I put this off for a long time due to the awful reviews but I always knew I would get around to it eventually. As I feared, this is pretty bad, not so much because it is confusing but because it seems so sloppily made. The central conceit of moving backwards through time is sound enough but everything else around it is so generic and flat. At times, it was so bad that I wondered if Christopher Nolan was deliberately making fun at the inherent silliness of James Bond films but I fear that the humorless Nolan was being completely earnest.

The unnamed protagonist is a combatant in what looks like a terrorist attack on an opera house in Kyiv, Ukraine. After being captured, he tries to commit suicide with a pill but his loyalty is rewarded by being recruited into a secret organization known as Tenet. They are effectively fighting a secret war against enemies from the future who are able to invert objects or people, so that they move backwards in time. Following a series of clues, he learns that a Russian oligarch Andrei Sator is the origin of the inverted objects. He is also assigned another agent Neil to help him. They decide to get to Sator through his estranged wife Kat and to help her they raid a vault in a freeport facility. But inside the vault is a turnstile, a device that inverts anyone or anything that passes through it in time. Neil also reveals that he is already a member of Tenet and that they are ultimately racing against Sator to recover an artifact that can invert the temporal flow of the entire world.

Even aside from the temporal shenanigans, the film is deliberately obtuse about things like who they are working for and who knows what. You get ridiculous contrivances like Neil and the protagonist raiding the home of an Indian billionaire, only to find that his wife is really the one in charge, only to find that she is actually a member of Tenet herself. But then Neil reveals that he is also a member of Tenet so why did they need to raid that billionaire’s tower in the first place? Effectively everything that they do to drive the plot forward makes no sense, including how and why Kat gets involved with them. Meanwhile, the temporal twists aren’t really surprises at all given Nolan’s reputation. It’s so convenient that the inverted people need face-obscuring masks to breathe so that when the hero fights one, you already know that he is really fighting himself. I’m pretty sure that Nolan is very pleased with himself by making sure that all the forwards in time and backwards in time sequences sync up perfectly. I would also concede that the time inversion trick adds some novelty to the action scenes but that doesn’t excuse Nolan for being so sloppy about everything else in the film.

It truly is striking how lazy this film is. Elements like a freeport as an art repository and the Indian billionaire’s tower seem lifted from the pages of The Economist, Elizabeth Debicki as Kat seems to be playing the exact same character that she did in The Night Manager, the heists here are seemingly included just for the sake of having heists as they are neither required by the plot nor are they particularly interesting. It is astounding how the same person who made Dunkirk could have a battle scene so meaningless and devoid of tension. How could there be any sense of peril when we can’t even see who it is they are fighting against? Most of all, it utterly fails when it comes to Kat’s family drama and how the protagonist gets involved in it. It feels like a robot trying to direct human emotions. Yet in the end, Nolan does demonstrate that the most important relationship in the film doesn’t involve Kat at all but is the friendship and partnership between the protagonist and Neil. Why couldn’t he just lead with that all along?

That’s why I’d say that this is an unambiguously bad film with almost no redeeming qualities at all. It seems like Nolan had the idea for this ages ago but struggled to bring it to fruition. Maybe some ideas just aren’t worth it.