Senin, 24 Agustus 2020

Tenet blows its high concept with convoluted science and low emotional stakes - ABC News

If you haven't been in a cinema recently, experiencing the first scene of Christopher Nolan's Tenet will be — if not like falling in love again — at least like sitting down with a great friend you haven't seen in a while.

It's an all-over, tingling sensation of recognition and joy. Big-screen, balletic action joy, with cameras that wind like snakes through the back stage and cavernous auditorium of a Soviet-era concert hall in Kyiv, as squads of masked terrorists and cops — it's not clear exactly who's who because Nolan is already placing doubts in your mind — exchange machine gunfire.

For a film this highly anticipated, saddled with expectations to revive the global exhibition sector out of its coronavirus-induced hibernation, it's a running start.

The fact the scene also depicts a large audience and full orchestra gassed unconscious, oblivious to the battle around them, is an added layer of metaphor.

The deployment of gaseous substances — either to immobilise or to inoculate — recurs in the film. They are fed into air conditioner vents here, later they are deployed by canisters, and finally we see them dispensed through tubes into face masks, worn by all the main players.

There's something prescient about the way the film echoes our real-world concerns about the air we breathe, and there's a triggering anxiety in seeing heroes and villains with faces covered, literally waging battles in their own rarefied atmosphere.

A man walks away from an exploding car in the movie Tenet
Nolan says when making a film: "Everything is about that larger-than-life experience that we're intending to give the audience."(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

All this has to do with the film's concept of time travel, which allows people and things to reverse time while the rest of the world continues forward, a feat that can only be performed by humans with breathing apparatus.

The British writer-director's science is convoluted, but when someone in the film describes it like swimming upstream against the current, it's a workable enough metaphor.

The idea is first illustrated by bullets that travel backwards into the guns that shoot them. Later, explosions get sucked back into thin air, wounds heal and car crashes unfold in reverse (why people aren't moving like Michael Jackson moonwalking backwards across a stage is a mystery — don't think too hard about this. It doesn't pay to.)

Close-up of actor John David Washington seated, with two sets of hands holding him down, under pink-blue lighting.
Nolan says he cast Washington after seeing him in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman: "I was struck by his natural charisma."(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

The man who has to nut out this mystery is called, simply, the Protagonist (BlacKkKlansman's John David Washington). Soon after the concert hall battle, he meets a man in a grey suit on a boat in the middle of the North Sea, a typical faceless spy tsar who has "that chat" with his bewildered and physically smashed up hero. There's a new "Cold War" going on, he says. The future of humankind's survival is at stake, and the harbingers of doom are mysterious objects which appear to have been sent back from the future.

Are they warnings? Are they parts of some future doomsday machine?

Jack Cutmore, John David Washington and Robert Pattinson walk through a gallery in the film Tenet
Christopher Nolan got physicist Kip Thorne (who worked on his film Interstellar) to read the Tenet script.(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

Nolan seems to be channelling the reverse time travel ideas in The Terminator, though he's too portentous to make anything as brilliantly simple.

The Protagonist embarks on a fact-finding mission that sees him traverse the globe to meet some shady and illustrious individuals — from London to Mumbai to the Italian coast.

He pairs up with an eccentric English wingman (Robert Pattinson) to break into various buildings, steal precious artefacts and get information from villains at gunpoint.

John David Washington and Robert Pattinson confront each other in a scene from the film Tenet
Producer Emma Thomas says in casting Robert Pattinson, she and Nolan were excited by "how he manages to disappear into a role".(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

The film unfolds like a series of heists — the Mission Impossible franchise comes to mind — although the reversing bullets and other "inverted" objects from the future remain an element of arcane mystery.

As an action movie hero, Washington doesn't have the kind of tough guy self-possession you might expect. There's a wide-eyed quality to him, which belies the fact he's also capable of pushing back — verbally and physically — without fear.

