Of course, there’s been a bit of buzz about Nolan’s decision to focus the release on theaters—and, well, whether it’s even viable to see in there will at best greatly vary depending on where you are. Perhaps a compromise could’ve been to emphasize drive-ins, or what have you, and maybe when the current state of affairs blows over hopefully sooner rather then later, Nolan could consider a re-release. Still, safety comes first, and there are still places where staying in is still very much the better option. Either way, with precautions taken, I do hope to ultimately support the cinema experience myself, so here’s how this one turned out for me.
Overall? It’s not Nolan’s absolute best…but it’s still pretty darn solid. Much as Inception was essentially a heist movie with a high concept, this is basically a Mission Impossible/Bond yarn with time travel—sorry, inversion—thrown in. We follow a nameless Protagonist John David Washington who gets scooped up after a job in Ukraine to join a mysterious group trying to avert future catastrophe involving said time inversion, which leads him to go up against Russian arms dealer Sator (played with nicely chilling coldness by Kenneth Branagh). First off the bat, though, there’s not as much detailing of the mechanics of it through an audience proxy as there was in Inception—the Protagonist asks questions but there’s more ambiguity about it this time. If you found Inception hard to follow, this’ll likely leave you completely stumped.
But what I do most definitely like is the very deft genre-busting—we go from fourth-dimensional time shenanigans to suave and sneaky suit-clad espionage, to building-smashing action. For example, we have a car chase which starts off fairly standard…and then quickly escalates to crashes and vehicles happening in reverse, and once we start getting more context later, the whole meaning of what we just saw completely changes. It’s that sort of extra creative touch that helps make what would otherwise be a fairly standard scene in say Mission Impossible 12 or whatever feel all that much more engaging.
Of course, as often with Nolan films, it’s not really strictly the main character who has the most compelling plot or is driving things—here, Sator’s wife Kat, played by Elizabeth Debicki, who does have the more emotional stake in the plot. There is an emotional connection between her and the Protagonist set up, though it’s not the strongest one, and with how much of a bastard Sator is, to her as well as many others, you ultimately end up rooting for her more to kick his head in.
The other compelling supporting character is Robert Pattinson’s Neil. Combined with The Lighthouse earlier this year, I think it’s safe to dispel the Twilight jokes, as he does a decent enough job here conveying ruggedness combined with a nice coy sense that keeps you asking questions about his character. He takes to it with surprising naturalness in my opinion, far more than his admitted half-job playing Super Sparkly Count Punchable.
There are of course some faults—while I do like the time reversal touches, it will make some of the larger action scenes a little harder to follow for some, particularly the big assault near the end, where we have hundreds of extras about. Likewise, as you expect from Nolan, it is pretty po-faced, so apart from some one-liners, if you enjoy films with levity injected periodically, it also might also not do that much.
There’s also the issue of sound mixing that some have raised—and yes, there are some dialogue parts that are oddly muffled (like if someone’s wearing a mask, or speaking at a distance, but even so), though there’s only a handful of lines that are actually hard to decipher for me. On the other hand, at least in the theater I was in, the audio was very well done in the action scenes, and got my heart legitimately pumping—another plus for the cinema experience I guess. So while it’s not terrible, it is oddly balanced.
Still, overall, I enjoyed Tenet, and if you’re yearning for an action piece with more to it that rewards close attention, this is certainly a solid one. Apparently the CG was kept to an absolute minimum—which, if it was reliant on pure stuntwork on co-ordination, forces me to give absolute props to the co-ordinators and the direction. And it does pay off—Nolan’s action scenes always have a good bone-cracking physical punch to them; even something like the truck flip in Dark Knight has an impact a lot of the CG flurrying in other films simply doesn’t match.
So, I say check it out—but only if you feel safe enough. No film is worth compromising that after all. I did enjoy my theater experience with Tenet and I feel it should ideally be viewed that way, but if such means is far from ideal for you right now—and in many places it likely is—then waiting a bit for home releases is fine. Even so, once we hopefully see current situations die down, consider giving any re-releases in the cinema a watch. I do feel that films like this, which aren’t just remakes or more superhero/franchise tentpoles, with thought-out direction and presentation, need their due rewards, and while Tenet isn’t Nolan’s absolute best (I felt Dunkirk and Inception were just a little tighter), it does still deserve that as far as I see it. However you view it, I hope you’ll see why.
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