Tenet

[uk666]

Tenet

Armed with only one word--Tenet--and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.

Movie info

• Rating:               PG-13 (for violence and intense action)
• Genre:                Action & Adventure, Drama, Mystery & Suspense, Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Directed By:      Christopher Nolan
• Written By:        Christopher Nolan
• In Theatres:      USA Sep 3, 2020. UK Aug 26, 2020.
• Budget:              $200m/£153m)
• Studio:               Warner Bros. Pictures

Christopher Nolan is that rare beast: an art house auteur making intellectually ambitious blockbuster movies that can leave your pulse racing and your head spinning.

Ridley Scott had the same knack, as did Stanley Kubrick: the wit to combine a vivid imagination with unabashed showmanship in order to explore complex ideas such as time and space and consciousness in the context of an epic, all-action movie.

To this, Nolan adds a mastery of mixing genres. Inception was a sci-fi-heist movie, The Dark Knight a comic-book thriller.

He's at it again with Tenet, which is a globe-trotting sci-fi-spy drama starring John David Washington as The Protagonist, who is given the not insignificant task of saving humanity from certain radioactive Armageddon in a looming World War III.

In terms of spectacle, Tenet delivers. The stunts, the camera work and the scale are impressive. As is Nolan's appetite to use blockbuster entertainment as a platform to seriously consider existential threats, the unconscious mind, and cutting-edge physics.

It's a Bond-like set-up. The Protagonist is the goodie: a Western agent working for a morally sound, state-backed, above-the-board secret service. The baddie is Andrei Sator, an unscrupulous Russian businessman played with great vigour but not a lot of subtlety by Kenneth Branagh.

Andrei is hell-bent on putting together the wherewithal to erase the past, present and future of the world. The Protagonist is heaven-sent to stop him. Kat is the key, a love triangle plot device that might work on paper but doesn't in the film where there is little emotional spark or screen chemistry between her and either Andrei or The Protagonist - or Max for that matter.

To that extent, it's certainly not Bond, but then, it's not Bond either. There are action sequences with Bond-like levels of spectacle, and interior scenes in which you sense The Protagonist actively putting his tanks on 007's lawn with his own bone-dry quips (asked how he would like to die, he replies: "Old").

What differentiates Tenet are the bigger ideas in which Nolan is framing his story. It turns what could have been a sub-Bond action-packed spy movie into an inventive, bold and thought-provoking interrogation into our perception of time.

It won't leave you shaken, but your mind will be stirred. And that has to be worth a trip to the cinema.