Time- bending thriller for bended times
Iwent in fresh to Tenet. I didn’t have any real sense of the plot, yes, but it’s more that it had been some five months since I was last in a movie theater. That’s a long hiatus — a dark ages for sitting in the dark — for someone, anyone, used to going to the movies more days than not. The last film I had seen in a cinema, back in March, was the Vin Diesel vehicle Bloodshot, so you can imagine my eagerness for a new aftertaste.
It’s complicated, in a way, to parse the experience. There’s the feeling of being back in a movie theater, and then there’s the sensations particular to Tenet. For
Christopher Nolan, whose films build their conceptual architecture around the metaphysics of movies themselves, it’s kind of one and the same. His movies are designed, from a molecular level, to unlock innate cinematic powers and glorify the almighty Big Screen — a lonely god these last few months.
As the first major film released in theaters since the pandemic began, Tenet has swelled in the minds of anxious moviegoers, adopting the role of savior. Nolan vs. Covid- 19 is as much part of the drama of Tenet as anything on screen, and just as convoluted and disorienting. Seeing
Tenet for this critic meant crossing numerous state lines and watching it at a nearly empty movie theater — a luxury of social distancing that won’t be possible for most, even in reduced capacity theaters. At its best, moviegoing has always been thrilling, even dangerous. That may be doubly so right now.
For better and worse, Tenet is just a movie. It won’t beat the virus and it won’t single- handedly save movie theaters. It won’t even really blow your mind. But for much of its 150- minute running time, Nolan’s globetrotting sci- fi riff on the spy thriller will provide a dazzling escape, one dense with singular imagery and intellectual puzzles. And, perhaps most vitally, it will give a cool, brutalist refresher of the movies’ capacity for awe, for imagination, and, yes, for tiresome grandiosity. For the palindromic Tenet, it cuts both ways.
Naturally, Tenet opens on a crowded auditorium. At an opera house in Kyiv, just as the conductor is raising his baton, a barrage of bullets rings out and masked men take the stage. Outside, a squadron of covert American agents are stirred. They pick a local police patch for their shoulders, and one among them ( John David Washington, known only as “the Protagonist” in the credits) maneuvers to rescue a man who sits in a closed balcony. He greets him with the coded phrase “We live in a twilight world.”
As he’s trying to stop bombs from going off in the theater, an odd thing happens. Tussling with one of the terrorists, a bullet seems to fly backward into the gun. After being taken hostage and tortured, he blacks out. When he wakes up much later, he’s told that he’s been released from the CIA and been enlisted in a shadowy organisation known as Tenet. The mission goes beyond borders, he’s told. A Cold War — “ice cold” — is brewing. He’s to try to prevent World War III and an apocalypse worse than nuclear holocaust.
The details of this secret war — who’s on what side, what’s at stake — take a while to unspool. But just as Nolan’s last film, the gorgeously synchronised WWII survival tale Dunkirk, was arranged elementally by land, sea and air, Tenet is spliced between past, present and future. A heady genre movie that puts James Bond- like tropes through a collider, it’s very much a companion piece to Inception ( a heist movie with a sci- fi spin) and just as laden with continual explanation.