In case anyone reading this still hasn’t seen the latest from Christopher Nolan’s highly watchable yet increasingly convoluted and at times borderline impenetrable oeuvre—now regularly preoccupied with lengthy peelings of internecine cinematic onions of his own Dante-tiered imagination—yet still punctuated by occasional epics of stunning coherency…here be spoilers. *It wasn’t the most exciting film I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t the most boring film I’ve ever seen, but it definitely was the most of both I’ve ever experienced all at once.

How is it even possible to find yourself at the heights of boredom and excitement, simultaneously? I found out the other night, watching Tenet (2020), a very slick and stylized curiosity from a titan of the Hollywood mainstream who aspires to something greater, but I can’t tell you exactly what that is, what it was, or remember another film that left me with a feeling quite so binary. Approximately one third into Tenet’s two-and-a-half-hour running time, I was still thrilled, yet increasingly distracted. Before long, I was still wide-eyed, yet incurious. Engaged but indifferent. Excited and bored.

Nolan’s persistent habit of Rube Goldberging us to death with the space/time/memory/dream -twisting mindbenders he invariably writes, directs and produces himself first got its legs with Memento (2000) where this tendency arguably also peaked. A troubled man, the inimitable Guy Pearce, awakens daily with amnesia, only able to remember a small semblance of who he is and what is going on by reviewing his collection of self-inflicted tattoos, you see, for trust is something he cannot afford, and presumably if he wrote something down, someone would erase it or change it or rewrite it for him…while he sleeps. Memento is a unique masterpiece of memory-challenged misdirection and obfuscation that holds up well, 21 years later.

With the exception of Nolan’s satisfying, often thrilling cinematic forays into less convoluted territory with more immediately discernable plots—as within Batman’s lair, among competing illusionists in the late 19th century, amid cops and robbers in a figurative and literal Alaskan fog or betwixt various Allied WWII soldiers, officers and the British civies who strive to help them—Nolan can’t help returning to the tricky stuff that messes with the viewer’s perception of reality and implores us to second-guess everything we think we know. Though it hasn’t held up as well, he does this effectively with dreams in Inception (2010), at times even literally folding his layers of filmic “reality” before our eyes. He does it again, perhaps even better, with astrophysics in Interstellar (2014), wherein black holes and the space/time continuum mess with our minds and toy with our heart strings. Whichever lens of perception he’s bending, his recurring, reality-twisting magic act now dominates four of Nolan’s 11 feature-length films, which are often celebrated deservingly as “cerebral” and “nonlinear” but occasionally also as somewhat boring. For the record, I’m a fan of much of his work. With Tenet, he adapts his varyingly effective yet well-worn technique from the subjects of memory, dreams and the mysteries of the cosmos to real time itself, on the planet, with gravity (sort of), through the eyes of a very top-secret agent who doesn’t even know his own secrets. Sound a little too familiar? That much is.

John David Washington crackles with personality and charisma in Spike Lee’s excellent BlacKKKlansman (2018) as Ron Stallworth, an African-American cop in Colorado who in the late 1970s successfully infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. I was looking forward to seeing Washington lead what seemed sure to be another stunning new mindbender from Nolan. Here, however, Washington’s generic hero, known only as “Protagonist,” is more like a blank slate. His attempts to save the world leave little room for emoting throughout most of his grueling adventure as a top-secret Jason Bourne-special-ops type who wakes up from a mission gone awry after enduring great violence only to learn that he is merely tasked with a lot more of it. Why? Someone in the future is messing with time-travelling bullets and must be stopped. Washington’s performance feels fairly wooden, though he clobbers, shoots and verbally jousts his way through the requisite waves of baddies convincingly enough, which seems to be the role’s primary demand. I look forward to seeing him play more nuanced characters, as he’s got the chops.

Robert Pattinson, who first landed on my radar in The Rover (2014), has also impressed me since then, more than once in films wherein his performance was more memorable than the material. Here he is known blandly as “Neil,” which reminds me of the great Flight of The Conchords line about Steve (“Did Steve tell you that? …Steve…”). Anyway, Neil…is a perfectly tailored Chanel model / cypher who appears to work for British intelligence and aid our Protagonist but knows a lot more than he lets on, which seems to be next to nothing, until near the end when he reveals that he actually knew everything all the time, from the beginning, which was actually the end (?) at which point he then somehow brings our otherwise emotionally stunted and also confused Protagonist to actual tears at the idea that they’ll now need to end their apparently blossoming friendship and part permanently (sort-of)…which happens not so long after Protagonist chokes Neil against the wall, accusing him of having “talked.” Make sense? Didn’t think so.

