TENET and Post Lockdown Cinema: A Review

Tenet is the first film I have seen at the cinema since the Coronavirus lockdown. So I’d like to thank all the staff for their reassuring and professional approach to socially distanced cinema. I felt comfortable and safe wearing my mask throughout the film thanks to their efforts and it just felt fantastic to be in front of a big screen again after half a year.

Tenet has been billed as the film which will persuade people back into cinemas and, as with any new picture by Christopher Nolan, expectations are high. It’s a science-fiction film which centres around spies working to prevent a World War which will occur if the villain, played by a scenery-chewing Kenneth Branagh, is able to assemble a nuclear weapon which is being sent back piece-by-piece from the future.

This film takes a rather novel approach to time travel. Whereas most films will send their characters backwards in time to a fixed point, from which they move forwards, Nolan’s time machine reverses the flow of time for whoever, or whatever, is inside. This means that the sequence of cause and effect are reversed until the time machine is used again to switch back to travelling forwards. The impact of this is to give the film a palendromic feel that hinges around these reversals. We see the same scenes repeated from a reversed perspective. Objects and people travel in the opposite directions, and we see follow them along through some high octane action sequences. These scenes may sound desperately confusing from a verbal description and they could very easily have looked like that on the screen. In fact, it is a testament to the talent of Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema that it is comprehensible at all.

Picture courtesy of Warner Bros.

The film opens with a terror attack at an opera house in Kiev, but immediately, we know all is not as it seems with multiple false identities. The film then breaks the metaphysical elements in at a small scale, establishing the new rules with which our characters are working. A lot of the second act’s plot is quite unclear until it is seen from the other direction. John David Washington stars as the protagonist of the film, the anonymous agent who we follow through these middle sections of the film. His performance is what carries us through the total breakdown of cause and effect until the final act, where the plot crystallises into a nail-biting conclusion with a strict unity of purpose.

Even though the films most exhilarating scenes are filled with people running backwards and land mines imploding into the ground, it always felt like the forwards and backwards action was of a piece. The metaphysical effects described by the characters precisely matched what I could see before me on the screen, so I never doubted them for a second. It is executed with such precision, that the inherent absurdity of characters yelling about ‘time pincers’ and ‘grandfather paradoxes’, sometimes during fight scenes, didn’t make me laugh out loud. This is in stark contrast to the trailer for Greenland, an upcoming disaster movie starring Gerard Butler and copious explosions.

Washington excellently guides us through the complex plot and both he and Robert Pattinson deliver the goods, making you believe in the world they inhabit. With this in mind, I felt like the film left me feeling quite cold, I never felt like I connected with Washington’s protagonist on a deep and emotional level, while the performance is excellent, the script has at its centre an anonymous man-on-a-mission rather than somebody who is driven by anything personal. Most of the emotional heavy lifting is done by Elizabeth Debecki, who is motivated by love for her son and a desire to escape from Branagh’s abusive antagonist. However, since her son is barely on screen, we will just have to take her word for it.

It was this which made me realise that Nolan was telling us, rather than showing us why we should care about the outcome of the plot. We have to accept that the villain will cause untold carnage should he succeed. Nobody is sending us anything back from the future to demonstrate just how catastrophic this would be, worse than a nuclear holocaust, according to the script. There are also several minor characters whose sole purpose seems to be turning up, explaining the pseudoscience and then vanishing until they are needed again. We know that Nolan could be showing us all this using mind-bending special effects, because he does so consistently throughout this film.

There is a brilliant idea at the core of this film, but any movie which deals with highfalutin metaphysical concepts should offer us a way in that feels personal as well as intellectual. The late Roger Ebert once defined cinema as ‘a machine for creating empathy,’ which perfectly encapsulates the way that films should engage both sides of the brain. While the acting performances are brilliant, only Debecki really has a personal reason for foiling the plot, she felt a bit like a spanner in this cleverly designed and well oiled machine. Worse than a nuclear holocaust sounds really bad, but it is difficult to actually comprehend such wholesale destruction without a route in at a human scale, especially when your brain is already busy trying to process a car chase happening backwards and forwards simultaneously.

For all my complaining, this has certainly got me back into the mood where I feel safe returning to the cinema for the first time since Little Women, so I’m looking forward to taking in and reviewing more films. The cinema have taken responsibility and ensured social distancing, so barring a second lockdown, I will be back there soon.

3/5.

Picture courtesy of Warner Bros.