Review: With ‘Tenet,’ Christopher Nolan shines

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The one thing we all knew in advance about Christopher Nolan’s time-running adventure “Tenet” was that it would be a very complex affair. While the exact content was kept secret, pre-publicity cannily emphasized the incomprehensible intricacy of the story; cast member Kenneth Branagh said reading the script was “like doing the Times crossword puzzle.”

That does not mean that Nolan has created some sort of multimillion-dollar “Last Year in Marienbad” – rather, a full-on blockbuster aimed at speculative action fans as well as viewers. Much of “Tenet” consists of spectacular stunt numbers with full fireworks, but with pauses for us to take a breath and go, “What just happened?” – and then, to another breath, ‘And but why, right? ”

Written by Nolan, the film stars John David Washington as a protagonist – just known as “the Protagonist” – on a mission to save the world, provided with one word, “tenet”, to help him. As it happens, “Tenet” has indeed become a magic word for the global film industry, hoping for Nolan’s film to draw audiences back to cinemas after months, when lockon of coronavirus brought theatrical releases.

“Tenet” has reached a quasi-mythical status in the company, given several delays in the release since the originally announced July 17, so much so that people on social media started joking about the question of whether the film actually existed (the best Twitter -gag, given “Tenet’s” themed reverse theme, the release was finally postponed back to August 2018).

While other studios have chosen to stream some major titles, Nolan and Warner Bros. improved the prestige of “Tenet” by holding out for theatrical release – with the film premiering in multiple areas on Wednesday and opening on September 3 in the US. Domestic “sneak” preview screenings begin Aug. 31, though no opening date in California is in sight because indoor theaters remain closed in the state and Warner Bros. is not screening for press in areas where theaters close.)

The film’s monolingual aura also assumes that Hollywood is rarity – an original title with a big budget, without a franchise, with a cast that is not apparently prime marquee material. With a reported budget of $ 200 million to $ 225 million, “Tenet”‘s fortunes rested entirely on the air of deep mystery, and on Nolan’s reputation as a commercial author of flamboyant embarrassment and invention.

Truth be told, “Tenet” is not the absolute sui generis surprise you might expect. It’s basically an espionage adventure, but with a backbone of science fiction: Nolan makes the ante on “Mission: Impossible” by making the impossibility not only physical, but quantum physics. And he goes it expertly, boldly and with angry perverse intent to enchant.

Critics are asked to avoid spoilers, but the plot is so complicated that it is difficult to measure what a spoiler does and does not. The premise, in simplest terms, is this: the Protagonist (“BlacKkKlansman” star Washington) is entrusted with a secret mission to prevent World War III. He is coolly informed by a white-coated boffin (French actress Clémence Poésy, adopted a cutlery English accent). The threat, she explained, is about “inversion” – technology from the future that will cause objects to move backwards in time. Its powers are demonstrated by “intricate” bullets that bounce back into the rifle and an object that bounces into the hand of the Protagonist, as if he had fallen, but vice versa. Cause comes into effect, she says, adding, “Try not to understand it.”

Absolutely so. Such lines tell us that we do not have to try “Tenet” if we do not want to: “Does your head still hurt?” asks the sidekick character of Robert Pattinson during an exchange on time paradoxes. In fact, it’s just possible to let go of the film and enjoy it as a chain of set-up-to-top pieces: Washington scales a skyscraper to reach a key contact; comes close to the villain’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki) to meet her husband, the Russian arms dealer Sator (Branagh); crashes a plane into a building to reach an important object; pilots a kind of super-catamaran because … who knows, maybe just because it looks swanky and 007-ish.

John David Washington, left, and Robert Pattinson in “Tenet.”

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Warner Bros. Images.)

But slowly (and you have to admire Nolan for joining us in his spare time) things get weirder. Things come to a head in a delirious car chase, the Protagonist drives in one direction, while Sator’s car drives backwards. Halfway through the half, Nolan spectacularly picks up this back-and-forth at the same time: a battle sequence involves a ‘temporary pincer movement’, with two army detachments cooperating but in different directions in time.

