Christopher Nolan has an extensive filmography of movies that can be quite confusing, and his defense that the confusion is part of the experience works for Inception, but not for Tenet. Nolan recently addressed the frustration Tenet inspired in viewers due to its complex and often hard to follow story by saying that confusion is part of the experience of the movie. Nolan is an expert storyteller, and he can use ambiguity to enhance his films, but the tactic didn’t work for Tenet in the same way it worked for Inception.
Both Inception and Tenet feature one of the hallmarks of many of Christopher Nolan’s 12 best movies: time manipulation. In Inception, the main characters experienced time dilation as they moved through different layers of the subconscious, meaning that each layer moved more slowly than the last. In Tenet, Nolan introduced his concept of reverse entropy, which allowed events to play out both forward and in reverse. The movies are similar in their subjects, but Inception and Tenet are very different in how they execute their confusing time-based plot devices.
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Nolan’s “Confusing Narrative” Defense Works For Inception’s Ending
Inception
- Release Date
- July 16, 2010
- Director
- Christopher Nolan
- Cast
- Tom Hardy , elliot page , Joseph Gordon-Levitt , Cillian Murphy , Ken Watanabe , Marion Cotillard , Leonardo DiCaprio
Inception, for all of its visual effects and mind-bending plot, is a story about a man trying to move on from a terrible tragedy and return to his family. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, was haunted by the suicide of his wife, Mal, and since the police believed he killed her, he couldn’t see his children anymore. Because he wanted to be with them again so badly, Cobb visited them in his dreams. Throughout Inception, Cobb was obsessed with determining what was real and what was a dream, as the inability to separate the two caused Mal’s suicide.
At the end of Inception, Cobb saw his children again and spun his totem to see if they were real, but he didn’t wait to see the result. The ending is extremely open-ended, and either way it could be interpreted would completely change the movie. However, the point of Inception‘s ending is that Cobb doesn’t care whether his children are real, he just wants to be with them. Cobb went from a man who was willing to kill himself if he couldn’t tell he was dreaming to one who didn’t care about reality as long as he could be happy.
Inception‘s ending is the perfect example of Nolan’s confusing movie “experience.” The story up to that point was complex but comprehensible, and viewers could understand that Cobb was reuniting with his children, what that meant to him, and how it could be either a dream or reality. Then, the ending was made ambiguous, but only after the stakes were sufficiently set. Nolan gave audiences 95% of the story of Inception and used the ambiguous ending to drive home the main theme of Inception: that reality is subjective and obsessing over it is futile.
Why Nolan’s Explanation Doesn’t Work For Tenet
Tenet, on the other hand, uses its ambiguity in a very different way. Throughout the movie, The Protagonist was moving through time both regularly and inverted, and it could sometimes be difficult to tell which way he was going. Tenet also had a much more complex world to build, with conflicts that took place during the movie that had been started far in the future and interesting changes to the laws of physics. Nolan can use ambiguity effectively, but in Tenet, it was mishandled and made the basic plot of the movie difficult to discern, let alone the message he was trying to convey.
The confusion Nolan gave viewers in Inception served a narrative and thematic purpose, but Tenet‘s ending left many questions unanswered. Viewers had to concentrate intensely on the plot just to understand what was happening and when. It detracted from the characters, as any development they experienced was overshadowed by Tenet‘s confusing narrative. Inception‘s ambiguous ending was used effectively and sparingly, and it served as both the completion of Cobb’s character arc and a poignant delivery system for the movie’s theme. Tenet‘s ambiguity lasted for too much of the movie to pack as much punch as Inception, and it didn’t add much to the story.
Inception & Tenet’s Box Office & Reviews Prove Why Nolan Is Only Half-Right
Inception‘s ambiguous ending lent itself to success, as it gave audiences the power to interpret the narrative for themselves. Tenet‘s ambiguity did not give it a similar boost to its reception, and in fact damaged its reception. Inception made over $800 million worldwide at the box office (via Box Office Mojo), and scored 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. Tenet made $365 million worldwide and earned 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, despite its larger budget. Tenet was released in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which obviously detracted from its box office earnings, but it still under-performed compared to Inception.
Box office earnings aside, the reviews for each movie show why Nolan’s “confusing experience” defense does not work for Tenet. Critics praised Inception for its complexity and noted that it added to the film, taking an above average heist thriller and turning it into a mind-bending and emotionally-charged intellectual exercise. Tenet, on the other hand, was considered confusing, and many critics did not consider it worthwhile to understand and instead praised its visuals. Ambiguity added to Inception and detracted from Tenet, and critics picked up on that.
While they may not apply to Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s comments do speak to the biggest strength of his directorial style. Nolan’s movies can be complex and challenging, and figuring them out can add much to their appeal, but at the end of the day, they are experiences more than puzzles. The fact that a movie like Inception can instill confusion so effectively in its audience proves that ambiguity can be used to enhance that experience. However, Tenet missed the mark and suffered for it.
Tenet
- Release Date
- September 3, 2020
- Director
- Christopher Nolan
- Cast
- Kenneth Branagh , John David Washington , Michael Caine , Robert Pattinson , Elizabeth Debicki , Dimple Kapadia , Aaron Taylor-Johnson , Clemence Poesy
