‘Tenet’ on HBO Max Celebrates The Whole Christopher Nolan Vibe, For (Mostly) Better and (Sometimes) Worse

Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action movie Tenet debuted on HBO Max this past weekend. Its easy accessibility on a streaming service with millions of subscribers gives it a shot at improving its standing on a very specific list: Right now, it’s probably the least-seen Christopher Nolan feature since the indie days of Following and Memento. A global pandemic, a studio in transition, and Nolan’s own proclivities all converged to turn a $200 million behemoth into a cult movie. What more audiences may discover starting this weekend is that it works pretty well in that context.

While most movies initially earmarked as 2020 blockbusters were pushed way back (like the as-yet-unreleased Black Widow and No Time to Die) and/or pushed into streaming models (like Wonder Woman 1984), Tenet‘s journey to release was somehow both nail-biting and anticlimactic. When the pandemic closed down movie theaters over a year ago and caused summer movies to start postponing their releases, Tenet held fast to the hope that it might still go theatrical in its original July 2020 date. When both that and an August berth proved untenable, a relatively low ebb in COVID-19 positivity rates (at least in some areas) caused Warner Bros. to stick with a Labor Day weekend theatrical debut, in whatever markets were open. After months of speculation, Tenet came out; it even held in-person press screenings in markets where theaters were open (New York and Los Angeles, notably, were not among them).

Reactions from those press screenings were muted, and audiences showed up in understandably underwhelming numbers; it did moderate business in the U.S. (and better worldwide), but nothing about the Tenet word-of-mouth suggested it was a knockout event, wholeheartedly worth the safety risk of returning to movie theaters in those pre-vaccine days. The film had been shrouded in mystery for months, and finally revealed itself as… another Christopher Nolan “temporal” (read: time-travel) puzzler, with the usual muffled dialogue, handsome but occasionally disorienting cinematography, and characters that felt even more abstracted than usual. The lead character, played by John David Washington, doesn’t even get a name; he’s a CIA operative so clandestine that he’s only ever referred to, with half a wink, as The Protagonist. Eventually, he discovers a plot to destroy the world using “inversion,” a process that can essentially give objects a kind of time-travel radiation: Inverted objects will move backwards in time while the rest of the world continues to press forward. With the right equipment, people can be sent back in time, too (albeit traveling at the same speed as they would moving forward; that is, no jumping back centuries), and that’s what the Protagonist and his sidekick/handler Neil (Robert Pattinson) must do to stop a madman named Sator (Kenneth Branagh), with the help of his desperate wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki).

Everyone and everything in Tenet looks typically great; it’s seemingly the closest Nolan has ever gotten to making his version of a Bond movie; Branagh grimaces like a supervillain and Debicki even plays the Good Bond Girl and the Bad Bond Girl, rolled into one. What the movie lacks is an emotional through-line; dashingly charismatic as Washington and Pattinson are here, they can’t match the intensity of Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, and the story doesn’t have the same true-life urgency as Dunkirk or the open-heartedness of Interstellar. Nolan has been accused of adopting the chilliness of Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker he’s frequently and inaccurately compared to, and Tenet is one of the few cases where the comparison tracks (though he’s still more Ridley Scott-meets-Tony Scott than Kubrick). Whatever their faults, movies like Dunkirk and Interstellar have clear thematic resonance. Tenet is mumbo-jumbo with momentum.

On screen, anyway. Its actual release was a little more lumbering, with some fans venturing out to see it in theaters or private showings, others catching it at the drive-ins that stayed open through the fall, and still others waited for the Blu-ray and VOD release in December. At that point, conversation about the movie started to shift from disappointment and eye-rolling to a sense of discovery. For the first time, a Nolan movie was experienced with low expectations. And some film lovers found that Tenet exceeded those expectations wildly. Podcaster Blake Howard put it most succinctly when he tweeted, back in August, “Tenet is Nolan’s Blackhat.”

It’s a comparison that’s practically a film-geek dog-whistle, and sounds to normal human ears like an insult, or possibly just nonsense. Blackhat is perhaps the poorest-regarded movie from cultishly beloved director Michael Mann; his better-known work includes the Pacino/De Niro faceoff Heat, which influenced Nolan. His Blackhat, in which Chris Hemsworth plays an improbably laconic computer hacker, has earned the affection of the Mann faithful for distilling so many of Mann’s pet themes, images, and tics into a movie that has little else going on besides its Mannliness. Like Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (or, better/worse, Passion) or David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it’s a movie certain fans of the filmmaker will love for feeling so much like a fans-only affair.

That’s Tenet all over. It’s a movie that exists as a big-studio indulgence of Nolan’s talent and, more importantly, his weird hang-ups: muffling dialogue, covering his handsome actors’ faces in masks, toying with his timeline, shooting action sequences so big they seem to overwhelm even him at times, imitating James Bond but with far less sex… it’s all here. And there’s something purely cinematic about these indulgences—something that also made it the absolute wrong movie to prematurely welcome America back to movie theaters.

Tenet is a tribute to the specificity of filmmaking, rather than the kind of sweeping universality people tend to blather on about when describing the magic of the movies.

Removed from the fraught context of an ongoing, national will-they-or-won’t-they, Tenet becomes more of a curio, a puzzle-box not many people had the time or inclination to open until months later. Though Nolan probably didn’t intend it this way, it’s a celebration of his whole vibe—a tribute to the specificity of filmmaking, rather than the kind of sweeping universality people tend to blather on about when describing the magic of the movies. In the end, that might be the subtext the movie otherwise lacks. Inception may have had metatextual elements of filmmaking in its meticulously planned dream heists, but it was ultimately more about exhuming guilt and anguish. Tenet, with its Bondian trappings, location-hopping, and the faintest hint of inverted Casablanca in its touching treatment of male friendship, is a movie full of movies. If circumstances have forced more people to discover it at home, well, it’s not a bad Nolan-style twist: satisfying and bittersweet.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.

Watch Tenet on HBO Max

Watch Tenet on HBO Now