Tenet

 

Gillipedia Official Rating: Blockbusters are back, baby

          Before Regal theaters shut down temporarily, I took advantage of the biggest screen—IMAX—and watched Christopher Nolan’s newest film Tenet. Anyone who knows me will surely realize how excited I was to see this film. Let me start off by saying this isn’t my favorite Nolan film. But just because I don’t think it’s his best work doesn’t mean that this isn’t an epically impressive, thinking man’s film people have come to associate with his work. There’s time manipulation, impressive action set pieces, and a whole lot of spectacle. It’s time to dive in both forwards and backwards.

          The less you know about this film, the better. Just so you’re not completely lost, the basic plot of this film is John David Washington (Denzel’s son and star of BlackKklansman) is the protagonist as a CIA agent who gets caught up with a Russian arms dealer played by Kenneth Branagh who has discovered a machine that reverses the way an object experiences time by inverting its entropy. It’s a little confusing, but a small example is that lil Denzel has a fight scene, and the other guy is fighting in reverse. If that’s hard to imagine, strap in because the film only gets crazier from there.

          As far as the cast goes, Washington is a great choice for the lead. An ex-football player, he has the suave of a country-hopping spy, but Nolan makes full use of his physicality as well as he dashes his way through action scenes. Robert Pattinson plays a mysterious but helpful side player, and if you’re still somehow someone that only associates him with Twilight and can’t wrap your spandex around him as the next Batman, you clearly haven’t seen his other work. Yes, this is him in another big blockbuster film, but he has garnered an impressive resume since his sparkling days and is a devoted actor.

          Branagh teams up with Nolan again after Dunkirk and doesn’t break new ground as the villain, but he’s solid overall. Elizabeth Debicki deserves a big shoutout for her performance, and Michael Caine even receives a warm sendoff. And I hope this is his last film too because he looks old in his film and needs to retire.

          As I said from the start, this isn’t Nolan’s best. But it is his most ambitious. Jam packed full of set pieces including one that includes crashing an actual plane, Nolan always knows how to impress. The fact that he uses practical effects wherever possible is how things should be done because the scale simply can’t be replicated through a green screen, and it’s a driving force as to why this movie needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

          From a technical standpoint, I truly have no idea how this movie was made. People familiar with past works like Inception and Memento will recognize that he played around with time back then, and he uses this film as a way to see how far he can push things. The visual effects and especially the storyboarding, and subsequently the editing, must have presented an incredible challenge. So as not to spoil anything, I’ll only refer back to the fight scene where Washington is fighting linearly while the other guy is fighting in reverse.

          This is a long film, and things move pretty fast between quickly explaining the rules of the reverse entropy machine as well as moving to new action scenes. You’ll have to take some things at face value and go along for the ride, albeit a little confused, for the first half. Once the second half hits, and particularly the final third, the story comes together in a mostly satisfying way. I wouldn’t call it predictable by any means, but you do learn to start looking for things to pop up. There won’t be any Shyamalan twists to shock you, but the final 20 minutes is an absolute joy to watch.

          There’s no Hans Zimmer for this film, and even considering the pipe organs he used in Interstellar, I’d say this is the biggest departure of what to expect for a score in a Nolan film. There’s some nice synth vibes that keeps the intensity going, and I’d be curious to find out if some of the score is played in reverse, but it’s nothing spectacular overall.

          I was a little surprised by the violence in this film. There’s hardly any blood, but there are a couple brutal moves that provide visceral moments in early fight scenes. I think it does fit and continues the theme of Nolan pushing the boundaries of how filmmaking is approached. If you’re fine being a little confused and having to focus for 2 ½ hours, you need to see this film. And if it’s possible to see this safely in theaters, I can’t recommend doing so enough. Having gone a whole summer without blockbusters and continuing to hear about all the delays for other films I’ve been looking forward to, it felt amazing to go watch this movie. I most certainly have a bias towards Christopher Nolan films, but this is another movie of his that I will absolutely have to revisit to see what I can catch on a second watch.

          Also, of course even the title Tenet works on a palindromic level for the film, and the only title I could come up with for a potential sequel is 2 Tenet 2. It’s a work in progress, okay?

 

In Brief:

I fully expect Tenet to be nominated for an Oscar for editing or visual effects because I truly still have no idea how this film was made. From both a technical and spectacle level, it’s mind-blowing.

Some of the previews were fun to watch simply to see how the trailers would say like “Coming soon to theaters in August.” Yeah, that didn’t happen. But the boost in sound quality in an IMAX theater got me hyped up even during the previews.

Since everything is delayed, I have no idea when things will be released, but it doesn’t seem like anything else big will be coming soon. Wonder Woman 1984 might be the next biggest film set to release? Anyways, it doesn’t look like I’ll be back at the theaters soon, but come 2021 and 2022, I will do my best to support films and theaters as best I can.