Tenet is a por- and pre- kind of movie: portentious and preposterous. Poor-man's-Bond and pretend-deep. Lots of boom and bang & billionaire-y conspicuous consumption wrapped around a rod of pure Nonsense. I enjoyed it a lot.
It's a hard movie to discuss without spoilers, but I'll have a go. It's overlong. It drags particularly in its final act, a clonking battle sequence (actors filmed running backwards such that the footage can be reversed to make them look like they're running forwards through imploding smokebombs and rubble reassembling into buildings .... don't look like actors running forwards. That's just not how they look). The characters are so thin in terms of writing—and in some cases literally—you could use them as rizlas. ‘The Protagonist’, a beefy if generic John David Washington, is nothing but his superspy character, so disconnected from the rest of the human race that he doesn't even realise his best friend is his best friend until the end, and doesn't even boff the movie's, tall, rigyd no-Bond-y Girl (Elizabeth Debicki). Debicki's English rose is married to a villanous Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh, aiming for menace but hitting growly-chunky) who is Antag to our heroic Protag. The narrative is all twisty-turny plot. It's no spoiler to say: once you know the forward-backward timeywimey premise (as we all do, now) you spot the twists a mile away.
Given all that, it's remarkable how much fun it is.
Tenet is not so much high concept as ‘huh?’ concept. Were I to start listing, spoilerishly, all the holes in plot & worldbuilding, why then we'd know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Or a Kiev opera house. But you don't want the movie spoiled, so I won't. Not here. I may discuss a couple of the more egregious daftnesses in the comments: St Nemmoce (h/t) N.I. ses ‘sent fads uoiger’. Gee! Rome (h/t!) foe L. P. U. O'Cassuc (Sid). Yam? I ere (h/t!!) on't now, ios'd eliopse, I vom, eh, T T Nawt. Nod. U, oy! Tubes u ... oh a repo veik a rollah treblae htl lifot sekatt. I see! Lo! Hynam (woh!) wonk dew men mey H. W G Nidliubdl row & tolpni seloh, eh, t'l lay L.H.: Sir E Liops-Gnitsiltrat, sot, i.e. rewt (P. Ecnoch) ... uh: sat pecnoch G.I. hh cum ostonsi-tenet. Sit in (ufh ...) cum.
Wo!
Hel bakramers? Tit? aht! Llanevigy, awa' e lima St Siwte (h/t) tops u. Oy! wonodl—la—ew!—saes I, me (R. Pye) mewy emit draw k-cab (drawr of E.H.T. wonk). U! oy! ecno! yas ... O'Treil, ops on St Itolp.
Y? N? Rut ... y? 'ts I wtl la siev. It arrane (h/t Gator PC). I, or ehru, oot gat nasioh: wy? knuh cyl-worgg nittih tube-can EMR of gnimi, ah, ganarb h/t ennekh crag. I, lo! na is sursu on ally vaot dei rams, i.e. sorh silgnes ikci bed ikci bed the bazil ‘el rigyd no-Bond-y girl’, lat sei, vomeht f-fob nevet n' se odd nad, née H. T: Litnud neir f/t. Sebs ... I (Sidnei) raft. Sebs I, he, silaer ne vet'n se ode h/t a h/t e-car namu heh. T: Fotser (eh) t'morf de t'cennoc sidos ret-car ah! Cy (PS re puss ih tub). G-nih tons, I (not G-nih) saw diva. D. N. Hoj. cire neg fly feeb at sin ogatorpe h/t salzir sa mehte sud luocu (oyy!) llaretil sesac emos nid-nag-nit i.r.w. fos m'ret ninih to Sera's ret car ‘ah'ceht’. Kool? Yeh. T? woh! tonts u jst ahts draw'r of gninnurs rot cae kil koolag
The second half of this review makes about as much sense as the movie it notionally reviews. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, really. You gotta hand it, as I believe the idiom is, to Nolan for raising the evidently huge budget for this film on the strength of so bafflingly abstruse an original concept. And there’s a lot to enjoy, provided you silence that little voice that says ‘wait just a moment … didn’t you just say that … er ….?’ In many ways this film is a t-slab of blast.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Doesn't work, that one.
