Tenet *MILD SPOILERS*

Year: 2020
Director: Christopher Nolan

* Mild Spoilers *

If you are like me and you like to see a new Christopher Nolan film totally cold without knowing anything about it, then please don’t read on if you haven’t seen this yet! I won’t spoil the plot as such but I will go into a bit of detail about the overall themes and some of the action.

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The first thing to say is that anyone who watches this and says they understand it all the first time is just lying. I don’t care who you are. This film just isn’t made to be understood on first viewing.

That might annoy you, and if it does then you might want to avoid this. But there’s actually plenty to enjoy even if you can’t get your head round it.

I heard that Christopher Nolan didn’t want to make a Bond film, but wanted to make a film that makes you feel like you felt watching the Bond films for the first time. Crucial difference. I think in that he has succeeded. I remember at the age of 10, 11, 12, watching Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker and kind of losing track of the plot, but it didn’t really matter as you get the gist of it. Some evil madman is trying to destroy the world and Bond has to fight and charm his way through a series of set pieces in glamorous world locations, including a big final battle, to foil the plan.

And that’s exactly what happens here. But with the added twist of…. time travel. You heard me. (Well, not strictly time travel, but… well, I’ll let you see for yourself). That adds a level of complexity that makes it incomprehensible. You literally get some scenes running backwards and forwards at the same time at different parts of the movie, and you have to mentally disentangle the cause and effect of it all to work out for yourself what you just saw.

It’s the most complex time travel movie since Primer. But even that (a strictly low budget, indie affair) had the advantage of knowing it would probably be seen for the first time on the small screen, with the advantage of subtitles and a pause button. You don’t have that luxury here.

On top of that, Christopher Nolan makes a bold choice. It’s almost as if he decided, “Well, no one is going to get all the backwards stuff first time round anyway”, so he figured there was no point conceding on the plot transparency of all the espionage stuff on top. So even that (formulaic Bond stuff like a forged painting, a rich madman, a nuclear test site, a mysterious arms dealer…) is buried in a haze of mumbled expository dialogue under some booming sound effects.

I was literally lost within the first five minutes. And the movie doesn’t sit still for a second, so you don’t even get a chance to relax and have a breather.

He is essentially just saying – Look, sit back and don’t try to understand any of this when you see it in the cinema the first time. You can watch it again on DVD and you can pick up the plot on the reddit boards.

That would be infuriating if the actual surface stuff wasn’t so appealing. The official Bond franchise always balked at appointing a black Bond, but here we have it. John David Washington is absolutely magnificent. He is good looking, charming and witty, has a bank of pithy one liners, plus utterly believable as a coiled spring of a fighting machine. There is a fight scene in a restaurant that is so well set up and executed you want to stand up and applaud.

Most of the action sequences are ingenious. The truck heist scene in The Dark Knight is remixed here, turned up to 11 and infused with jaw dropping tension. There’s a hair-raising bit with bungee cords that will have the Bond people smacking their foreheads wondering why they didn’t think of that. And the opening scene in the opera house (even though I didn’t really have a clue what was happening) is spine-tingling.

And all (mostly) done with live stunts and in-camera effects! This is action film-making of the highest possible quality. Nolan is a real craftsman, surrounded by a crack team of people at the very top of their game. The official Bond trailer right before this film looks a bit stale by comparison.

I apologise for continually mentioning Bond, but that’s a genuine and transparent influence running all the way through this. The first time you see Tenet, watch it like your 10 year old self watching a Roger Moore film, not even trying to understand the plot but just enjoying the escapades. Putting the pieces together can come later.

And unlike, say, the third Matrix film, I have a feeling this all DOES make sense in the end and isn’t just using vagueness to mask the plot-holes.

Roll on my second, third, fourth viewing…. fifth, sixth, seventh….

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Inception, Primer

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