After sabotaging a siege of a Kyiv opera by Russian terrorists, a CIA agent is tortured by them. He takes a suicide pill, but is saved by the CIA, who recruits him into a new team, “Tenet”. In the opera, they found a device that can invert time on objects: for instance, a bullet is fired in reverse. The agent is ordered to find out who is behind this, and he tracks down Russian oligarch Sator. It turns out that in the future, a scientist invented a device called Algorithm which can reverse time in objects, but she was affraid it will be used as a weapon and thus dismantled it in nine parts and hid it in different locations back in time. Sator accidentally discovered a part of it, and has been in contact with the Agency from the future, which wants him to leave the Algorithm in an underground bunker, where they will find it in the future. They also want him to invert the entropy of Earth, destroying CO2 civilization in order to prevent global warming in the future. The agent and his friend Neil lead a team which stops this, while they also save Sator’s wife Kat.
Christopher Nolan wanted to make his own James Bond-like spy film, but managed to actually shoot above this goal and deliver a big budget rarity: a philosophical action film. Unlike the poorly conceptualized “Inception”, and to some extent even “Interstellar” due to its illogical last act, excellent “Tenet” is (almost) consistently thought out from start to finish, and is a joy to watch: it is mysterious, suspensful, esoteric. John David Washington is too brutish at first, yet he compensates later on due to the tight events that happen to him, whereas Robert Pattinson is the real surprise here, giving a competent performance. Several sequences are isolated pieces of ‘tour-de-force’ on their own, such as the brilliant heist attempt in which the team throws gold bars on the airport tracks as a diversion and then simply crashes a vault with an airplane (!) plowing through a building, while the protagonist and Neil hold their breath to try to steal an item inside the sealed off room filled with a special gas that was activated due to a fire alarm. But the time reverse concept is the most fascinating aspect of the film, since some of these scenes are so unique, disorienting, scary and eerie that they almost seem as if something haunted is happening.
One example is the car chase on a highway near Tallinn, in which the agent and Neil are terrified when they hear someone starting to talk in reverse, and then a flipped car unflips, turns and starts driving in reverse towards them, since it is in inverted time. The effect is memorable. The sole sequence where the agent is inverted himself, and exits near a port where seagulls are flying backwards and a ship is sailing in reverse, is so magical it sends shivers down the spine. The finale is also great, involving a genius tehnique of a “temporal pincer” since one team is attacking in real time, and the other in inverted time, culminating in a virtuoso moment where a destroyed building “unexplodes” and assembles itself again into a whole, but is then shot and explodes again in real time — you really have to direct such a complicated scene. Nolan is once again weaker in creating characters, who are again lifless, dull, whereas his dialogues are again stale, and some of his tendencies to always insert a plot twist leads to two major plot holes that somewhat weaken the storyline: one is the identity of the masked attacker; the other is the villain Sator’s motivation for doing all this, which is personal and suicidal, and thus one wonders why anybody would fight for his folly when they themselves would be killed? Nonetheless, “Tenet” is a dazzling and wild experience, and a secret allegory on trying to get a grip on your destiny and take control in your life.
Grade:+++
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