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.