Alright, I love Christopher Nolan still, but I'm going to talk about the main reason, for me, why the story of
Tenet fundamentally doesn't work for me.
Think about the protagonists of all of Nolan's previous films. All of these characters have deep conflict within them and we also know clearly what their goals are. Leonard Shelby (
Memento) wants to avenge the rape and murder of his wife while suffering from a severe memory loss problem. Bruce Wayne as Batman is driven by his desire to bring justice and devoting himself to an ideal to become a legend. Robert Angier (
The Prestige) wants to beat Alfred Borden at magic and will go to extreme lengths to do it, driven by sheer obsession. Cobb (
Inception) wants to get back to his kids in America and he has to take on this one last job to make that happen, while being deeply conflicted over what happened with his wife. In
Dark Knight Rises Bruce rises above his pain and his trauma and lets himself live a happy life. Cooper (
Interstellar) wants to save the world and get back to his son and daughter, knowing that decades will go by for them while he experiences months or years.
Now consider The Protagonist, the protagonist of
Tenet. The protagonist's whole journey is driven by...this.
There's no deep conflict at the heart of The Protagonist's journey, and he doesn't have a clear goal aside from seeing where this one word will take him. Yes, he feels bad for Kat and he doesn't want her to die because of him using her, but that's an added complication. His journey is basically driven by the need to unlock a mystery box, to solve a puzzle. Which ends with him realizing that he was the one in the future to set events in motion and started Tenet. Basically...his character arc concludes in learning about learning a future plot development.
A story needs to have clear character motivations and goals set up early on in the first arc not only for it to be good but for it to work. Instead,
Tenet seems to think its premise is good enough and gets lost and caught up in plotting and keeps adding new idea after new idea. Sure,
Inception is complicated too, but it's very simple and easy to follow at its core.
Additionally, structurally, the prologue showing the Protagonist doing his job works fine, but we are not given nearly enough to actually empathize with him following this. Our takeaway from his torture and passing the test is, he's a good guy and a good soldier. But we're not supposed to sympathize with him throughout the film for having to endure such ordeals in the name of service. He's a pretty chill dude consistently making jobs.
Again, compare this to All of Nolan's other films.
The Prestige almost immediately makes us sympathize with its protagonist when his wife tragically dies during a magic trick because of an accident by Bale's character.
Inception gives us a similar opening prologue to
Tenet with the protagonist living his "day to day life" doing his job, but this prologue and the scene that follow generate empathy for him as we learn that he can't go home and be with his kids, which is what he wants the most. We see his memory of his kids. "When are you coming home, dad?" In the same scene, we also learn that he's feeling pain over the death of his wife ("Mommy's not here anymore") and that he has self doubt in his grasp of reality, pointing a gun to his head while watching the totem spin.
And yeah, there's a good amount of clunkiness to the plotting as
Daneel_O and
BossAttack have said...but I think I should review the film some more to talk about that.
Inception really was a masterwork in storytelling and this movie sadly failed in so many fundamental ways that
Inception succeeded in.
