USA TODAY International Edition
Christopher Nolan’s ‘ Tenet’ is bewildering
Remember the Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s? That puzzling toy was challenging enough. Then came Rubik’s Snake, then Rubik’s Magic, and meanwhile it’s like, “Whoa, I’m still trying to solve the cube thing!”
This is the experience of watching writer/ director Christopher Nolan’s sci- fi action thriller “Tenet” ( eegE; rated PG- 13; nationwide Thursday where theaters are open), the latest from the auteur of the brilliant “Inception” that’s both dazzling and increasingly bewildering.
Since we are in a pandemic and this is the biggest movie to date since our big- screen entertainment went kablooey, consider seeing it at a drive- in and take safety precautions at indoor theaters. If you’re not feeling up to it yet, that’s OK, too – you have plenty of time to do a ton of physics homework that might help navigate what is essentially a very complicated James Bond movie.
The globetrotting spy film covers some familiar bases – albeit with Nolan’s signature epic vision – starting with the far- flung locales, from the coast of Vietnam to an abandoned Russian town to an opera house in Kiev, where “Tenet” opens with a white- knuckle mission and a test for The Protagonist ( a sensational John David Washington). A new recruit to a super- duper secret organization, our hero goes unnamed because he is the audience’s point of view as we all get a crash course on time inversion. ( It’s not time “travel” per se in Nolan’s cinematic science, it’s more about the connection between how some things move forward and others – thanks, entropy! – move backward.)
There’s a megalomaniacal Russian oligarch, Andrei Sator ( Kenneth