Remember the Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s? That puzzling toy was challenging enough. Then came Rubik’s Snake, then Rubik’s Magic, and meanwhile it’s like, “Whoa, I’m still trying to solve the cube thing!”
This is the experience of watching writer/director Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action thriller “Tenet”, the latest from the auteur of the brilliant “Inception” that’s both utterly dazzling and increasingly bewildering.
The trailer is here, take a quick look!
The globetrotting spy film covers some familiar bases – albeit with Nolan’s signature epic vision – starting with the far-flung locales, from the coast of Vietnam to an abandoned Russian town to an opera house in Kyiv, where “Tenet” opens with a white-knuckle mission and a test for The Protagonist (a sensational John David Washington). A new recruit to a super-duper secret organization, our hero goes unnamed because he is the audience’s point of view as we all get a crash course on time inversion. (It’s not time “travel” per se in Nolan’s cinematic science, it’s more about the connection between how some things move forward and others – thanks, entropy! – move backwards.)
Stick around to know more!!
The Protagonist (John David Washington), is an agent for an international undercover organisation who’s promoted during a new cold war (“ice cold”). “That test you passed,” a flunky tells him, “not everybody does.” We’re never told exactly what the test was, but the implication is clear: this is not a man who’d have trouble recognising an elephant.
Then follows the first of many scenes in which a supporting actor who may or may not have a background in nuclear physics blinks through 500 hours of exposition about how the future is attacking us with bullets that go backwards. First up is Clémence Poésy, who talks about inverted weapons and the detritus of coming wars so listlessly you want to giggle. Next, Michael Caine, who says: “I presume you’re familiar with the Soviet-era closed cities,” over steak and chips.
The world is more than ready for a fabulous blockbuster, especially one that happens to feature face masks and chat about going back in time to avoid catastrophe. It’s a real shame Tenet, isn’t it?
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