Christopher Nolan has built a spy thriller that runs in two directions at once, and the engineering is remarkable. What is missing is anyone to care about: the people are instructions in good coats, and the sound mix swallows half of what they say.
Christopher Nolan writes, directs and produces Tenet, a spy thriller in which objects, and eventually people, can be made to travel backwards through time while everything around them carries on forwards. Most directors would spend a whole film explaining that. Nolan spends a whole film explaining it and stages a heist, a chase and a war at the same time. The result runs 150 minutes and carries a 12A, and it is the most elaborate machine he has built. It is also the first of his films we found hard to care about.
The idea works best when Nolan shows it. In a customs warehouse in Oslo, a man in a suit fights a masked figure who is moving the wrong way through time, and Hoyte van Hoytema keeps the camera wide and level so that we can see all of it and check for cheating. There is none. A motorway chase later does the same with cars, and a saloon un-crashing itself across three lanes is the strangest and most pleasing picture Nolan has yet put on a screen. Nathan Crowley gives him hard, clean places to do it in: the freeport’s white corridors and turnstiles, a yacht that looks like a bank, a wind farm out at sea.
Ludwig Göransson’s score is the film’s engine, a low grinding pulse that never quite stops and rises to a siren whenever the film wants our hearts to go with it. It is often the most exciting thing in the film, and it is mixed so high that whole lines vanish under it. This is a film made of lines. When a man is telling us why the world is about to end and we are listening to a bass drum, that is a mistake, and it is repeated. Jennifer Lame cuts to the beat and never lets a scene run a second past its last piece of information.
The trouble is in the script, and Nolan wrote it alone. His hero has no name, no past and no wish of his own; he is called the Protagonist and behaves like the definition of one. Almost every conversation is an instruction. Barbara (Clémence Poésy) explains inversion. Priya (Dimple Kapadia) explains Sator. Crosby (Michael Caine) explains Sator’s wife. Neil explains what the others meant. John David Washington is a graceful, contained physical actor who carries the suits and the fights well, but he has been asked to play a job description, and there is nothing behind the eyes because nothing was written there.
Robert Pattinson is the one enjoying himself, playing Neil as an amiable public-school drinker who knows far more physics than he lets on, and the film brightens whenever he walks in. Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat is the only character with a want we recognise, her son and her freedom, and she plays her as a woman who has been frightened for so long it has settled into her posture. Kenneth Branagh gives Sator a Russian accent and a temper and little else. Dimple Kapadia is drily sharp in her few scenes. Himesh Patel and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are brisk and likeable as a fixer and a soldier.
Here is what we felt. When the masked figure first came through the turnstile and moved the wrong way, we sat forward; we did not know what we were looking at and we wanted to. Two hours later, in a final battle the film has spent an hour arranging, we caught ourselves admiring the timetable. Soldiers ran through a ruined town and we could not have said which of them we minded losing. We were not bored, and we were not moved, and the second matters more in a film about the end of everything.
Nolan has made time misbehave before and got away with it. Memento (2000) ran backwards and nobody was lost, because one man’s grief was in every scene. Inception (2010) had dreams inside dreams and a father who wanted to go home. Tenet has a man who wants to complete the mission, and a mission is not a person.
It opened in UK cinemas on 26 August 2020, and the size of the screen is a fair part of the case for it. At home the pictures survive and the plot gets no clearer. See it for the warehouse and the motorway, take somebody with a good memory, and do not expect to feel much until Debicki is on screen, which is not often enough.
