Tenet Review

Cinemas around the world are starting to reopen and the big test for theatrical films is the release of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.

After a mission in Kyiv, an unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) gets recruited by a secret organisation that gives him two leads, a hand gesture and the word “tenet.” The agent gets told about the discovery of a future technology that allows items to move backward in time. This technology is a threat to the world and a Russian arms dealer, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) is involved. The agent must find a way to infiltrate his world.

Christopher Nolan is a director who has managed to gain mainstream success whilst also maintaining artistic integrity and freedom. The success of The Dark Knight Trilogy has allowed him to do whatever he wants. With Tenet he mashes up a spy-thriller with a time travel story.

Nolan is an incredibly smart man and likes to show off. With Tenet he gets to show off two of his greatest loves – twisty storytelling and complex theoretical physics. Tenet had the slick stylings of Inception, the time travel mechanics of Interstellar, and a story that loops around itself like Memento. Tenet ticks all the boxes fans of Nolan would expect – complex plotting, excellent performances, and a celebration of old school techniques like using 70mm film and practical effects.

Tenet has been criticised for being hard to follow and it’s true that the time travel mechanics do get confusing. However, the basics of the story were that people from the future were able to send things to the past and preparing for a conflict across time. Time travel stories do run the risk falling to technobabble, plot holes, and clichés. Fortunately, Tenet was more like Twelve Monkeys and Looper, and to a lesser extent Doctor Who. There were ideas of characters’ timelines that can play across multiple time periods and the idea of the future people preparing to go to war with their ancestors was like the Toclafane in Doctor Who. The idea of the future people being against the past was an inversion of Interstellar where the future people in that film were helping their ancestors.

Nolan is a big fan of the Bond series and Tenet is the closest we are going to get to a Nolan Bond film. The opening action sequence was essentially a pre-title sequence and the agent’s job was to investigate and penetrate before the action begins. Washington showed himself to suave, quick-witted, and well-dressed and he was handy with guns and his fists. He has the action credentials and will easily get more roles in that genre if he wants to. Washington would be a great fit to play John Stewart/Green Lantern.

Like a Bond film, Tenet had some fantastic action sequences. The most famous was when a plane crashes into a hanger because the filmmakers actually did that instead of using CGI. The other big set pieces were a car chase on the highways of Oslo and the final sequence was a full-on war zone. However, my favourite scene was when the agent had to fight a man who was inverted. It led to some interesting visuals because the physics were backward as the men were fighting for control of a gun. It was like the zero-gravity fight in Inception.

As a filmmaker, Nolan loves to play around with screenplay structure and time frames. Memento told its story backward, Inception was filled with flashbacks, and Interstellar had a time loop. Tenet had characters who have different personal times and certain events get revisited from a different perspective. This leads into the philosophical questions about time travel like what would happen if someone tries to change the past and whether is time predetermined.

Nolan’s storytelling has been described as a horseshoe. His stories start at one point before turning back around at the halfway point. This happens again with Tenet because Nolan had to close all the time loops he had created.

Tenet assembled an incredible cast. As stated, Washington was excellent in the role and hopefully, Tenet will propel him into stardom. Robert Pattinson has paid his dues in indie films and he was a fun presence as the Agent’s partner. Whilst Kenneth Branagh made for a great villain and Aaron Taylor-Johnson was unrecognisable in his role. However, the most impressive member of the cast of Elizabeth Debicki who played Kat. Kat was Sator’s trapped wife and the agent offers her a way out. She was the most interesting character because of her position: she was an abusive relationship with a megalomaniac who’s of the view that if he can’t have Kat, no one can. Her role was in the vein of Andrea Anders and Sévérine from the Bond series: women who were trapped in relationships with powerful men.

Tenet did see a change in some of Nolan’s behind-the-scenes collaborators. Lee Smith and Hans Zimmer were attached to other projects, so Jennifer Lame and Ludwig Göransson were hired as editor and composer, respectively. Both were fine substitutes. The issue with editing is when its good audiences don’t even notice, so Lame did her job well. Whilst Göransson did replicate aspects of Zimmer’s music, i.e. the ‘braams’ and was still able to put his own stamp on the music.

Tenet was a bold film that has the look and feel of a prestigious thriller, and be a mash-up of spy action and sci-fi high concepts. It’s not quite Christopher Nolan’s best film but it was still an ambitious thrill ride.