WTF: Life is just the movie Tenet (2020) and that’s why it is so confusing and awful
John David Washington, pictured above, stars in Tenet (2020) as “the Protagonist.” He is a very beautiful man.
It’s been a long year of me, your current WTF writer, attempting to avoid using the first person singular narrative voice in my various opinionated articles. I suppose that this, the last WTF I’ll ever write, is as good a time as any to publish a completely personal, deeply self-serving magnum opus. So I’ll write about the worst movie I’ve seen this year.
Tenet (2020) came to HBO Max on Saturday May 1, giving me and W.C. Hoag—infamous creator of the WTF column— an excuse to sit in front of my tiny laptop and be pretentious assholes while waiting for Robert Pattinson to show up on screen.
Christopher Nolan, responsible for such masterpieces as Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), is the creator of Tenet. Since his previous works have landed spots somewhere in every annoying male film major’s top ten list, our expectations for Nolan’s new movie were high.
And oh, man, did he let us down. Nolan’s version of a bad movie is some sort of increasingly bizarre, excessively complicated pile of jumbled bravado and hanging plot threads. It is worse than the classic poorly written, so-stupid-it’s-funny kind of bad movie. It is two hours and thirty minutes of total confusion and frustrated headaches.
Though neither I nor W.C. Hoag could comprehend what was happening for any part of the two-and-a-half-hour film, I shall now try to distill it into a paragraph summary which may or may not contain spoilers because I’m not even sure if any of this is correct.
The main character—played by John David Washington— is in the present time, but he learns there’s a war happening in the future. Apparently, the people in the future have figured out how to mess with time, so they start leaving objects from the future in the past. These objects are imbued with the time travel properties that the future has access to.
And now we get into the complicated bits. Washington is charged with figuring out who’s doing the dirty work in the present time on behalf of the people of the future. And then somehow he has to stop the people in the future from destroying the people in the past.
It’s so confusing that I can’t adequately explain any further than this, so read this article if you want to know what actually happens in the movie. But that doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters: hopefully by accident—because who the hell would do this on purpose?—Christopher Nolan used Tenet to send us on a spiral through contemplations of existence. That doesn’t mean it was a good movie, though. It was very bad. I digress.
The whole time we were watching Tenet, I felt like Nolan was trying to be Dumbledor from Harry Potter with his weird cryptic messages and insignificant clues woven into the plot. It was like he wanted us to figure out what he meant with the film, but he also wanted us to suffer miserably while we tried our darndest to piece the tiny fragments together.
So there’s the first parallel to existence: Nolan is fate, the universe, whatever mysterious force governs our lives. There has to be some chaos. That’s how existence works. I don’t know why. I wish there did not have to be any chaos.
But what W.C. and I were waiting for finally showed up. Robert Pattinson and Washington, our leading men, working together. The only reason we kept watching, even though in Pattinson’s first scene he looks like he was just kidnapped and dragged on set before he had time to wash his hair. Somehow, he cleaned up so nicely in the following scene that we forgot all about the disgusting initial impression. So there’s the second parallel: we stay for the beauty.
Yes, I’m comparing the beauty in existence—the only reason to appreciate the chaos, the confusion, the violence—to these two, very fine, manly men and their strange partner dynamic. But oh, they really are beautiful. Why else would we have stayed?
The confusion, the destruction, and the leaps from past to present to future made this amorphous blob of a film, which was clearly intended only to be understood by the brightest of cinematic minds, into a smudge of pencil lead on paper.
In other words, death and life got jumbled up, tied together and crossed in the frames. Death didn’t matter, life didn’t matter, maybe they were the same, or maybe they mattered a whole lot, or maybe they were constructs of our consciousness and perception of existence. Either way, we could tell there was some important message to be wrought from the mess of it all.
So the third, final nail in the coffin of this parallel: nobody knows what the hell is going on. Do what you want. Consequences, no consequences—who cares? Maybe we die, maybe we don’t. But at least I know that I’m here right now, writing this article. And tomorrow I will be in the future, reading it over again and thinking about how goddamn beautiful—spectacularly magnificent—Robert Pattinson and John David Washington are.