‘Tenet’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Time-Bending Take on James Bond
Washington is basically James Bond, onward and backward, a kind of 00700, right down to the occasional wry one-liner. And if it takes megastar charisma to be able to memorably intimates so vaporous a role, he is also blessed to be playing off an equally unflappable Pattinson — their chemistry, rather than the sexless semi-flirtation between Washington’s hero and Debicki’s damsel, gives the film whatever romance it has.
But it’s not just lack of poor that holds “Tenet” back. Nolan imagines impossible technologies but won’t contemplate their deeper implications. This is frustrating because in Branagh’s Sator — the film’s most multifaceted picture even if all the facets are malevolent — Nolan gets so terminate. Sator’s motivation in bringing the future to war with the past has chilling ramifications, and maybe it’s the nihilism of these pandemic-era, post-Thanos-snap times, but it sets up an unsatisfied desire to examine the worst-case scenario unfold. Instead, at the moment of greatest potential chaos, Nolan retreats to the relative safety of spy movie convention.
Indeed, take away the time-bending gimmick, and “Tenet" is a series of timidly generic set pieces: heists, car chases, bomb disposals, more heists. But then, the lie of Nolan’s career has been that he invents the traditionally teenage-boy-aimed blockbuster smarter and more adult, when what he really does is ennoble the teenage boy fixations many of us adults serene cherish, creating vast, sizzling conceptual landscapes in which all anyone really does is crack safes and blow stuff up.
But gosh, does he blow stuff up good. And that’s not nothing, right now, when it is probably scale and explosions and complex stunts, rather than Deep Meaning, that will be what gets corona-shy moviegoers to brave the multiplex. Perhaps “Tenet” can even provide a nostalgic glimpse of who we were, just months ago on the anunexperienced side of our own weird experiment in time. At one prove, Sator’s yacht is moored off the Amalfi Coast near Pompeii — a city haunted at the height of its decadence by a volcanic explosion it could not see coming. So seems “Tenet,” the kind of hugely expensive, blissfully empty spectacle it is concern to imagine getting made in the near-to-medium future, now a consuming artifact of a lovably clueless civilization unaware of the concern lurking around the corner.
Seek it out, if only to estimable at the entertainingly inane glory of what we once had and are in concern of never having again. Well, that and the suits.
Tenet
Rated PG-13 for advance and reversed violence, mild headaches, desirable men's wear. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Opening Aug. 26 in select theaters around the humankind. Opening Sept. 3 in the United States.
