Tenet
Movie Review , Christopher Nolan New Movie
Tenet Movie Review
Tenet
Movie Review
A
majority of Christopher Nolan’s films are about his protagonists trying to
grapple with a reality that’s out of their control. In Inception, Cobb lost his wife and cannot
return to his children; Interstellar has
Cooper trying to find an alternative to Earth;
and in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Bruce Wayne fights, both, his inner and
real demons. The common thread is that
they are all men shackled to an indeterminate universe. Fundamentally, Tenet is a retread of those
ideas. The only difference here,
however, is that this one is a soulless and deafening mania of time fetishism.
Tenet
is clearly Christopher Nolan’s most self-indulgent film. It is what Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood
was to Tarantino and The Irishman to Scorsese.
There is a lot to say about filmmakers who are fascinated by their own
style of work. Without revealing too
many details, here, we have an unnamed protagonist played by John David Washington navigating this obtuse realm of time in order to prevent the world from
experiencing a war that already took place in the future. It’s essentially an Asimovian spin to the
Bond and Bourne genre of espionage. Nolan
alternates between exposition and let-me-riddle-your-brain moments far too often. His obsession with time exists beyond the
confines of the story.
Everything
moves extremely swiftly — if you blink
your eyes even for a second, you may miss an entire conversation. In all fairness, however, Tenet is one of
Nolan’s most impressive ideas. Ignoring
the pseudo-scientific babble, this film
massively deals with time looping and inversion, like the Escher-esque Möbius strip that you
may remember from Endgame. The problem,
though, arises when you realise that Nolan
is a tad too delighted by this idea. He
sacrifices effective and structured storytelling on the altar of scientific
exhibitionism. After a point, it only
comes off as intellectual grandstanding —
basically, all sizzle no steak. At
the core of every film he has made, there has been a strong emotional layer
attached to it. He’s been able to
surgically graft every over-the-top saga of his with primal human desires and
emotions. But here, even the
ingeniousness of Tenet is not enough to
salvage the debilitating lack of it.
The
emotions in the film are ice cold, and
for Nolan, this can only be classified as pure narrative neglect — one that you cannot overlook despite all of
Tenet’s cinematic panache. His attempt
to fill that emotional void, though, is at best unremarkable and at worst,
phoney. This is where Elizabeth
Debicki’s character, Kat, comes in — the
aristocratic, money-clad damsel in distress whom you’re supposed to feel sad
for. I’d much rather have Nolan own up to
his lack of zest here than have him
conceal it with wishy-washy feminism. This,
sadly, is not the end of Tenet’s drabness.
After its high-octane opening sequence and a masterfully choreographed
fight scene where we are officially
introduced to time inversion, the film
falls flat for over an hour. I started
growing restless and weary. None of
Washington’s espionage hijinks have the high you’d expect in a Nolan film.
Tenet, at this point, is a cautionary tale about
how flash, style, and silver-tongued
cocksureness, alone, just won’t cut it anymore.
This also has to do with the fact that Nolan did not even bother to develop his gratuitously violent, ammunition-savvy
antagonist — Andrei Sator, played by Kenneth Branagh. Sator, who always has a scowl on his face, terrorises
his wife Kat and with her, the rest of
the world with his nuclear wheeling and dealing. Nolan doesn’t get to Sator’s “bad guy” motives
until the climax, leaving us high and
dry throughout the film. However,
Washington and Robert Pattinson, who plays Neil, another secret agent, galvanise their suave, debonair characters with
absolute ease, carrying parts of the
film that they’re not even supposed to. In
one scene, as he strode across a covert facility holding a cup of espresso in one hand and a
suitcase in another, Washington
perfected the ideal masculine image — not too macho, not too smug. And even Pattinson, with his seductively slicked
hair and attenuated gestures, easily
goes down as one of Hollywood’s most charismatic actors. Together, they make a snappy and dazzling
team. I wouldn’t even mind seeing a
mini-series just on their homoerotic chemistry either. Even Dimple Kapadia, as the silent
industrialist, plays her role with great poise and elegance.
Tenet’s
cinematic glamour would make you believe that Nolan was just warming up with
Inception and Dunkirk. The
cinematography, coupled with a formidable production design, makes this for a delirious and wild ride. The film’s twin visual components — the
architecture and its shots — portrayed a
futuristic yet grim look of this world. What
did throw me off, however, was its unsparingly loud sound mixing. You will leave the film in immediate search
for cochlear implants. The extent to
which you enjoy Tenet will largely depend on your priorities. While his story lacks the heft to carry an
overwrought narrative, the film does
deserve a watch solely for Christopher Nolan’s audacity and ambition. You can watch Tenet in the theatres, if you
feel comfortable doing so.
Tenet
Movie Star Cast
- Juhan Ulfsak
- Jefferson Hall
- Andrew Howard
- John David Washington
- Rich caraulo
- Jonathan Camp
- Wes Chatam
- Martin Donovan
- Celemence Poesy
Tenet Movie Director: Christopher Nolan