We’re a few minutes away from the 2½-hour movie time and it’s already delivered: the sequence ends with interior and exterior photos of an explosion, which transforms editor Jennifer Lame into such a perfect action cut as ever. In that microsecond, we are reminded of something that has come together over the last few months to make us forget: cinematic scale. “Tenet” works on a physiological level, in the belly-pit rumble of Ludwig Goransson’s score, and the dilated pupil’s responses to Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which delivers the same splendor, as observing a narratively redundant catamaran race, as the dovetail and fabric of Jeffrey Kurland’s implicit creaseless costumes. Seriously, the toughest aspect of “Tenet” might be the ironing budget.
The unnamed character of Washington is soon introduced into the mysteries of “reversal”, a process by which an object – as a person – can reverse its entropy, by making it appear, to those of us who are lamely advancing through time. , as if it is spooling backwards. His new mission-related mission leads him first to a fixer, Neil (a lovely Robert Pattinson), useful to both his action chops and his masters of physics, then to a Mumbai arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia), whose fortress apartment alone may be accessible by bungee jump, and then to the villainous Ukrainian squillionaire Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who can only be accessed through his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a miserable, implied art dealer who despises him.
For once, spoiler sensitivity may be the happiest break of the reviewer, and free me from even trying to explain a plot of a plot so tainted that it’s best not to worry about it. Even the scientist played by Clémence Poésy, here exclusively to provide exhibition, eventually dies out. “Try not to understand it, feel it” is the best advice anyone can offer. Suffice it to say, the idea of time-inversion is most impressive not in the larger architecture of the film, which, as widely accepted, loosely resembles a palindrome, but in some scenes in which some elements emerge. run while others reverse. Similar to “Origin”, which created a whole mythology of dream world, only to make its revolving course to become its most iconic sequence, in “Tenet”, time inversion poses a civilization-destroying threat, but the killer scene is, again, fight a corridor. We see it twice, and every time, after your brain clicks on one of the fighters fighting ahead in time while the other goes backwards, it’s all how-done-that-ingenuity brilliant.
“Tenet” blinds the senses, but it does not move the heart – a critique common to all of Nolan’s original films. And other widely recognized Nolan blind spots are also in evidence: it’s depressing that an actress like Debicki should be saddled with such a coding role, given a son instead of a character and made responsible for the only bad decisions of the story . Everyone else performs to perfection, especially Washington’s history-less protagonist who proves that not all superheroes wear hats. Some carry the hell out of packs so bravely that one of the film’s biggest laughs comes when Nolan talisman Michael Caine looks at Washington, looks better, in his dark blue ensemble, than any human has ever looked like, and in British disgrace, “Brooks Brothers will not cut it.”
