Review: In ‘Tenet,’ A Time-bending Thriller For Bended Times

I went in fresh to Tenet. I didnt have any real sense of the plot, yes, but it’s more that it had been some five months since I was last in a movie theater. Thats a long hiatus a dark ages for sitting in the dark for someone, anyone, used to going to the movies more days than not. The last film I had seen in a cinema, back in March, was the Vin Diesel vehicle Bloodshot, so you can imagine my eagerness for a new aftertaste.

Its complicated, in a way, to parse the experience. Theres the feeling of being back in a movie theater, and then theres the sensations particular to Tenet. For Christopher Nolan, whose films build their conceptual architecture around the metaphysics of movies themselves, its kind of one and the same. His movies are designed, from a molecular level, to unlock innate cinematic powers and glorify the almighty Big Screen a lonely god these last few months.

As the first major film released in theaters since the pandemic began, Tenet has swelled in the minds of anxious moviegoers, adopting the role of savior. Nolan vs. COVID-19 is as much part of the drama of Tenet as anything on screen, and just as convoluted and disorienting. Seeing Tenet for this critic meant crossing numerous state lines and watching it at a nearly empty movie theater a luxury of social distancing that wont be possible for most, even in reduced capacity theaters. At its best, moviegoing has always been thrilling, even dangerous. That may be doubly so right now.

For better and worse, Tenet is just a movie. It wont beat the virus and it wont single-handedly save movie theaters. It wont even really blow your mind. But for much of its 150-minute running time, Nolans globe-trotting sci-fi riff on the spy thriller will provide a dazzling escape, one dense with singular imagery and intellectual puzzles. And, perhaps most vitally, it will give a cool, brutalist refresher of the movies capacity for awe, for imagination, and, yes, for tiresome grandiosity. For the palindromic Tenet, it cuts both ways.

Naturally, Tenet opens on a crowded auditorium. At an opera house in Kyiv, just as the conductor is raising his baton, a barrage of bullets rings out and masked men take the stage. Outside, a squadron of covert American agents are stirred. They pick a local police patch for their shoulders, and one among them (John David Washington, known only as the Protagonist in the credits) maneuvers to rescue a man who sits in a closed balcony. He greets him with the coded phrase We live in a twilight world.

As hes trying to stop bombs from going off in the theater, an odd thing happens. Tussling with one of the terrorists, a bullet seems to fly backward into the gun. After being taken hostage and tortured, he blacks out. When he wakes up much later, hes told that hes been released from the CIA and been enlisted in a shadowy organization known as Tenet. The mission goes beyond borders, hes told. A Cold War ice cold is brewing. Hes to try to prevent World War III and an apocalypse worse than nuclear holocaust.

The details of this secret war whos on what side, whats at stake take a while to unspool. But just as Nolans last film, the gorgeously synchronized WWII survival tale Dunkirk, was arranged elementally by land, sea and air, Tenet is spliced between past, present and future. A heady genre movie that puts James Bond-like tropes through a collider, its very much a companion piece to Inception (a heist movie with a sci-fi spin) and just as laden with continual explanation.

The central conceit here is that a rare mineral can reverse the entropy of objects. That means time travel, inverted weapons, car chases that speed both ways and the biggest blockbuster to ever look a little like the backward-running Pharcyde music video Drop, by Spike Jonze. These weapons are the detritus of a coming war, were told; the future is attacking the past.

The Protagonists journey brings him in touch with a British fixer named Neil (a delightfully knowing and especially dashing Robert Pattinson; you want him always to say more than he does), a Mumbai arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia) and ultimately a Ukrainian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). To reach the insulated Sator, the Protagonist finds an entry through his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki, the films most suave and affecting performer), an art dealer who has come to detest her husband.

As a film, Tenet rumbles like a jumbo jet. Its sheer tonnage is what most strikes you. There are trucks and ships, giant turbines and helicopters, concrete masses and 747s. Its a literally heavy movie. The settings, which span from the Amalfi Coast to the closed cities of Russia, give Tenet a technological backdrop of ecological destruction. If anything, I wish Nolan had taken his future vs. past concept further, instead of situating it so firmly in the more familiar (in movies) world of black-market weapons dealers.

Tenet lacks the elegant mastery of Dunkirk or the cosmic soulfulness of Interstellar, but it has a darkly grand geometry. As instruments in an abstraction, most of Nolans protagonists verge on the hollow. Washington glides through the film with charisma and preternatural smoothness but his characters inner life goes unexplored. Leonardo DiCaprios Cobb in Inception wasnt so different, but the mission plunged directly into his subconscious. Nolan, a visionary filmmaker, can sometimes be too busy conjuring visions to build a character.

Time is Nolan’s real protagonist, anyway. Its loss was the agony of Interstellar. A ticking clock, on three different temporal tracks, measured Dunkirk. In Tenet, it moves in circles: backward and forward like waves in the ocean. Its a distinctive characteristic of the movies, and its one you can feel Nolan investigating and experimenting with. Its easy to imagine Tenet was born in an editing suite, while a shot was rewound and epiphany struck.

Time has grown strangely elastic during the pandemic (as have movie release schedules). Today, yesterday and tomorrow blur together. So its some comfort that even still, Nolans clock keeps ticking.

Tenet, a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language. Running time: 151 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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