Tenet is a Garbage Movie, and Here’s Why That Matters

Like so many other mugs, I spent $20 last week to rent Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film, Tenet, on Amazon Prime. And I was furious at how bad it is. Kenneth Branagh invented a time machine. That’s the premise on which the plot rests.

TENET MOVIE LIVE STREAM

 

 

Hollywood studios and movie theaters spent much of the spring and summer engaged in a strange chess match, trying to find the right time to launch two aspiring blockbusters, "Tenet" and "Mulan," which might jumpstart movie-going amid a pandemic.

Yet while both movies contain plenty of fights, with the benefit of hindsight neither of them gave the theater chains a fighting chance.

TENET - Final Trailer

 

Despite marquee elements seemingly designed for blockbuster glory, each of these big-budgeted films came with handicaps in terms of its box-office drawing power.

In that sense, the question of whether people could be lured to theaters despite public-health concerns was never fully tested, in the way it would have been if a project without those built-in speed bumps had been thrown into the breach.

Released by Warner Bros. (a unit of WarnerMedia, as is CNN), "Tenet" did premiere theatrically, performing reasonably well internationally -- $300 million is nothing to sneeze at, unless you're hoping to make a lot more than that -- but generating less than $60 million in the US.

Or is it because Nolan stole a character wholesale from the TV adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager? The wife of Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer, Dicky Roper — called Jed in the better production — was even played by the same actor, Elizabeth Debicki,

in Nolan’s film, as Kat. She’d grown longer hair and got a better actor for a husband this time around. Although Kenneth Branagh seemed to be phoning it in. And I do think Hugh Laurie was better in the other film. I couldn’t believe the audacity.

And there's the rub. That’s what bothers me so much. It’s that the success of this film shows me we’ve lost our cultural respect for good writing. Say what you want about Star Wars, and it’s overrated, but at least the writing was there to underpin it. A hero with daddy issues.

The myth. The tragedy. These days, our attention spans are so corroded, it’s almost as if directors chance sneaking this kind of dross past us. It's done on the off-chance we’ll think: “I must have been too busy checking my phone to pay attention, there.”