Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is the only really big movie to soldier through the pandemic and be released in cinemas during the most lucrative time of the year. Others like Black Widow, No Time to Die and Mulan all were either pulled back to later in the year or released on a streaming service. Rightly or wrongly, Tenet went ahead with its release with many cinema chains banking on Nolan being so in demand people (some) will go out to their trip first cinema in half a year.

It’s certainly a film made for the cinema with a huge screen and deafeningly loud speaker system. Nolan’s epic sense of scale benefits from the larger screen and using a smaller screen will diminish these effects and make some of its problems even more pronounced. Even though I think the score is obnoxious, headache inducingly terrible its impact is made ever the stronger from being inside a cinema. In general, I do think some of the sound mixing doesn’t quite work. I can appreciate the effect it is trying to induce but it’s almost impossible to catch snippets of dialogue amongst the loud score.

Tenet seems a better film to look at rather than listen to. The script is written in a way that every line of dialogue works towards advancing the plot or the idea of reversed/inverted time. Everything is exposition almost as though robots are talking to each other rather than human beings. It’s a script loaded with needless exposition where characters explain things like Freeports or the fact that Russian arms dealer Andre Sator (a hammy and menacing Kenneth Branagh) is a Russian arms dealer dealing weapons. These are all things that the characters should already know, but the film feels it needs ham-fistedly explain these things to the audience.

Essentially it leaves the characters no room to flourish, they feel as though they are mere cogs in a machine geared for a greater purpose. Tenet is certainly epic cinema but its emotionally lacking, devoid of personality or character. Thereby it makes for an epic experience, with the staggering action set pieces, the sense assaulting soundtrack and time bending, wibbly wobbly timey wimey narrative stuff but one that’s lacking emotional substance (unlike Interstellar where Nolan was also giving total free reign).

That said Elizabeth Debicki does try to bring some emotional weight to her role. She is the only character we know anything about as she suffers in an abusive relationship and the Protagonist (John David Washington) sees it as his duty to protect her from her psychological and abusive husband. All Debicki’s work is undone by a script that makes her role defined entirely by the men of the film. Another issue is Ludwig Göransson’s score which blares obnoxiously during a scene where she is being beaten by her abusive husband (in a grossly tasteless use of music during a brutal scene) .

It’s a great film to watch and you want to see where it goes (even if the film isn’t as smart as it thinks it is) but I do think that is actually the least rewarding and least substantial of Nolan’s films.