So, yes. SPOILERS. A mysterious somebody in the far future has invented a way of ‘inverting’ matter so that it goes back in time, alongside all the other matter that’s going forward. OK then. Bullets that have been ‘inverted’ leap from holes in concrete back into the barrel of your gun and so into the clip in its handle. You can, as if by magic, levitate inverted objects up from a tabletop and into your hand (wearing the needful lead-lined gloves, because inverted matter is hugely toxic and beyond-radioactive) provided you have future-already dropped it onto the table, see? But then, later, our heroes pick up and hoik about large amounts of inverted matter without gloves and without ill effects.
ReplyDeleteWhat does this state of affairs do to free will? How does it avoid the grandfather paradox? Both questions are asked in the movie, and neither answered—since the answer to the latter is ‘it avoids it by snapping neatly back into plot-place, which means negating any and all the narrative tension TENET needs to function as a thriller. When she realised what she’d done, Future Scientist, alarmed that her invention might destroy the world, made the ‘code’ that governs it into a physical rod of polygons and destroyed all other accounts of her process (what?), scattered the various polygons around the world (what-what?) before committing suicide, leaving her inversion technology to drift away safely back into the past. But if anyone could reassemble her magic curtain rod s/he could destroy the world, which is what Branagh does. But wait, even though the technology has been destroyed, there’s loads of it around, masses of inverted kit and materiel, big airlocks that swap people from forward-in-time to back-against-the-flow-of-time, so clearly the tech is well-known. When you invert a person they must wear a breathing mask and carry oxygen, because they’re lungs can’t process the other-time-direction air they’d otherwise be breathing. It’s not discussed, but do they have to bring their own food too? Presumably Nolan shied away from his characters sucking turds into their fundaments, adding nutrient to it as they rise through the gut and finally spitting it into complete meals.
"they're" >> "their" ... grrrrr
DeleteOne puzzling moment, to stand-in for many. So: halfway through ‘The Protagonist’ inverts himself to save the girl. There’s a forward-backward timetangled car chase and his car crashes. As Protag is trapped inside, Oligar-Ken Branagh sets this alight. Ah, but you see, because he’s inverted, entropy works in reverse, so instead of burning him alive the fireball actually chills him. Two things: one, so does that mean that Debicki’s Kat, inverted so she can go back and assassinate her evil husband, and walking around the decks of his yacht in a bikini, is actually freezing in the tropical heat? Why doesn’t she shiver? And how is it that Branagh’s ‘Sator’ (you see what Nolan did there? With his villain’s name?) doesn’t know that setting Protag’s car on fire won’t burn him? He knows everything else about the whole timeywimey handwaviverse, after all.
ReplyDeleteThe really interesting question: Why doesn't Kat need oxygen and does not backwards when she travels back in time? At one point TENET simply replaces the inversion thing with 'normal' time travel. Oh, And why does the fact that Kat kills Sator in the past not change anything about the present?
DeleteIsn't it that they invert to go back in time, before un-inverting to travel forwards again in their own experienced past. Not that I'm saying the plot makes much sense, but it does have *some* internal consistency
DeleteMy son expected me (as a physics PhD) to be able to explain the reverse entropy thing to him afterwards in Frankie and Benny's. Fortunately our pasta arrived so I was saved form that.
ReplyDeleteOn the whole I enjoyed the film and didn't worry too much about the science. It was more a problem that key bits of exposition were hard to hear over there background, so for example in the final battle I wasn't sure how close to failure they were and what it was that turned the tide.
Yes: maybe I'm getting old, but lots of the dialogue was, for me, swallowed by ambient crashes and bangs and the immensely hefty soundtrack music. I film to watch with subtitles on, perhaps.
DeleteWell: my PhD was in Eng Lit, so I bow to your expertise. But if entropy is reversed, wouldn't each footstep you take rebound as if your shoe-soles were coated in Flubber, until you were kangaroo bouncing to the moon? If "inverted" air refuses to interact with your lungs, why don't "inverted" photons refuse to interact with your retina? And thirdly: WHAT? WHAT-WHAT??
"I film" >> "A film"
DeleteI spotted "...l rigyd Bond-y girl..." in the second half and promptly spent far too long wondering why I couldn't read backwards and forwards from that point, before realising that the midpoint was actually way back at "comments". H'mph.
ReplyDeleteDunno about Bond, but Debicki was previously in _The Night Manager_, in which she played a young woman trophyishly married to a terrifying oligarch (played by a well-loved and instantly recognisable English character actor), who controlled her every move and kept her from seeing her son. I guess bad directors borrow, good directors steal.
You are much too kind to this shoddily made piece of crap. I know very few movies where pretension and actual execution are in such a glaring disproportion.
ReplyDelete