IT’S FAST &
Director Nolan’s mind-blowing spy romp
“DON’T try and understand it, feel it,” Clémence Poésy’s scientist says early on in Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary Tenet.
She’s talking about a batch of “inverted” bullets that fly away from their targets and back into the barrel of the gun that has fired them – or perhaps is about to fire them.
My advice is that you should take this approach to the whole shebang.
If Nolan’s Inception baked your noodle, prepare for a whole new level of bewilderment as John David Washington’s superspy tries to foil a plot hatched in the future and fought out by assailants moving backwards through time.
I’ve seen the film twice.
I enjoyed it and followed it a lot more the second time, but I still left the cinema furiously scratching my head.
Perhaps this is what Nolan is after. Although I also suspect there’s a touch of misdirection from The Prestige director.
I’m pretty sure there are plot holes residing in some of his “temporal paradoxes”.
Still, this unpredictable, bold, original and wildly spectacular movie could be the perfect curtain-raiser for this year’s delayed blockbuster season.
Watching his opening scene – a thrilling siege at a Ukrainian opera house – unfold on 70mm IMAX was a weirdly emotional experience.
I’ve seen some decent home-streaming movies during lockdown, but nothing can compare with the thrill of sitting in a darkened room watching giant images.
As a big part of the pleasure involves surprises, I won’t go into too much detail about the plot.
Although, in this case I’m not convinced that my mind is capable of producing a proper spoiler.
Washington – here known only as The Protagonist – is a CIA hotshot who, after saving the day in Ukraine, is inducted into a secret society called Tenet.
His job is to stop Armageddon. Somewhere in the future, someone has created a machine that “reverses the entropy” of objects, people and weapons.
“A nuclear bomb can affect our future, an inverted one could affect our past,” says Poésy’s cryptic brainbox.
After tracing the reverse-firing bullet to India, Washington teams up with Robert Pattinson’s inscrutable British spy to get close to Dimple Kapadia’s hugely confusing arms dealer.
She puts them on the trail of Kenneth Branagh’s Andrei
Sator, a London-based
Russian oligarch with uncanny “instincts about the future” and a dangerously disgruntled trophy wife (Elizabeth Debicki).
For all its fancy science talk, ultimately this is a globe-trotting espionage caper made up of thrilling set-pieces.
Nolan, who favours old-fashioned physical effects to CGI trickery, literally crashes a jumbo jet into an aircraft hanger for his first heist. Then he hits us with a thrilling fight sequence involving a masked man who walks and fights backwards like a violent Michael Jackson. But the most memorable action scene is a raid on an armoured car involving multiple vehicles moving along a busy motorway in Estonia. As not all of the vehicles are heading in the same direction, you can only marvel at the skill of Nolan’s stunt drivers.
His cast is excellent too. Branagh makes a truly horrible villain while the excellent Washington (son of Denzel) proves that charisma resides in the genes.
Watching him barely break sweat while going at a Russian goon with a cheese grater sent me tumbling forward through time.
Somewhere in the near future, someone is unveiling the first American Bond.