Tenet

Tenet opens with an attack by a large team of Ukranian terrorists on a packed auditorium attending a classical concert in the Kiev opera house.  Narratively-speaking this is our introduction to The Protagonist (John David Washington) a C.I.A. agent who has infiltrated the operation in order to save an asset. Having established his fighting chops we move onto the main event in which, with the help of his assigned partner, Neil (Robert Pattinson), The Protagonist (for some reason he has no other name) must save the planet from the future apocalypse of WWIII which in turn involves tracking down a billionaire arms dealer, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who is planning to blow up the world with a nuclear device...or something like that.

As we have seen with Memento (2001) and Inception (2010) writer-director Christopher Nolan has a liking for movies involving alt-universe scenarios that play with our tenuous relationship with reality. I wasn’t exactly taken by the former but found the latter quite intriguing. Tenet shares a family resemblance with these films but unlike them, as far as I could tell, makes no sense at all.

I assume that at least in Nolan’s imagination Tenet does make sense. A film of this level of narrative convolutedness would have had to have been closely story-boarded (it would have presented a challenge to the inappropriately named editor, Jennifer Lame) and no doubt Nolan spent a lot of time creating the conceptual rabbit hole that he wanted the film to be. For the ordinary consumer however, strapped into a two-and-a-half-hour whip-through of Nolan’s byzantine creation, the result is less than immediately comprehensible.

The trouble is a lot of scientific and pseudo-scientific jargon about “reverse entropy”, “temporal pincer movements” and so forth combined with periodically running its footage backwards, and topping it off with a palindromic title (a code word that gets forgotten about as the film progresses), doesn’t come close to being a sustained thesis.

Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and even Robert Zemeckis with Back To The Future (1984), not to forget Tom Twyker and the Wachowskis with Cloud Atlas (2012), succeeded in weaving different time frames into the fabric of their stories but in Tenet the device is merely a mystifying  accretion on its largely conventional thriller bulk.  For, for all its high concept pretensions, convoluted plotting, and unquestioned top drawer film-making skills, Tenet is quite routine in its handling of the familiar good guys vs bad guys face-off.  

Partly Tenet’s failure is a due to a confusion of genres. Nolan’s other main calling card is his Dark Night trilogy (soon to be quartet with Pattison as Bruce Wayne). Although in many ways Nolan's film, with its exotic locations, amped-up action set-pieces, madman-on-the-loose villain and immaculate tailoring is reminiscent of a Daniel Craig-era Bond movie, within Nolan’s oeuvre it is a super-hero movie in the guise of an action thriller, The problem with this is that what we will accept unblinkingly in the former is incongruous in the latter. Thus we want to know how the reverse entropy stuff works but there is no attempt to justify it (in one of the film’s lamer lines Neil assures The Portagonist that he understands what is going on because he has a Master’s in physics). LOL.

If most of the problems with Tenet are down to, willful or otherwise, obfuscation, there are other minor issues. Photogenic as Washington and Pattison are, their characters get no attention beyond their function in the narrative. Elizabeth Debicki, continuing her remarkable career since The Great Gatsby (2013) as Sator’s hapless wife, doesn’t do much to bring a human aspect to the film’s fantasy scenario.  Only Branagh who chews up the scenery with relish as the psycho-villain stands out. And the curious last act which shows us Sator and Kat billing and cooing, Sator’s flabby white torso with not a de  rigeur tattoo in view, Debicki badly in need of some trousers and a dummy that is supposed to be her being dragged along behind a motor boat appears to have been directed by Nolan’s AD.

There are plenty of other thing to find fault with Tenet but what's the point? All up Nolan has delivered a film that manages to be at once both spectacular and predictable, adrenaline-pumping and tedious. Next!

 

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