Tenet: Smartly paced action, in forward and reverse, almost makes up for all that sci-fi 'splaining
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
There are good reasons for an action film to be two-and-a-half hours long. Having to devote dozens of extra pages of dialogue to constantly explaining itself isn’t one of them.
By that token, Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s long, long-awaited and oft-postponed sci-fi adventure, may represent the future of the industry in these pandemicky times of socially-spaced theatres. If people must see a movie multiple times to “get” it, that could make up for some of the seats they can’t sell per screening.
As it is, Tenet is a difficult movie against which to commit spoilers, since no two people are likely to spoil this convoluted plot exactly the same way.
John David Washington is trying to stop the future, or make it unhappen, in Tenet.
What I will say about the premise is that Nolan has taken a trope that has sent many a movie down a rabbit hole – time travel – and found a way to make it even more confounding. See, time itself has been weaponized by persons unknown and is traveling backward. World War III, we’re told, will be fought with temporal weapons.
If this were Star Trek, at least the technobabble would make some kind of scientific sense. But the more the characters in Tenet reveal to each other about what’s going on, the less we care.
Nor I think does the director. Despite his penchant for feature-length head trips (Inception, Interstellar), one gets the impression that Nolan’s commitment to his premise is entirely based on the opportunity to film freaky, terrifically-paced IMAX action scenes that alternately go forward and backward. Car chases, fight scenes, gun battles, explosions, you name it. He distracts from wrapping your head around the latest thing someone says about “time inversion” with bursts of unusual and eccentric action. It’s not as pioneering as, say, The Matrix’s “bullet time,” but it’s a new flavour of action eye-candy.
Tenet opens with an apparent attack by gunmen on a Russian opera concert, in which not all the attackers seem to be on the same side, and strange things happen. The carnage serves to introduce us to The Protagonist (yes, that’s his name) played by John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman), an espionage agent of uncertain allegiance, though initially he appears to be CIA.
Apparently groomed for something bigger, he is hooked up with a Mumbai-based operative (Robert Pattinson), who knows all the good stuff about what they’re dealing with, and dishes it out to his partner on a need-to-know basis.
Tenet is the kind of movie that never wants to show its cards, heroes could be villains, villains could be diversions. But there is one that towers almost Bond-villain-like over the other threats to our very existence.
That would Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian oligarch with his own private army, and his own personal obsession with controlling the future (or the past, or whatever). We know he’s a bad guy because he keeps like wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) trapped against her will in a loveless marriage for the sake of their child (no, the kid’s name isn’t Baron).
Despite its length and ambiguous plot, Tenet moves quickly and noisily. For a movie with such a heady premise, it is propulsive, empty headed entertainment. But then, most James Bond plots haven’t made a lot of sense in recent years, and they’re still fun.
Tenet. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki. Opens in IMAX cinemas and theatres nationwide on Wednesday, Aug. 26.