Tenet

In case you were wondering, a 'tenet' is actually defined as "an opinion or principle held by a group or organisation, a creed." In Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited blockbuster the title Tenet actually is a sort of palindrome; referring to time moving forward and backwards by ten minutes, as it does in one of its major sequences.

If you’ve just seen one of Nolan’s films, or even had one described to you, you’ll know that time is his muse. He pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in modern film-making, using every bit of new technology he can to drive genres forward all with brain-melting science (even his Batman films played the ‘realistic five-minutes-into-the-future tech’ card.)

Tenet is no exception, testing the pulse of the spy genre and creating something entirely new, much as he did with the heist movie in Inception, the space film with Interstellar and the war movie with Dunkirk.

Whereas those movies trounced their competition on account of their smarts, visuals and sheer originality I don’t feel like Tenet will necessarily be considered in the same way.

Sure, this is a truly original film. I simply can’t write you a plot synopsis without giving anything away, but suffice to say, like Bond before it, we follow a spy attempting to stop World War III. This extinction-level event has actually come from the future, a broken society inventing the ability to ‘invert’ objects (set them so they walk back through time) which they plan to do with the whole world.

This is not then a time travel film, far from it. We play with the fabric of time to brain-melting levels. Things move backwards through events otherwise moving forwards, and that can include people too. We often, brilliantly, see events unfold from different time perspectives and different junctures. Robert Pattinson’s sidekick Neil has a Masters in Physics and you’ll feel like you need one too to keep up. We’re told multiple times, in the copious amounts of exposition, to ‘try not to understand things.’ That’s certainly a good message to take with you into the cinema.

It’s not as honed or as clear as Inception before it, or Rian Johnson’s Looper, those two being probably its most spiritual brethren. The comparisons to Bond feel justified but it’s a lot harder, sharper, darker visually and tonally, feeling similar in the latter to Interstellar.

John David Washington’s The Protagonist (he’s not given a real name) is every bit as watchable and brutal as the modern Bond, but Nolan doesn’t go down the ‘old-skool spy’ path. He uses a surprising lack of characters, which actually works to its advantage as it gives you something to tether onto. Kenneth Branagh is suitably menacing as the villain, if a little difficult to understand at times, but Elizabeth Debicki might just take the MVP gong here with a brilliantly layered performance. Her character is the wife of Branagh’s villain and is often the key plot driver. The aforementioned Pattinson takes the Eames (Inception) role and is also excellent.

The action scenes are absolutely incredible, as you would expect from Nolan. The intricacy of the time inversion can make things tricky to wrap your head around but sure look good as we witness a backwards car chase, a building coming back together after being blown up and an awesome backwards bungee jump to get into a guarded house. Ludwig Goransson’s score also deserves huge praise, certainly one of the best scores in modern film it perfectly suits the mood and dramatises the action.

This helps as it is sometimes difficult to care a great deal when it’s so difficult to know what’s going on. It’s not so much that the time stuff is confusing, you kind of get into the rhythm of it, but the actual plot and surrounding to the set pieces is so convoluted. The aforementioned ‘ten-ten’ section is loud, entertaining and fantastic to look at but you’ll spend the whole time wondering who’s doing what, where and why.

It’s utterly uncompromising and divisive and certainly not the fangled ‘saviour of the cinema family blockbuster’ it’s being marketed as. That 12A rating they had to cut a lot to achieve feels like a cynical attempt to get bums on seats. Many are going to walk out and not have understood a word.

The Nolan fanboys will no doubt see this film as a work of genius and I’m sure after a rewatch and a look at some of the copious theories, I’ll come round to the same way of thinking but there’ll be many who find it just utterly incomprehensible.

He’s definitely managed to ‘invert’ the spy genre but it’s a total Marmite film and one you really can’t be on the fence about. As you’d expect, I’m completely on the fence about it.

4 stars ****