After delay upon delay, Christopher Nolan's Tenet opens in Australia this weekend. It starts with a pumping opera siege and clicks along at a fair old pace, trying to get its premise across and mostly succeeding. John David Washington (from BlacKkKlansman and the loins of Denzel) stars with Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh but the story is boss here, and it's familiar ground for Nolan, dealing with the fiddly intricacies of time. In fact, it seems like he has lifted the structure of Memento and plonked it visually on screen, with the actual end of that film manifested as the big, clunky time inversion turntables in Oslo and Russia in this film. Watch Nolan talk through this blackboard sketch of the 'timeline' of Memento for more explanation. The gimmick of time inversion - backwards walking and driving, bullets flying out of walls into guns, buildings 'unexploding' - is actually quite fun and not too overdone. The combination of forward and reverse action, while technically stellar, might tend towards the "get your hand off it, Chris" end of the scale, if done to death.
I'm not planning to get too deep into the plot details here, but the podcast will be a free for all. (See bottom of blog entry). If it's possible to put it in a nutshell, the story deals with the need to stop a rotter from inverting time and basically destroying our current reality (a little like Thanos in Avengers: Endgame, he has a point). Needless to say, Tenet has a lot of heavy lifting to do in order for Johhny Public to follow the story. Nolan achieves this by having regular 'exposition dumps' throughout and it really pays to concentrate. I reckon either the sound mix was a bit off or the cinema needed to raise the general audio level, because I missed some sections of dialogue, though perhaps this was another Bane issue? But to be fair, these aural omissions didn't hinder any understanding.
Performance-wise, Washington smacks it over cow corner for six. He has an almost stilted quality, quite mannered, especially compared with Robert Pattinson, but it works for this character. I thought he was a bit unnatural in BlacKkKlansman but the gradual awakening of his Protagonist here matches his style (think Keanu in The Matrix). He also has a mint kitchen brawl where the use of a cheese grater on a face elicited an audible groan from me, and not in a good way. I'm getting a spine tingle now just thinking about it again. Pattinson is smooth yet wiry and he continues to choose meaty or unflattering roles post-Twiglet. Good on him. Debicki has an interesting part - at first it seems she's there only to be protected but as the film progresses, her role increases in importance. And she's always watchable. Branagh overplays it a touch as her nasty oligarch husband, upping the evil from his Russian in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. And of course, Michael Caine is back for a scene, sadly just the one, but he has one of the best lines of the film, when The Protagonist says to him, "You British don't have a monopoly on snobbery.", Caine replies, "No, more of a controlling interest." Incidentally, there's no credit, nor any other proof, but I'm almost certain that the concierge (?) of the restaurant they're in during this scene is Jeremy Theobald from Nolan's first feature, Following. I could be wrong, though. It's also nice to see Martin Donovan again. I know that he's been in loads of stuff since, but I mainly remember him as Hal Hartley's go-to guy in the early 90s.
So, I'd say even with all the fanfare of a new Nolan and the post-lockdown release anticipation (fnaar fnaar), this pretty much stacks up as an exciting, intriguing, fucking bonkers piece of cinema. Part Memento, part Inception, even part Dunkirk (with added talking), Tenet is a separate beast and well worth the time......emit eht htrow llew.
See also:
The temporal cold war angle put me in mind of the patchy Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) and for some more timey-wimey stuff, why not Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995). At a stretch, Gilliam had a similar knack to Nolan of getting studios to give him money to make original, though-provoking films.
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Listen to "Tenet" on Spreaker.
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