Tenet

There’s no getting around the oddness of seeing Christopher Nolan’s Tenet at home instead of in a theater. Arguably more than any other filmmaker, his creations are meant to be experienced on the largest screen possible, and while some of the spectacle of his latest dense adventure is lost in a COVID-resistant, relaxed living room setting, his ambition — which improbably seems to grow with each new project — is evident throughout.

At once wildly entertaining and immensely frustrating, Tenet gets off to a rollicking start with the film’s unnamed CIA agent protagonist (John David Washington, BlacKkKlansman) on a complex rescue mission at the Kiev Opera — a jaw-dropping sequence that sees no less than an entire seated audience collapse in balletic synchronicity upon inhaling sleeping gas.

Presumed dead in the event’s aftermath, our hero groggily awakens to his boss Fay (Martin Donovan, Inherent Vice) giving him a new highly classified assignment in which the titular word will open “the right doors and some of the wrong ones, too.”

From there, the film transitions from a mysterious but fairly straightforward action/adventure to something far more intricate as a series of characters inform the protagonist about a war being waged by residents of the future on their ancestors, resulting in “inverted” objects — and people — traveling backward through time and appearing to be in reverse to folks who are moving forward as usual.

While Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography and the imaginative set pieces remain stunning to behold, the logic of Tenet becomes so difficult to follow that it begins to detract from the film’s enjoyment — or it would if Nolan didn’t keep tossing out exciting visuals to keep viewers engaged and challenged.

As the protagonist partners with fellow agent Neil (Robert Pattinson, giving easily his best performance thus far) — with whom he scales walls in Mumbai, navigates vehicles driving in “reverse” on Estonian highways, and breaks into a heavily guarded sector of the Oslo airport — Nolan dares viewers to keep up.

Doing so, however, is akin to the experience of watching the director’s similarly trippy Inception (which does a much better job at its exposition by immediately illustrating its points), but with the events from his The Dark Knight simultaneously happening off to the side — and it all matters.

Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

Nolan’s approach to his characters explaining the science — a task that frequently finds Washington struggling with the cumbersome dialogue — bounces between Looper’s refreshing “I’m not here to talk about time travel” stance and a TED Talk from Stephen Hawking.

In addition to this wishy-washy accessibility, the process of deciphering Tenet’s core principles is hampered by leaps of logic that make the lengths the protagonist goes to protect Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) — the disgruntled wife of Russian arms dealer Sator (Kenneth Branagh, atoning nicely for Murder on the Orient Express and Artemis Fowl), the future’s conduit in the present — tough to believe.

Fortunately, the details ultimately coalesce a decent amount in the final minutes when additional revelations arise, and it all grows clearer as one sits, post-credits, with the gradually settling cyclone of information, but it’s too much to satisfactorily parse out in the moment and basically necessitates a second viewing.

Whether this convolution is a mark of brilliant, layered, pioneering filmmaking or a shortcoming of over-ambition and a failure to provide sufficient comprehension in a standard single viewing is up for debate, though in typical innovating Nolan fashion, both sides feel partially true.

Grade: B-plus. Rated PG-13. Available to rent via Amazon Video, iTunes, and other streaming services starting Dec. 15

(Photo: Warner Bros.)