OPINION | REVIEW: Don’t try to understand, let ‘Tenet’ wash over you

I realize he spent the better part of the aughts depicting the adventures of a gray-armor clad dude with bat ears on his cowl, but it's pretty clear nothing energizes Christopher Nolan quite like the idea of time travel, and the subsequent opportunities for micro-physics lectures in the process. He's like your weirdly obsessive uncle at the dinner table, holding forth on force diametrics, and angular quantum momentum, even though he actually works as a plumber.

As always, a new Nolan movie is an event, all huge budgets, and big-name casts, and a studious seriousness ascribed to them as if he'd just come up with the "99 Theses." Not all of this is bad, of course. He's one of the few studio directors working today who can command a $200-plus million budget for an original concept film -- no previous tie-ins, comic books, or old '80s video games -- and he pushes the envelope on his pictures, visually and intellectually. We also can't say dude isn't true to himself: His first full-budget feature, "Memento," was all about a man with short-term memory loss, who keeps having to repeat each day, learning about his eventual murder all over again.

The thing is, as much gravity as his films command, I'm not sure there's very much actual weight behind them. As a big-budget curio, a particularly intricate jigsaw puzzle one needs to spend days working out, his films succeed in part because of their obliqueness: They seem deeply complex, so we accept them as such, and they're enjoyable even as much of the physics mumbo-jumbo goes screaming past our heads like an cascading building exploding in reverse.

That last simile brought to you by his latest opus, a two-and-a-half hour trek through such concepts as "inverted munitions" and "reversing an object's entropy" (as one wizened scientist tries to explain to the befuddled protagonist early on, "Don't try to understand it"), en route to a spectacularly thrilling action concerto which many of us in the audience properly understand about a third of, if we're being honest.

As this protagonist, excuse me, The Protagonist (Nolan's script doesn't provide us a proper name), we have John David Washington, some sort of special ops mastermind, whose team fails to prevent a massive explosion in a packed opera house in the film's opening gambit. Literally as the film begins, we are thrown into a hugely complex series of situations that come about as this opera house in the Ukraine is invaded by a group of strong-arm brutes, whose sole purpose appears to be causing enough carnage such that the real purpose of the mission remains tangled with the twisted metal and settling dust of the aftermath.

The Protagonist (I'm already weary of typing that one out) is eventually brought before a high-ranking official who tells him something vague about his next mission, then leaves him waiting to be picked up inside a floating installation dressed up to look like a buoy. We don't ever know much about this Protagonist -- about the closest Nolan comes to filling out his character is having him hang off a high-ladder to add more umph to his repetition of pullups -- but after a time, the film moves at such a fast pace (even at a 150 minute run time), we don't get much of an opportunity to care.

Meeting with the aforementioned scientist, trying to explain the existence of weapon materials that somehow have come from the future and are therefore reversed in their motion (a gun doesn't "fire" a bullet, she helpfully explains, it "catches" one). In the wrong hands, it is feared, this discovery could lead to a catastrophic event that would wipe the world completely clean of its history.

Unfortunately, as we come to find out, the tech is already in the wrong hands, possessed by steely-eyed Ukrainian crimelord, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whose battered wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), stands at his mercy because of the young son they share, whom he threatens to take away from her if she steps out of line.

Joining the Protagonist in this Mission: Impossible, there is the thankfully named Neil (Robert Pattinson), another agent, from yet another mysteriously unnamed agency. As the two men embark on their quest to stop Sator, the Protagonist befriends the miserable Kat, and promises to protect her and her son from whatever goes down, even though he's completely unsure of what that might entail.

And entail it does! There's a long bit about having to infiltrate a giant, secure storage facility near the London airport utilizing a madcap plan that involves crashing into the structure by a land-speeding jumbo jet, an action that leaves our heroes battling dark helmeted agents from somewhere else who seem to be able to warp time backward and forward to better suit them. Later, there's a dazzling car chase in which some vehicles are moving forward in time while some are simultaneously going backward, while aware of the quality of time they're displacing.

The movie ends with another massive crescendo, as a pair of small battalions of agents, one wearing red armbands heading one time direction, the other, in blue, going the other way, desperately try to infiltrate an abandoned underground city in the Ukraine, to keep its precious materials from again (?) falling into Sator's hands, all while Kat, having moved back in time herself, attempts to soothe her evil husband as a means of distraction for the operation to continue.

So, yes, and sadly Tylenol is not handed out to the crowd before these confusing festivities really take off. It's a lot to try and muddle through all at once, and Nolan, as ever, does us no favors, with important dialogue difficult to discern through the barrage of explosions (and Ludwig Göransson's low-thrumming soundtrack), and the characters wearing air masks, such that at a certain point, I just stopped trying to determine the plot particulars and settled in to enjoy the spectacle laid before me.

In truth, Nolan clearly wants you to have to watch this film at least once more, with necessary foreknowledge -- emulating the experience of the characters time traveling backward in time on the screen! Brilliant! -- to make better sense of things. As such, there's no shame in not figuring everything out at once, though I'm certain some dedicated Nolanites will spend the film attempting to do just that. The truth is, I had more fun after putting my pen down and letting it wash over me like an extremely loud, chaotic waterfall. I've often found myself put out by Nolan's somber airs, but it must be said, his films reliably bring us something we very rarely get to see in today's Hollywood: He forces us to observe his version of 3D Chess in what has become an exceedingly tic-tac-toe world.