What did you watch? The 2020 scifi spy thriller Tenet.

Oh, about CIA Director George Tenet? But, like, in space? Almost. Wait, no.

Tenet stars John David Washington as the “Protagonist,” and people call him that, but only after a botched rescue of a diplomat or spy from an Ukranian opera house. Someone helps rescue the Protagonist but flees, and the Protagonist is captured and tortured until he takes a cyanide pill. He wakes up on a boat where he’s told he passed a test, there was no cyanide, and now he’s being recruited to solve some other world problem outside of any government interference. One of the things that he’s alerted to are bullets that fly backwards out of walls into guns, and that there’s weapons sent from the future into the past, which may be attempts at assassinations from some future source.

From there he’s tasked with meeting the wife, Kat, of a Russian arms dealer, Sator. She’s an art curator or something, already rich, and married a rich guy. This is a Christopher Nolan film so often there’s ridiculously wealthy people walking around looking sharp and eating fancy dinners or hanging out on huge yachts. I haven’t seen Interstellar so I have no idea what the socioeconomic backgrounds of those characters are, but like Inception it’s a lot of very well dressed people in very fancy locales in far off places. Anyway, the Protagonist is joined by someone assigned to help him, Neil, who is also very well dressed and they use neat slingshots to scale walls and beat people up and interrogate other rich people.

I may be getting the “which arms dealer he meets first” wrong but like I said, he meets Kat who tells him that she’s married to this murderous arms dealer and can’t leave him because they have a son. This somehow points the Protagonist and Neil to a warehouse for the insanely wealthy who hide their priceless art, and where there’s some kind of device that opens up and masked armed men pop out and fight our heroes. This is a pretty neat fight sequence, where one masked guy fights the Protagonist and seems to be walking and fighting backward, while the other runs out normally past Neil. Neil unmasks this assailant but we don’t see who it is, and Neil doesn’t say, so that should tip you off.

So it turns out there’s a bunch of devices sent from the future and divided up in various places across the planet, and Sator accidentally found one and has spent up until now finding the rest to put them together to create a more functional time machine, I guess. Okay, I just nod along to the plot points and take the “science” or rather the movie’s rules of time travel for face value, because thinking too much about it will have you ask way more questions throughout the 2.5 hour run time. There’s a heist for the last remaining piece and the Protagonist and Neil manage to steal it from a moving truck, only for some backwards racing cars piloted by Sator and his goons to steal it from them while threatening Kat.

A further siege is planned, with two groups – one moving from the past and one from the future, and geez do not try to keep track, as they attack an abandoned mine where Sator is going to detonate the device and erase history…? Or change the future? I have seen videos of people breaking down how hard it was to keep track of some of the action in Nolan’s other movies (The Dark Knight Lower Waker police car/semi chase being one). I liked this movie but not enough to rewind this sequence to follow along to see if it all actually works with one group moving forward and the other backward and that they sync up like the movie wants you to believe. Someone somewhere else points out “who exactly are they fighting?” because you don’t see many of Sator’s forces or vehicles or armory big enough to blow up buildings (or reverse time to rebuild them, and then blow up a different level). There’s a goon that fights the team just before the device is detonated. At the same time, Kat is sent back in time with them to kill Sator, who figures out that there might be two Kats he’s dealing with at the same time, one from the past and one from the future.

Oh, why is Sator blowing up time? Well, he has terminal cancer, and must have some guilt about being a vicious warlord because he wants to solve environmental problems the world is facing in the future, which is why the devices were sent back in time. At no point in the movie is the environment, the drastic devastation of climate change, ever mentioned or shown. Just well off well dressed people standing in front of exotic locales or on fancy boats talking about saving the world.

Was it good? Yeah, it was okay. Like I said, I didn’t bother trying to keep track that everything matched, I’m sure some effort was made to make sure that the forward and backward actions of these swat teams worked out like the film wants you to think they do, but I think the time travel in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure makes more sense. The device from the future are some grey components that don’t look like anything that when put together still don’t look like anything, but maybe that’s the point. Other than tying up loose ends, will the Protagonist and friends make an effort to fix the world so that the people of the future stop trying to kill the past? Or is he going to join a secret organization that just exists to cover up these devices while the world faces these unseen but grave consequences?

The backwards fight and car chase were pretty neat. I thought about Matrix Reloaded and its highway car chase, and how overkill that was, while watching this one – in a sense of a car chase inserted into a science fiction adventure, this served the purpose for cars moving in time backwards and forwards. John David Washington was pretty good, I’ll have to check out other movies he’s been in. Not the best movie, I have questions, I rolled my eyes a few times, not anywhere as dumb as The Dark Knight Rises.