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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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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