My local theater has reopened with a whole bunch of extra
safety precautions in place and so I saw Tenet on the big screen. As much as I
hate to admit it, Christopher Nolan was correct: Tenet should be seen in a theater.
I happened to be alone for my viewing
and I found myself wishing the theater was more full. It would have been interesting to watch this
with a crowd – not complaining, that’s still not safe – just observing.
Tenet introduces us to The Protagonist as he works as an
international spy. The movie begins with him helping stop a terrorist hostage
situation in Moscow. While there, he witnesses something odd when being fired
upon by the villains. He doesn’t quite
make it out, and just as he thinks he’s been killed, he’s actually rescued (but not before getting some teeth yanked out) and
recruited for another top-secret mission with only the word “tenet” as his way
in. He travels from location to
location, eventually learning that Russian Andrei Sator has some terrible plans
for the world and a mysterious organization is working to stop those plans.
Honestly, that’s about all I will say about it. You definitely should see it. It feels like a throwback to early
Christopher Nolan work, most notably Memento, a movie that managed to run
forwards and backwards. I don’t believe I am spoiling anything by mentioning
that this movie has some forward and backward in it. Not necessarily time travel, but time
inversion. If you want to travel back 10 days, you need to reverse through 10
days. Confusing, but also fascinating,
and apparently based on some real entropy physics. Nolan loves a non-linear story, and this one
is linear with non-linear bits. There
are very few CGI effects for a movie with inverted time sequences. Nolan had
the actors shoot scenes moving backwards to do as much practically as possible
and I think it made a difference in the final product. The action set pieces including a massive car
chase and plane crashing into a hanger are all done practically. The cast includes some Nolan regulars and
some new additions.
John David Washington is exceptional as the lead of this movie
and I am suddenly ready to hand him his own action franchise. He is calm, cool,
collected, and manages to let almost nothing rattle him, even inverted bullets.
He is absolutely a leading man and I cannot wait to see what he does next. Also
– weird observation, I was really intrigued by his talent to hold an espresso cup
and saucer in one hand.
Here’s something I never thought I would say, after watching this, I can understand how Robert Pattinson got the new Batman. Don’t get me wrong, as much as I love Batman, I think the character deserves a bit of a rest, give us a few years to breathe before forcing another one at us (unless of course you make a Batman Beyond with an old Keaton-Wayne and JGL Mcginnis). Pattinson is a slick assistant spy named Neil in this piece, seemingly prepared for almost any situation. He is capable in the action sequences and even more with his partnership with the Protagonist.
Elizabeth Debicki and her incredibly long neck provide the female lead as Kat – a woman trapped in a relationship with Kenneth Branagh’s villainous Sator. I hated her character at first, because the whole ‘trapped in marriage with this horrible man because they have a son’ is really tired. She manages to make it work and steps into her own by the end.
I did not know that Aaron Taylor-Johnson was in this and it took me a few minutes to recognize him. He’s pretty great as the standard action guy leading a team that has been recruited by whatever mysterious benefactor and organization has recruited the Protagonist. Dimple Kapadia enters her first Western movie to play a arms-dealer/helpful friend who points our team in the right direction. And yes, since it’s a Nolan movie, Michael Caine pops up briefly.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I thought when I left the theater, but the more I think about the movie, the more I like it. It’s not perfect and certainly uneven, and I figured out the who just before the reveal, which I don’t mind. But the action is spectacular, the cast is great, and the story interesting. It may be worth seeing a second time to catch all the little added bits I missed the first time around. For example, the color red indicates regular movement and blue indicates inverted movement.
8 out of 10 – and possible getting higher.
Side note, a Sator Square is a five by five square of different
palindromes that when turned various ways, the words still read the same. Each
word features in the movie Tenet in different places. The earliest dated Sator Square was found in
the ruins of Pompeii.
No comments:
Post a Comment