Tenet

So this is supposed to be 2020's first great summer blockbuster.

I didn't take the offer to see Christopher Nolan's latest film, Tenet, during its theatrical release (there were some theaters open). So I waited to get the Blu Ray from Amazon to watch it. I know that Nolan's films make much more sense upon repeated viewing. But. Never. Was. This. Truer. Than. With. This. Movie.

The protagonist of Tenet is … The Protagonist (John David Washington). He starts the movie by foiling a terrorist attack at the National Opera of Ukraine. Our hero is taken prisoner and, one cyanide capsule later, is inducted into the Tenet Organization. Now let's see if I can explain this clearly:

The MacGuffins of the movie are objects with "inverted" entropy. We see our hero fire at an already shot up wall and the bullets return to the gun. They've been coming from the future. Tenet thinks someone is planning to destroy all existence with an inverted bomb. Mr. Protagonist and Tenet agent Neil (Robert Pattinson) are assigned to the case. Their Antagonist is oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). His abused wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) is willing to help our heroes. But whether backwards or forwards, the mains don't have all the time in the world.

Everybody got that?

Nolan's screenplay gives a full textbook's worth of exposition about time inversion and stuff. A lot of it would've been understandable had the sound mixing been better. The dialogue is often drowned out by Ludwig Goransson's booming score. And there's a lot of dialogue. A key plot point involves a fake Goya painting that Sator blackmails Kat with. How? It's easy to get lost after the third or fourth exposition lecture

It does get better when the action picks up, though. There's a heist at an Oslo Airport that involves crashing a live 747 into a hangar. That leads to an inverted fight with Our Hero and Neil against two of the same guy. They have a car chase in Estonia where they try to stop Sator from getting inverted Plutonium. And there's a spectacular siege of Sator's home base. These scenes show off the best of Jennifer Lame's editing. The international locales are splendidly photographed by Hoye van Hoytema. 

Let's devote a paragraph to the inverted effects. It's simply more than playing the footage backwards. There's some amazingly complicated choreography in motion. We see our heroes going forward while everyone else goes backward. In the same shots. The Airport fight scene is a perfect highlight. We even see clouds go back and forth behind the Protagonist. The technical prowess is the film's most intriguing part.

I'd normally say a blockbuster like Tenet needs to be seen on the big screen. But if your TV is the biggest screen around, so be it. The film is a visual marvel even if its mechanics are confounding. As I said, repeated viewings may help you understand the plot. Keep in mind that it's not an easy home matinee at 150 minutes. You may also get the published script from places like Amazon. I did.