Tenet Review

Poised to be the event film to ‘save cinema’ in a post-pandemic world, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has been anxiously waiting in the wings till its release. Hotly anticipated for being both the new film from the industry’s most revered blockbuster filmmaker and for being the first big release for the re-opening of cinemas, there hasn’t been a motion picture like this to have your fingers crossed for since The Force Awakens. Fortunately, those fingers can relax.

Time (and the manipulation of it) has fascinated Nolan right from his backwards thriller Memento twenty years ago all the way through to Interstellar, Dunkirk and Inception. With Tenet, the director has culminated two decades of barnstorming temporal storytelling into a 150-minute spy thriller that makes Inception’s narrative complexity look as basic as a Cars film. The less said about the plot the better, but it boils down to The Protagonist (John David Washington, sporting an immaculate beard and enough tailored suits to make the folks in Kingsman blush) dashing about the world investigating ‘inverted’ objects that means actions and entire scenes can play out in reverse. It is an idea to be seen rather than told.

Those that have discovered the limitless creative possibilities of Snapchat’s reverse filter will thrill at seeing the same effect supported by a nine-figure budget. Bullets are inhaled back into their gun’s barrel (a pre-established trick from the opening of Memento) and cars are ‘un-crashed’. It is a unique, head-spinning piece of technical wizardry that is a cinematic delight. Nolan tinkers about with the concept; pushing it to the very extreme but never to self-indulgence. Tenet does maintain the muted colour palette that all of Nolan’s film have but there is a notable usage of red and blue, with each colour corresponding to the state of time. It is a simple idea, set up in the film’s opening logos, but it works wonders to remind the audience what on earth is happening.

Washington anchors the film with just enough to wit to sustain the labyrinthine narrative, asking enough questions for the audience’s benefit but also packing some serious muscular presence in the film’s exceptional action scenes. One such set piece is a high-concept hallway fight that might just out-do its counterpart from Inception. But Nolan, whose eye for action has exponentially increased with each blockbuster, also helms road heists, sophisticated shootouts, spectacular vehicular crashes and an adrenaline pumping opening of such bravura to rival The Dark Knight Rises’ plane ambush. If there is CGI in this film, it is impossible to see. All of this is intensely scored by Ludwig Göransson who channels all the synths and drums he can find and unleashes them to near deafening effect.

Another notable change is that this is the first Nolan film since 2002’s Insomnia to not have the legendary Lee Smith as editor. The difference is practically invisible, as Jennifer Lame picks up the mantle and, in what must have been a herculean effort, deftly uses her shears to cut and stitch the sequences into an accessible order whilst also reversing a great deal. It is blistering filmmaking.

Despite this, there are lines and occasionally entire scenes where the dialogue is drowned out by the sound effects and score. A soon to be infamous sailing conversation is in desperate need of subtitles. Whether this is due to post-production occurring in lockdown and away from the studios or whether it is Nolan forcing his audience to concentrate as hard as possible is unclear. Furthermore, Nolan’s character-based dialogue can’t keep up with the intriguingly dense exposition. Of course, going to see a Nolan film means ideas, story and technical genius over characters, but it is only Elizabeth Debicki’s character who gets the emotional heavy lifting and her dialogue doesn’t fully sell it. The cast are still uniformly strong: Robert Pattison drips charm as a fellow spy and Kenneth Branagh is a scene-chewing Russian villain who could easily inhabit a Timothy Dalton era-Bond film.

The filmography of Nolan can be defined by being fiercely apolitical and completely uninterested with being products of their time. Brands, dates, years and ideology are discarded for the sake of achieving immortal filmmaking; meaning new audiences can watch Tenet decades on and still find it fresh. Yet despite Tenet aiming for being timeless rather than timely, it is bizarre watching characters wearing masks in order to inhabit a backwards world.

