacks an enemy from two sides, so a “temporal” version of that would mean attacking an enemy from two sides of time (one going forward, one going backward). It’s funny, in that it’s introduced as a crazy thing that everyone is obviously supposed to immediately accept and understand without question, but it’s Christopher Nolan funny because you should just accept it without question.

But not everything in Tenet is that kind of “funny.” Some of it is closer to a normal kind of funny, thanks to Washington’s effortless charm and the fact that he plays most of Tenet as a man who is just slightly out of his depth. This is most obvious when he meets up with Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat, Sator’s art dealer wife, to probe her for information about getting to her husband. What begins as cold, Bond-esque repartee quickly devolves into The Protagonist’s poorly concealed shock at just how badly Sator has treated his wife—who stays with him because of a complicated blackmail scheme he put in place when she sold him an expensive art forgery created by a man she was having an affair with.

The Protagonist questions why Sator was willing to spend $9 million on a forgery, and Kat shrugs it off, saying that money would’ve barely covered the vacation Sator recently forced her to take. With surprise comedic timing and a carefully measured amount of shock in his voice, The Protagonist responds: “Where’d you go, Mars?” and Debicki takes a beat to let it breathe before continuing the conversation.

It’s a rare moment where the artifice and “serious” aesthetics of both this film and Nolan’s entire filmography fall away and The Protagonist becomes a human—one who is truly in over his head in a bizarre world where things like a “temporal pincer movement” are treated as normal, and his shepherd through that world is Robert Pattinson, playing the exact kind of super-competent, charming Englishman you’d expect to find in a Bond movie.

Washington’s line and delivery in the scene is the kind of thing Nolan generally avoided in projects like his Dark Knight movies or Inception, where it might have broken the reality of those carefully constructed worlds. Tenet is no less of a carefully constructed world, but the world is less important than the people in it and what they do.

That’s why it feels a little different from Nolan’s usual films and why it can be so hard to parse for people who aren’t on its wavelength. Nolan has taught audiences to try and understand The Rules of his movies (which is the whole point of The Prestige), but Tenet rebels against that in the name of just giving audiences a good time.