What started soundly with a bang and first felt like one of the most exciting modern movies I’d seen in quite some time, Tenet unleashed phenomenal action set pieces, one after another, keeping me on the edge of my seat…until it started growing tiresome due to its own bludgeoning incoherency. Tenet hopped, skipped, grapple-climbed, wrestled, raced, punched, kicked and shot its way with glee from one masterfully executed sequence to another, including an inventive, inexplicable car chase that at least partially unfolds in reverse time with cars racing in actual reverse, and a completely bizarre and bonkers, backwards battlefield shootout and reverse-explosion finale. But what the hell was actually going on here? Something about a fake painting and a sad wife? Was I enjoying this film? In reverse?

I kept thinking Tenet would start to make sense soon, but somewhere in there I gave up on this idea, checked out and just watched the pretty pictures. It may have been when the top-secret scientist our Protagonist greets with a secret code word “explains” the “physics” of the loose bullets that appear to be still on a steel table but are actually heading back through time (because they’ve been “inverted” by someone in the future, of course) and can thus be manipulated to move in various directions by anyone who knows their secret and can gesture at them imploringly. Yes, gesture. At a bullet. Because it’s actively going backward in time. But not appearing to move. And you can control it with a gesture. For some reason. Anyway, these inverted bullets are actually jumping into Protagonist’s gun, as he appears to fire them and is naturally convinced that he is doing just that, until he is told that he isn’t. Because those bullets are inverted. Things just get muddier after that, though everything looks quite impressive.

A relentlessly pounding, at times overwhelming soundtrack awkwardly mixed with often mumbled, muted or unintelligible dialog throughout the film doesn’t exactly help Tenet’s appeal for coherency, if it indeed even makes one. Nolan’s insistence on filming several scenes with actors wearing various masks and helmets doesn’t help this frustrating sound situation at all, and it’s particularly baffling given widespread past criticism of Tom Hardy’s turn as Bane in Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, when Hardy’s already odd choice of an accent for the character is augmented by a mask that muffles his voice to barely intelligible levels that inexplicably were not corrected in post-production. It’s hard to imagine why Nolan chose to remain on this muffled, mumbling path, sound-wise.

Speaking of the luxurious look of the film, it is as if the production design of a recent James Bond outing had combined with elements of the most deftly cut heist movie, and it was easy to be caught up in the vast, decidedly cinematic sweep of the thing and just allow oneself to be entertained. The scenic vistas, the architecture, the glamour, gadgets and guns. The yachts, fine automobiles and restaurants, and the clicking of fancy heels on exclusive, cobblestone streets preceding the next shocking apprehension, assassination or collision, inevitably arriving in the next moment as if in a slasher film. This is no horror show, though. This is the stuff of classic spy chic—elegant, sophisticated, expensive and constantly reminding you of all three adjectives. Combine all this visual extravagance with relentless, heart-pounding action, and you really have something fun to watch, whether or not it makes any damn sense. We’re even treated to a gravitas-lending cameo by none other than Nolan regular Michael Caine, but blink and he’s gone.

Elizabeth Debicki, who earned my respect in Steve McQueen’s Widows, adds some emotional weight to all the stolid men glowering at each other in fancy suits as if they intend to punch one another in the face as soon as the right moment arrives, whenever they’re briefly rendered unable to punch each other in the face due to inconvenient social conventions. One could argue that her character, however, exists merely as a damsel in distress to rescue, but she soon finds her agency.

Kenneth Branagh’s cold menace with smoldering subcutaneous aggression as a Russian businessman/gangster/psychopath with mysterious ties to the future feels appropriate in the classic Bond villain sense, but the performance feels muted somehow, perhaps repressed by the narrow dimensions of a character whose motives for inciting global catastrophe—other than his fury at total rejection by his much younger wife due to her unreasonable aversion to psychopaths—are cloudy at best.

Ultimately, this may be a film that rewards multiple viewings, more comprehensive note taking and a flow chart, and perhaps I lack that patience. In Tenet, time appears to invert itself. Physics no longer apply consistently. At least two timelines (and two versions of characters) compete in the same world. It’s a little like how I felt when I walked away after 150 minutes: excited and bored, simultaneously, though a little more frustrated than satisfied.