TENET directed by Christopher Nolan (UK/USA, 2020)

Up till now there has been plenty to celebrate in the movies of Christopher Nolan. With his redefining of Batman as The Dark Knight and visually striking films like Dunkirk, Interstellar and Inception he has established himself as a director whose films are made to be appreciated on the big screen. Streaming may provide the same information, but the spectacle is lost.

Nolan’s are the type of movies that Mark Cousins, in The Story of Film, spoke of as transforming the viewers experience and expectations from the ‘want see’ into the ‘can see’. In other words, the action is not limited by what is possible but transformed and expanded into a world of limitless possibilities.

The release of Nolan’s latest move, Tenet, was delayed to coincide with the end of Covid-19 restrictions and the media has gone into hype-drive pitching Nolan as a kind of savior of the multiplex. It’s a pity therefore that it is easily his worst movie to date and far from being the masterpiece we had good reason to hope for.

In Tenet we are invited to be amazed by the special effects, to salivate over the jet set lifestyles, to swoon over the costumes, to cheer the heroes and to hiss at the villains. But here’s the rub, we are also expected to be totally confused by the bafflingly complex and frequently absurd plot.

While at its core ‘Tenet’ is a traditional good versus evil story, it also comes heavily loaded with impenetrable pseudo science and deliberate obscurity. “You don’t have to understand it, you have to feel it”, says a scientist to a scientist to a CIA agent (played by John David Washington). This seems to be the message to the audience too. Feeling is apparently better than knowing in this context.

Kenneth Branagh says he read the script more times than for any other movie he has worked on. He nevertheless confesses to still being confused about what it all means. He is not even sure if his character Andrei Sator is meant to be the out and out villain or not. Going for broke, Branagh’s heavy Russian accent is a parody of what evil has sounded like from time immemorial in one-dimensional megalomaniacs such as The Hood in Thunderbirds to Blofeld in James Bond. It should surely mean that his malevolence is beyond doubt. Aspirations of world domination/destruction don’t usually mean viewers have to wonder whether the motives are good or bad. Andrei Sator doesn’t actually say ‘I am the antagonist,’ but we know from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ what “them Russians” are capable of : “The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out of our garages”. This particular Russian wants much more than just our cars.

Washington declares himself as ‘the protagonist’ and looks suitably dashing in a designer suit to fit the bill as our conventional hero. But for all his style and athleticism, not having a clue about the motives behind his mission makes it is hard to engage with the set piece action sequences. Robert Pattinson as his handler, Neil, at least looks like he knows it’s all baloney and doesn’t much care either way how things turn out.

The female interest is Kat played by Elizabeth Debicki who keeps whining about keeping her estranged son safe from her estranged husband (Andrei) yet otherwise plods around like an un-maternal supermodel who has lost her Katwalk.

The movie is a serious let-down despite the dramatics of the obligatory action-packed opening scene. An audacious attack on an opera house leaves the viewer unclear who is terrorizing who and why. Establishing an enigma from the start is a staple of any action movie worth its salt; the problem with Tenet is that the whole movie is one big enigma.

I soon ceased caring how inversions differed from straightforward time travel and by the end was prepared to root for Andrei in his quest to destroy humanity as we know it. At least if he succeeded it would put paid to any threat of a Tenet 2.

I will still go and see whatever Christopher Nolan does come up with next. The chances of this being a James Bond movie seem quite high. Based on his track record, what’s the betting he makes Bond lose his memory and become a destructive rapscallion. Someone somewhere should have a quiet word with Nolan and remind that with the fate of the world and the future of cinema at stake we want our heroes to be heroic and our villains to be villainous. Surely that’s not too much to ask.