Tenet
Dir. Christopher Nolan (SPOILERS!)
How do I start this one? Well, maybe with words spoken after Inception a decade or more ago - "I didn't quite get that". For me however, Inception felt pretty straightforward and I understood the plot from start to finish, or rather, I followed the plot from start to finish and left feeling satisfied. With Tenet, I could not follow the plot and no, it's not because it is genius level scripting from super genius Christopher Nolan. it's because the sound mixing is so damn awful, it is quite literally, physically impossible to follow the plot. Form the music to the environmentals to the action and everything in between, you hear it all except the words being spoken by the actors. But we will get to all of that in a bit, let's just discuss the contents of the movie first.
This is a time travel flick, for all the talk of "inversion" that's all this is. It has the usual time travel quirks: can you change the past? Will changing the past affect the future? What happens when you meet your future or past self? What is there is a plot point in the past, which requires action in the future, for that plot point to have ever happened at all? Tick, tick, tick and tick. There is actually very little here that is unique, I would go so far as to say nothing is original in Nolan's script. The bad guy is Russian (the 1980s want their villain back), everyone looks good in a suit in well lit environments (Sam Mendes wants his Bond themes back) and...well, all of it was done better in Avengers: Endgame last year or in Back to the future 30 years ago. This is possibly Nolan's least interesting or thought provoking script.
At this point, I would like to state that this is an action movie, or rather, you would remind me of that. "This ain't a physics phD thesis Watch_Tower, you nerd!" I hear the die hard Nolanites scream. I get that, I really do, so let's discuss the action. Is it any good? Well....it's ok I guess. I was initially truly hyped to see what these inverted sequences, such as the car chase or the fist fights would look like and personally, honestly, they were decent but nothing quite as jaw dropping as the scene altering sequences of Inception (or the Inception inspired chase scenes in Dr Strange). That is the saddest part for me. All the visual flair and practical effects are hidden by fast cuts, so often, so over indulgent that you can easily lose track of who is on screen and who isn't, what is happening and what isn't. Cars roll backwards and pop back onto the road, cool but when it all seems to be happening at about 5 miles per hour, it just isn't exciting. The final battle scene looks more like a really rough paintballing session than a battle to save humanity with some of the smallest, more boring explosions captured for a major blockbuster ever.
This all sounds very very negative, and it is but there are some bright spots. John David Washington is once again very good, slick, calm, physical and just nuanced enough that you believe in him as a just protagonist. Robert Pattinson is ok but he gets to deliver some cheeky comments, injecting a bit of humour into an otherwise very serious script. The rest of the cast do a decent job but Kenneth Branagh as the big bad Russian is just wasted. From his cartoonish accent to his nonexistent motivations (cancer, bla bla, wants to destroy world so...erm...so everyone else can die with him, I guess?) is a huge miss. One of the finest actors on screen and he comes off worse than most Saturday morning TV show baddies.
This is where the problem with the sound mixing comes in yet again. Why does he want to destroy all of time and space (on Earth anyway)? Something to do with having cancer but if it was explained beyond that point, I didn't hear it. Why can't his wife kill him until something happens on the battlefield? No idea, I couldn't hear that too but in the end, it didn't matter anyway. Pattinson's character (I couldn't even hear his name) seems to have died in the final sequence, but his inverted version is alive and knows the main character for many, many years, meaning he is actually from the future, was this ever explained? I don't think so but I can't be sure, as I could barely hear any of his conversations. If it wasn't explained, as I strongly suspect it wasn't, then this is a definite plot hole due to poor writing and not just some timey-wimey.
It may sound weird, after all that I have mentioned to actually recommend the film. I do it for two reasons:
1. It is a good enough excuse to go and visit the cinema in these hard times.
2. This is a genuine, family friendly blockbuster, one of the few of its kind and I would rather it was supported than ignored. I also enjoyed the two central performers and appreciate the craft of the stunt men and engineers who put all the practical work together for this, resisting silly CGI temptation.
Verdict:
Good for a rainy Sunday afternoon