Tenet review

TENET (2020)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Stars: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki

Runtime: 150 min

 

The minute Tenet opens you know you're watching a Christopher Nolan film. An orchestra is tuning up in front of a packed concert hall when black-clad armed men with guns burst in and... well they do something, it's not immediately clear what.

But just something about the dynamic camerawork, the editing, the rich colour palate, all of it instantly shows this off as a Nolan film. The scene could have come straight from a Dark Knight film or Inception. Interestingly the cinematography isn't from Wally Pfister who was responsible for those films but Hoyte Van Hoytema who shot Dunkirk for Nolan. So it really is Nolan's visual style on display.

The whole film is really peak Nolan. It exists on a grand scale and expounds on concepts on the outer boundaries of physics. And it has half a dozen incredible action scenes that genuinely contain things you've never seen before in a film. Remember first seeing The Matrix and its “bullet-time” camera movements, or the fights in shifting corridors in Inception? This has action that is similarly groundbreaking.

But if this is peak Nolan then perhaps peak Nolan is a little too much in some respects. There were few points in Tenet that I actually knew what was going on. There's a lot of baffling exposition, much of which I expect will become clearer on third or fourth viewing, but first time? If you thought the logic of Interstellar was convoluted then brace yourself. I was lost for most of Tenet.

Basically the main dude (Washington) is tasked with stopping someone who is sending “inverted” weapons and other things back from the future. These “inverted” things move backwards in time rather than forwards. And the world and everything that's ever existed is in danger of, er, not existing any more. I'm not sure why but it seemed important.

What this essentially means is that there are spectacular fights and car chases where half those involved are moving forwards in time and the other half backwards. It really is eye-boggling. One fight between people of different orientations is shown twice, once from each perspective. It merits many many repeat viewings just to unravel the incredible movement.

Said exposition takes our hero on a twisted narrative trail, with an obligatory stop for Michael Caine to briefly monologue, eventually leading to Kenneth Branagh's arms-dealing billionaire Russian oligarch and his captive bride. That's Debicki, essentially filling exactly the same role she played in TV's The Night Manager. If only Branagh had a little of the lethal charm Hugh Laurie showed there in the villain role but he never moves beyond being a cypher of a character.

And that's pretty much true of the entire cast. With the exception of Debicki no one gets a backstory or any real character. Washington's “hero” doesn't even get a name. The one actor who rises above this anonymity is Pattinson who, despite having little to work with apart from elegant dress sense, puts in a turn of such louche charisma as the slightly mysterious sidekick that the film is always better when he is on screen.

But as I say, all this is in service of what exactly? I don't know. By the time the epic final battle played out, with two black-clad fighting forces, one going backwards in time and one simultaneously going forwards, it was all just visually overwhelming sound and fury to me, signifying nothing.

P.S. I saw this at the V-Max cinema at The Crossing, Tauriko. Y'know, biggest screen possible 'n' all...  After watching ads with the full big screen utilised, the curtains came in to box off the sides of the screen. I was surprised and assumed the film must be in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. But no. It was full widescreen, 2.20:1, the same size as the fully open screen, only now they projected black bars along the top and bottom of the picture. So the glorious size of the V-Max cinema screen, for which one pays a princely sum of $21, was used... for ads. Good work Event Cinemas. Not impressed.