This logic lies in the title, “tenet” which reads the same way in both directions. So expect to find the palindrome principle at work in the structure of the film, most genius as Nolan puts action so that it seems to run backwards and forwards at the same time. This is both simpler and more complex than it sounds, and you can only imagine Nolan and his team (including stunt coordinator George Cottle and effects supervisors Andrew Jackson and Scott Fisher) alternately rubbing their hands and pushing their hair over the logistical challenge.

That will “Tenet” pull us all back into cinemas? Energetic escapist certainly seems to be the antidote to lockdown claustrophobia, not least because it offers a breathtaking travel companion who follows us quickly to Mumbai, Oslo, Tallinn, London and Vietnam; filmmaker Hoyte van Hoytema gives the Amalfi Coast of Italy a particularly stunning sheen that resembles the gleaming trolls of the recent Bond on a cheap package deal. This is also a film that in its sheer monumentalism demands to be seen in a cinema, and on the largest possible screen (it was recorded on IMAX and a 70 millimeter film).

But “Tenet” will later flourish in viewing formats of home, giving viewers the opportunity to pause and return over difficult passages. The exposition is abundant and confusing, and often difficult to capture, overloaded with industrial noise, like gunfire, like the thunderous score of Ludwig Göransson; or spoken via radio mix, or expelled by face masks (another element that, fortunately, makes this a COVID era movie). It’s like Nolan does not want us to capture what people say – one way to hold us back for more.

This perplexity principle is a high risk strategy that many viewers may dislike. Therefore, the action and the imagination must make an impression on their own account, and they do so in general. But, just as the utter trickery plays with your mind, the imagination has seldom reached the same intensity of dreamy strangeness as Nolan in his “Reception”; instead, as in the “Dark Knight” movies, he opts for a sometimes overwhelming degree of industrial-level fireworks, though edited with head-turning flashiness by Jennifer Lame.

That Nolan is trying to survive the dominant spy franchises is suggested by his playing with espionage troops – speedboats, glamorous locations, the sheer range of suits worn by Washington and Pattinson. There’s a nice allusion to the Bondian codes when the Protagonist lunches in London with an intelligence grandee, played in a trademark Nolan comeo by Michael Caine (in-joke: he remembers to name the character “Sir Michael ”). “You Britons have no monopoly on snobbery,” says Washington – to which Caine dryly replied, “Not a monopoly – more of a controlling interest.”

The performance is what gives “Tenet” his most mature career – much of it in a studied loose, almost affective style, especially from Debicki as Sator’s abused English wife, Kat. Debicki walks through the destruction with a world-famous cucumber cooler, her elastically elongated physical accentuated by the costumes of Jeffrey Kurland, in particular a super-streamlined take on classic 40s tailor-made. And Pattinson is boyishly debonair as the protagonist’s raffishly rumbling associate. The exception to the muted style is Branagh, sporting the rugged hairstyle of a medieval warlord as a football club owner, who at times erupts from the tense monotony of his scathing threats to sniff out ripe Magnitogorsk-accented rage.

John David Washington as the main character in “Tenet.”

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Warner Bros. Images.)

As for Washington, his performance is suitably low for a character who is a functional figure, but he compellingly registers himself as the focus of the film. He can decrease the physical intensity, as well as the more urban spyplay; but there is also a lightness and clarity to his gaze that makes his hero convincingly noble – suggesting that he takes in all the info just as amazed as we are.

“Tenet” has a lot of ambition, ingenuity and imagination. Yet it lacks a certain life spark: Despite the occasional sharp line, Nolan never feels very comfortable with humor, and his directing style is hardly what you would call unsatisfactory. “Tenet” is entertaining, but it’s not accurate pleasure; Nolan may be a cinematic wizard, but here he works in the grandiose watch-this-building-disappearing David Copperfield mode instead of portraying the cunning army demeanor who makes the grace in screen magic. ‘Tenet’ also feels somewhat archaic masculine for these times, with Debicki’s subplot essentially a traditional damn-in-distress story.

In terms of complexity, “Tenet” will undoubtedly trigger as much speculative debate and brief online chart posting as “The Matrix.” Most of us will have to trust that, from the maker of the fiendish reverse-narrated “Memento,” “Tenet” from the maker of 2000 is really as paradoxically complex as it might have us to believe, but who knows? Nolan’s last can be full of sound and fury, indicate nothing, or it can mean something incredibly resonant, en mean it forward, backward and from inside to outside. Does your head still hurt?