Filled with invigorating filmmaking, Tenet respects its audience’s capacity to think and follow. Feeling Tenet is incredible, but understanding it is like achieving Enlightenment. Whilst perhaps edging closer to the later films of David Lean with its pictorial focus and desire to be ‘true cinema’ at the cost of character, Tenet is a refreshing head-scratcher.

Inception- 10th Anniversary

A whole decade has passed since Christopher Nolan, hot off the juggernaut success of The Dark Knight, blitzed the world with Inception. With $820 million in worldwide grosses, the bitingly original film was, thanks to its complex ideas and brilliant special effects, a must-see experience. Since that July in 2010, Nolan has concluded his Batman trilogy, made a hugely ambitious space film, an art-house

 war film and a (slightly delayed) mysterious spy thriller film. But it is Inception that remains Nolan’s most ‘Nolan’ film and perhaps his greatest accomplishment.

Leonardo DiCaprio spearheads an international ensemble as Dom Cobb, a thief who commits his robberies deep in the dreams of his targets. It’s a thrillingly unique concept, one that is entirely dependent on vast swathes of exposition. Thankfully, Ellen Page’s Ariadne (the aptly named maze architect) is on hand as the audience surrogate, asking her peers the questions bouncing around the audiences’ brains. No other film gets away with this much constant explanation, but the premise is so ridiculously fascinating that there is an addictive quality to consuming more dream related knowledge.

Cobb is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to undergo a new job: rather than extract information, Cobb must plant an idea in his target’s (Cillian Murphy) dreams, a notion considered impossible. Nolan frames this science-fiction thriller under the structure of a heist film, taking his time mapping out the intricate details of the operation to keep his audience on the right side of understanding.

In a cinema the emotional response to Inception is enhanced to something akin to an epiphany. The film’s legendary and ground-shaking set pieces inspire a whole new sense of awe: the Mombasa chase, the folding city and the seriously impressive rotating hallway fight just become the apotheosis of big screen filmmaking. It takes one thing to imagine physics-bending sequences but something else entirely to create them with minimal CGI.

Nolan rightfully receives the most acclaim for this colossal convergence of blockbuster-meets-auteur but there are two other worthy heroes of the film’s success: editor Lee Smith and music composer Hans Zimmer. The juggernaut final hour intertwines the numerous dream layers, ensuring the audience gets both a grasp of the different time ‘zones’ and the effects that trickle down through each dream. The cutting between the ensemble is simply masterful, and Zimmer’s Oscar-snubbed score is one of his greatest accomplishments.

To see Inception as merely a high concept piece of technical filmmaking is to the detriment of the character work on display. In Cobb, DiCaprio’s conflicted widower supplies both the emotional beats as a father who wants to see his children again and the high stakes as the projection of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) becomes an invasive presence in the dream world: a pure femme fatale. By paralleling Cobb’s emotional arc with the increased threat, Nolan keeps the action and scope grounded in character. It is an underrated DiCaprio performance; the final look he gives Saito in particular is fantastic. The vital relationship between Cillian Murphy’s character and his father is also one that hits the feels; reaching its zenith in a moment of indescribable catharsis.

A highly overlooked aspect of the film is the relationship between Tom Hardy’s creative forger Eames and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s narrow-minded Arthur. Their exchanges are delightful; with Eames being critical of Arthur’s lack of imagination (Arthur uses pre-existing dream techniques such as the Penrose stairs as opposed to anything inventive). However, when things go inevitably off-plan in the climax, Arthur does think independently to stage a ‘kick’, overcoming his fear of spontaneity.

Some time prior to this, Eames comments to Arthur “never be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling” before exploding a gunman with a grenade launcher. The line demonstrates the icy relationship between the two but overtime it has come to manifest itself as something more: a challenge. It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine it as Nolan’s way of telling his fellow filmmakers and other studios to embrace originality, and that trusting an audience to keep up intellectually and narratively guarantees the lasting popularity that Inception has a decade on.

A behemoth picture that still looks and sounds incredible, Inception is the red wine of the 21^st century blockbuster bar.