Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real-time.
Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker I greatly admire because he is one of the few directors in Hollywood who tries to shoot everything within his movies for real, with very little reliance on CGI. The opening scene of “The Dark Knight Rises,” where one plane captures another plane mid-air and then proceeds to hijack it, was all done utilizing mostly practical effects and real planes. Nolan’s insistence on filming everything as authentically as possible, as well as his visual perfectionism, means the audience will always be treated to a movie filled with wide-eyed spectacle because when you see an explosion or large-scale invasion, you can bet that all or most of it was shot using real-life special effects and because your brain can differentiate between what’s computer-generated and what’s real, even subconsciously, it lets you empathize with the characters onscreen as you know they are in amongst the action for real.
Like “Inception” before it, “Tenet” embarks on a journey where reality is never what it appears to be and can change at a moment’s notice, depending on who’s calling the shots, the good guys or the bad guys. As the story begins, The Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, has just escaped from a botched terrorist siege at an opera house in Kyiv in Ukraine that he was participating in. His job is to retrieve a man who has an unidentified object that he requires. The Protagonist manages to take down the terrorists keeping him under heavy guard and rescues the man and the object. As they try to escape, The Protagonist is almost killed in an explosion but is saved by a masked gunman who then disappears into the crowd. Outside, he and the man are betrayed by the Russians and the man is executed. Before they have time to torture The Protagonist, he swallows a suicide pill and supposedly dies.
Sometime later, The Protagonist awakens only to find out that the pill he swallowed wasn’t actually a suicide pill but gave the impression that he was dead. He is on board a ship and is told by Victor (Martin Donovan), an agent who works for a clandestine agency, that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is dead. He then proceeds to tell him that his organization is on a top-secret mission to stop a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a man who can control time and as a result, could start a temporal war. Before The Protagonist is sent to a classified facility, Victor gives him the word Tenet, telling him that depending on the people he comes into contact with, it could save his life, or end it. He meets a scientist named Laura (Clémence Poésy), who explains what is going on. Apparently, people in the future are facing extinction and they reach back through time to Sator and tell him that if they give him the ability to invert the entire world, it will reverse climate change, thereby giving their future back to them. He agrees but has alternative motives, intentions that could end the world.
The Protagonist meets Neil (Robert Pattinson), a man within the secret organization who agrees to help him on his mission. To try and get close to Sator, The Protagonist befriends his estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) and they form a friendship. He soon discovers that the unidentified object he was after at the beginning of the film, is one of nine parts of a yet-to-be-discovered algorithm, the element that could invert the whole world. Kat then informs him and Neil that Sator has inoperable cancer and is omnicidal and wants to take the whole world with him when he dies. Always one step ahead of their every move, Neil informs The Protagonist that Sator must be passing information to himself from his future self by using a secret weapon, rooms called “turnstiles” which warrant passage from one timeline to another and lets you move backward in time from the point you entered, essentially allowing two versions of the same person to exist simultaneously but they can never touch each other, otherwise, it would cause total annihilation. He is told that he needs to wear an oxygen tank when he becomes inverted as “regular air won’t pass through inverted lungs.” With this knowledge, The Protagonist, Neil, and Kat formulate a plan where both men try to stop Sator destroying the whole world in the present while Kat goes back in time to when she and Sator were trying to work things out but her underlying objective is to kill him if The Protagonist and Neil’s plan fails, thereby exterminating all versions of himself.
Some might find “Tenet” convoluted but for me, it wasn’t perplexing, rather, it was labyrinthine in scale and execution and very involved. I understood everything that was happening at the time but it was after the movie ended that I found myself thinking back to certain parts of the film and this allowed me to appreciate and grasp the sheer magnitude of what Nolan put on display. It’s been a long time since a movie had me thinking about it days after viewing it but Nolan always has a way of achieving that intention. The film is so broad and expansive that it demands your total concentration, even taking a five or ten-minute bathroom break could disrupt the overall flow of the story and you could lose the essence of the primary narrative. As I stated earlier, Nolan likes to shoot his movies for real, and in some scenes, watching people move forward while those who are inverted are moving backward at the same time, was spellbinding. There were times I couldn’t discern if it was trick photography or if the actors trained how to move backward while everyone else operated normally, this is something I look forward to discovering on the Blu-ray.
Nolan shot the movie in 70mm film and IMAX and the big action scenes are jaw-dropping in glorious IMAX. Watching the action proceed normally and then to have a car or truck move backward within the scene is completely breathtaking. The cast is impressive overall, but for me, Robert Pattinson steals the show. I always remember him as this skinny vampire in “Twilight” but here, he has obviously bulked up and pulls off his scenes with great aplomb, and I now anticipate his turn as the Dark Knight in “The Batman.” “Tenet,” for me, is a film that will get better with repeated viewings, so much transpires the first time around that you are bound to overlook certain aspects of the story and that doesn’t happen very often in films these days, so many movies spell everything out for you that it is refreshing that “Tenet” requires you pay attention so you can put the clues together for yourself. And remember, early on as The Protagonist tries desperately to understand what is going on around him, Laura the scientist says, “Try not to understand it.” In other words, just go with it.
Available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™, DVD & Digital December 15th
