Film Review: Tenet

Tenet was the first film I’ve seen at the cinema since around before lockdown, either March or earlier. It’s also the first major film release as far as I’m aware since the cinemas re-opened as well. The review ahead will contain spoilers, so you are warned. Tenet is an action, thriller sci-fi film from Christopher Nolan, one of my favourite directors though admittedly I have yet to see his Batman films, Dunkirk or Memento. I have seen Inception, Interstellar, The Prestige with my favourite being the Prestige. Tenet stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, along with a stellar cast as usual including Michael Caine, one of Nolan’s favourite collaborators since Caine has been in at least 8 of his films including a cameo in Dunkirk. John David Washington plays as a CIA agent, nick named the Protagonist and Robert Pattinson is the other hero, as another CIA handler called Neil and they were my favourite characters and actors in the film but before I get into that, I have to do a quick run-down summary of the film. The film starts at an opera house in Kiev with an orchestral band in the centre and a large audience watching, and it spends no time in getting straight to it with armed men in uniforms and masks entering the building, and a shoot out starts. The audience start to panic but If I remember right, gas enters the room, knocking them out, or most of them. The soldiers rescue a spy as well as capturing a bizarre artifact. The spy is saved from being shot by a soldier with a red tag on his rucksack, and this is the first time we get to see the science-fiction tech in the film as in a flash there’s an “un-fired” bullet through the terrorist that kills him. The protagonist (John) is then captured by a Russian agent as well as being tortured to force him to reveal his mission objectives. However, the protagonist is able to take a cyanide pill but afterwards he wakes to learn the mission was a test and the pill was a fake. He is then informed that the same organization that captured him stole the artifact, killed all his colleagues from the mission. In order to combat the people called who killed his colleagues, the Protagonist’s boss points him to the secret organisation, Tenet, and this ends up with him finding Laura. Laura is a scientist studying bullets that have been “inverted” so they move backward through time. From then on, the pace of the film never really slows, and it ends up with the Protagonist tracking the bullets down and then he goes from one place to the next that ends up meeting with the main film’s villain. It turns out he was trying to create a nuclear bomb that would bring apocalypse to humanity. It’s a trope that has been done countless times before, the whole destroying the world trope / cliché, as it has appeared in so many James Bond films but its done in other films as well. However, there is a little bit more depth to it as the villain, Andrei Sator played by Kenneth Brannagh at least had more of a reason for it as he was dying of cancer. Sator also controlled his wife, he was of the mindset if he could not have his wife, Kat, portrayed by Elizabeth Debicki, then no one else could have her. I thought these two performances were not as strong, though I quite like the fact that they wrote Sator as an unsympathetic character in every sense. Sator does not have any redeeming qualities—he doesn’t seem to love his wife or son, and in fact at one point says he even regrets bringing a son into the world. Throughout the film, he has arguments with his wife, and doesn’t want her to leave him and is holding her against her will, which ends up leading to one of the best scenes in the film at the airport. While some people will be disappointed that Sator is totally unredeemable as there is this push to have sympathetic villains that even if you don’t like them you can at least empathise with them to a point where as some villains like Sauron, Palpatine, Voldemort don’t leave any room for sentimentality. Sator is more like that type of villain, though in a more bond type fashion. The film as it goes on though introduces a lot of sci-fi type elements with people going forward and backward, not quite described as time travel but it is like that in effect. I thought it was funny that the people using the tech had to wear masks because they can’t breathe inverted air, which is basically what most people in post-lockdown are doing, wearing masks though not as cool as the soldiers masks, it must be said. It then ends up with a final battle and a term called ‘Linear pincer movement’ to retrieve the bomb. The clock was clicking as Sator had a dead man’s switch that connected him to the bomb, so if he died the bomb would still go off. They used many of the techniques they had shown but on a slightly bigger scale with explosions and inverted explosions all around them. The shots in this scene as with throughout the film was pretty cool, from a cinematography point of view, the desert and broken landscape, and ruined out buildings were really well done. It doesn’t’ just fizzle out as some films do but this one ends well. The two best performances are from Robert Pattinson and John David Washington. It’s the first film I have seen either of them in but Robert was my favourite. He’s had a lot of stick in the past for the Twilight films—which I’ve never seen and don’t want too, but his performance in this was great. The charisma and banter between the two actors were on point, there was a sense of seriousness but also the humour. I never felt like Robert overacted at all, more subtle in parts yet that grit and humour all rolled into one. It never left me feeling, oh that bit of dialogue was cringe. It makes me look forward to seeing him as Batman in the upcoming films, overly optimistic now. They keep up the standard right until the conclusion of the film. The cinematography and special effects were also incredible throughout the film, yet also bizarre so there would be cars driving backwards, guns being pulled, that really made it a film that you have to see on the big screen. The music was for the most part great, though far too loud at times, when hardly anything was happening. They used clever cuts when explaining information in scenes, and then jumping along the story, it meant you did not have to have a scene info-dumping to each character that only pads the film out further. Of course, some people don’t like that type of style but I thought it worked well in this film. Sometimes I feel as though Nolan tried to hard with the whole sci-fi explanations and it could be hard to understand. In actual fact it takes a while to really grasp what was happening at all in the film, because it keeps the fast pace up throughout the first act of the film. Overall, I think the film deserves a solid 7 out of 10, and I can’t make out whether Nolan is insane or an insane genius. I do look forward to whatever else he has next to make in the near distant future.