Tenet (2020)

 

Since Inception, the subjective experience of time versus its objective flow has been central in all of Christopher Nolan's films, except maybe The Dark Knight Rises.  Of course, most films bend time, claiming that some sequences are longer or shorter than they actually are on screen.  But Nolan’s films make heavy use of crosscutting, setting several sequences of events in parallel—sometimes, as in Dunkirk, sequences of events that don’t happen at the same time or take the same amount of time.  It stretches out a period of time by cutting in different angles on it.  There isn’t even always a lot of plot in all the parallel sequences.  That’s often where the action scenes fit in his films, padding out the length of one sequence as opposed to the others. 

There are many films that do this.  But there aren’t many that make it such a central device, nor many that take it so literally.  Nolan’s sci-fi films always seek to give us some reason why this could actually happen, how the objective flow of time could be made to equal subjective duration. 

For all their bluster about technology that challenges our basic understanding of the universe, many of the goals Nolan's stories set for the characters are conservative.  A character will seek a return to ordinary, sci-fi-free life.  Gotham's police force is restored.  An American suburb will be built on the interior of an awe-inspiring spacecraft, and the nuclear family is the most powerful force in the cosmos. 

Tenet, surprisingly, isn't like this.  Rather, the film ends with the characters not having decided on any particular purpose.  It's maybe backward-facing in terms of how in love it is with the spy thriller genre.  Ignatiy Vishnevetsky was correct to identify “I love James Bond movies” as a central theme of Tenet.  Nolan makes no effort, neither in his films nor in what he publicly says, to hide the fact that he loves genre movies, and he draws on these liberally for his character archetypes and action scenes.  There is a streak of machismo in the positive reception of this film I find somewhat annoying, but in general this film's convoluted timeline and sci-fi speculations feel playful, rather than like some metaphor.  This is enough for it to stand out from the rest of Nolan's filmography.