Superspy in race against time
TENET ★★★ (Cert 12A, 150mins) In cinemas now
DON’T TRY and understand it, feel it,” Clémence Poésy’s scientist says early on in Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary spy thriller. 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 to take this approach to the whole film. If you found Nolan’s Inception confusing, prepare for a whole new level of bewilderment as
John DavidWashington’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 a lot more the second time, but I still left the cinema scratching my head.This unpredictable, bold, original and wildly spectacular movie could be the perfect curtain-raiser for this year’s delayed blockbuster season.
Watching the opening scene – a thrilling siege at a Ukrainian opera house – unfold on 70mm IMAX was weirdly emotional.
As a big part of the pleasure involves surprises, I won’t go into too much detail about the plot.
Washington
– here known only as The Protagonist – is a CIA agent 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 and people. “A nuclear bomb can affect our future, an inverted one could affect our past,” says Poésy’s cryptic brainbox.
After tracing the reverse-firing bullets 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”, an obscenely huge yacht and a dangerously disgruntled trophy wife (Elizabeth Debicki).
Branagh makes a truly horrible villain while the acrobatic Washington (son of Denzel) proves that charisma resides in the genes.
For all its clever science talk, ultimately this is a globetrotting espionage movie 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.
But the most impressive action scene is a raid on an armoured car involving multiple vehicles on an Estonian motorway.As not all of the vehicles are going in the same direction, you can only marvel at the skill of Nolan’s stunt drivers.
The mechanics of the finale, a “temporal pincer movement” on a Siberian “hidden city”, may always be beyond me. I’ll know for certain when I watch it for a third time.