Entering 2020, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was
just the summer’s most keenly awaited event movie. Eight apocalyptic months on,
it’s assumed the mantle of messianic cinema: a project aiming to blow minds,
make a bundle, and thereby save the theatrical experience for all mankind.
Beneath the parting clouds, there emerges a mere motion picture, screened in
London this week ahead of next Wednesday’s European rollout. What kind of
picture is it? Big, certainly: IMAX-scaled, and a hefty 150 minutes even after
a visibly ruthless edit. It’s clever, too – yes, the palindromic title has some
narrative correlation – albeit in an exhausting, rather joyless way. As second
comings go, Tenet is like witnessing a Sermon on the Mount given by a
saviour speaking exclusively in dour, drawn-out riddles. Any awe is flattened
by follow-up questions.
If you just want big, then Tenet
is as big as the world, a scale Nolan flaunts by traversing the planet twice,
in different directions. Within its opening half-hour, we whizz around Kiev,
where John David Washington is introduced heading up some sort of anti-terror
taskforce; to Mumbai, where Washington encounters intelligence officer Robert
Pattinson; then to London to dine with Michael Caine. (And one of Tenet’s
less appealing spectacles: an 87-year-old eating steak in close-up.) Later, we
head to Oslo, scene of a smashing great plane/terminal interface; eventually,
we reach one of those drowsy Mediterranean backwaters The Trip
showcased, where instead of Caine impersonations (too close to home), we’re
diverted by Kenneth Branagh doing his best Werner Herzog as Russia’s top arms
dealer. Ample consolation, in short, for all those holidays cancelled in 2020.
Yet if the characters incur no
jetlag, we soon do, a bamboozling consequence of Nolan’s writing withholding
even basic information from us. Who are these people? How do they get from here
to there so quickly? Why is Washington’s protagonist called The Protagonist?
(Seriously.) Not for Nolan the meat-and-potatoes plotting of lesser mortals.
No, Nolan trades in big-picture concepts, and his latest is tried-and-tested: a
device that reverses matter. Careers too, apparently. Tenet revisits the
terrain of 2000’s Memento with more money and a righteous,
state-sanctioned protagonist – sorry, Protagonist – who, in tracking and
repurposing that gizmo for good, masters the flow of time rather than falling
prey to it. An insinuating mid-budget noir has been punched up into a
bet-the-house studio actioner; interminably PG-13 shootouts and fistfights
replace those tangible, haunting Post-Its and Polaroids.
Since rebranding Batman, Nolan has
dedicated himself to fabricating these vast, clanking machine-movies,
engineered to generate a pulse-racing setpiece every half-hour, and the repeat
viewings that transform a $250m smash into a $500m or $1bn megahit. Despite
their claims to originality, there’s a formula at work: start with something
small – Tenet’s metallic timeflipper is barely bigger than the average
toaster – before constructing a headspinning conceptual and logistical
framework around it. The clanking here is partly intentional, composer Ludwig Göransson’s
cues doubtless honking the same backwards as they do forwards. But it also
derives from the way that tiny plot engine rattles around in the vastness of
everything else; these films don’t call for popcorn so much as they do packing
peanuts.
The hope is that the filmmaker can
bolster that essentially industrial process with flickers of heart, as he did
sporadically in Inception and even 2014’s hyper-clanky Interstellar.
Yet ever more caught up in his own machinations, Nolan now deploys actors like
spokespeople, appointed to field and deflect queries from his client base. This
wasn’t the case circa Memento and 2002’s Insomnia, where there
was an immediately recognisable complexity and frailty about his leads, but in
those days Nolan was still an artisanal puzzlemaker, rather than a businessman
and a brand; bigger budgets tend to remove characters of those qualities. Here,
he makes his none-more-desirable cast just about the least significant element
in the whole grand design.
It’s a particular disappointment to
observe Washington coached into beardy impatience, as if he sensed the casual
disrespect in being asked to play a character his writer-director hasn’t
bothered to name. (It’s possible he grew the facial hair while Nolan was
explaining the plot.) Pattinson gives tremendous fringe, but his absurd
cut-glass accent sounds a wise attempt to put distance between himself and
Nolan’s ever-deteriorating dialogue (“It’s just an expression of faith in the
mechanics of the world”). As Branagh’s moll, Elizabeth Debicki is here to look
good in deckwear and have guns held to her head; similarly capable supporting
players (Martin Donovan, Dimple Kapadia, Caine) offer gobbets of exposition
before being packed off to payroll. Tenet suggests Nolan no longer has
any interest in human beings beyond assets on a poster or dots on a diagram.
Where did it all go wrong? Deep in
the film’s tangled DNA, there are traces of an effervescent, boundless,
city-hopping romp. Turn time back! Reopen cinemas! Save the world! The set-up
invites comedy: a world spun on its axes, so that bullets return to guns, and
the rules of gravity are suspended. But there’s zero levity in Tenet:
Nolan simply reverses time in an effort to bring dead ideas back to life. And
if he couldn’t have envisioned Saturday-night moviegoing being among them, it
feels doubly sorrowful that a film striving to lure us all outdoors should
visit this many locations and not once allow us to feel sunlight or fresh air
on our faces. Visually and spiritually grey, Tenet is too terse to have
any fun with its premise; it’s a caper for shut-ins, which may not preclude it
becoming a runaway smash.
Unusually, before the London
screening, a studio representative invited us to attend a second screening in
the days ahead, and presumably a third, too, if we still hadn’t submitted to
the film’s cold, bloodless virtuosity. (You have to go to it, because a film
this sullen and unyielding sure isn’t coming to you.) That’s the strategy:
scramble the viewer’s mind so hard first time out they’ll pay multiple times to
unscramble it, making up those Q2 shortfalls. I wondered what’s really there to
untangle, beyond loops of string and a whole lot of smoke rings. Anyone ready
to obsess over a doodad on a backpack as they did over Inception’s
spinning top can cling to the illusion of Nolan as the movie Messiah. On this
evidence, though, he’s become a very trying, ungenerous, ever so slightly dull
boy.
Rating:
C-
Tenet opens in cinemas nationwide this Wednesday.
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