When he meets an elder statesman of British intelligence (Michael Caine) who criticises his Brooks Brother's suit and offers to recommend a tailor, he tells him he'll manage and deadpans: "You Brits don't have the monopoly on snobbery."

Finding a good suit is the least of his troubles, though.

John David Washington and Robert Pattinson confront each other in a scene from the film Tenet
Tenet was shot using a combination of 70mm IMAX cameras and 65mm cameras to allow for high resolution.(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

In a conversation with one of the film's more hard-to-pin-down characters, an arms dealer played by the Indian actor Dimple Kapadia, she tells him he's one of many protagonists.

Ah Nolan. Of course. The director of Interstellar and Inception has a long-held grudge against boring, old linear reality and Washington's character is about to find out just how multidimensional life can be.

When Elizabeth Debicki turns up — a statuesque, beautiful and wounded femme fatale — it looks like we might be in for some old-fashioned doomed romance, too. Or perhaps some socially distanced, temporally challenged sexual tension. But if Nolan has this on his mind he doesn't really pull it off, even with a nasty Kenneth Branagh to complete the love triangle as her violent, jealous Russian oligarch husband and father of her young son.

Elizabeth Debicki in scuba gear on a boat in the film Tenet
Producer Emma Thomas says the role of Kat was reconceived for Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki after she saw her in Widows.(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

The Anglo-Russian couple is a particularly odious vision of domestic nightmare, against which Washington seems less a romantic way out, more like a guardian angel.

Whatever the case, it's not particularly affecting.

Neither is the buddy-movie friendship between Washington and Pattinson, laced with a melancholy foreboding.

The actor John David Washington crossing a London street in the movie Tenet
While they were shooting, the cast and crew had to constantly check their work against the film's "rules" around time and motion, says Nolan.(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

The film is too busy with fist fights in restaurant kitchens, high-speed shootouts on freeways, abseiling up buildings and 747s smashing into warehouses.

The obsession with megastructures and rich people's toys creates a sense of spectacle, from yachts with helicopter landing pads to deep-sea wind turbines and hydrofoil catamarans that levitate above the ocean.

Interstellar and Dunkirk cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shoots every hurtling piece of metal and human flesh in pristine 70mm celluloid to their full, kinetic action-movie potential, but as the film dives into its full-blown time travel conspiracy, the convoluted boffin Nolan, as opposed to the entertainer Nolan, slowly pulls the reins on the energy.

There's no hope of understanding exactly what's going on, and the audio mix — stuffed with Ludwig Goransson's thick tidal waves of strings and tribal percussion — often drowns out the dialogue that might have clarified a few things.

Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh in a tense scene in the film Tenet
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema says they adapted an IMAX camera so it could "run in reverse to achieve certain in-camera physics".(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

In general terms you realise salvation depends on securing an artefact, and Branagh is standing in the way. It may as well be a Marvel comic at this point. The film's nuances go missing in the audio-visual storm.

The final extravaganza of violence occurs in the kind of underwhelming but logistically practical location that filmmakers think can pass as the ruin of a Soviet city, and not a few concrete structures in an ex-mining town in California.

It's disappointing given the film begins so well, although Nolan is too conscientious to leave loose ends, and tries hard to satisfy the mind-boggling time travel arithmetic (fans for whom his Dark Knight films are a cinematic holy trinity will undoubtedly scour over the details on numerous rewatches).

Kenneth Branagh in a white shirt holding bars of gold in the film Tenet
Kenneth Branagh plays Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, who he says Nolan described as "an appalling piece of humanity".(Supplied: Warner Bros/Melinda Sue Gordon)

If Nolan had as tight a grip on the emotions of this story as he did the pseudo-science, he might have achieved much more, especially with Debicki and Pattinson as emotional levers on Washington.

Tenet is clearly attempting some kind of emotional payoff that remains out of reach. By the end, the idea of swimming against the current feels like a metaphor for the film itself.

Tenet is in cinemas from August 26.

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2020-08-24 19:07:00Z
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