Central Tenet

The ongoing COVID health crisis prevented us from going to see Tenet (2020) in the theater. That, and the fact that we never go to movie theaters, even when there isn't a damn crisis. We don't even pay for them on streaming. We wait until Netflix gets the DVDs. This definitely lowers the stakes.

It starts with the protagonist, John David Washington, who is apparently just called "Protagonist", going into a hostage situation: Terrorists have taken over an Eastern European Opera House. Prot is part of a group going in in the uniform of the state police, but actually not. Inside, they fentantyl gas the audience (like in Moscow 2002 - it didn't work that great that time...) and start fighting. Washington meets up with someone who is moving strangely, and seems to suck a bullet out of a seat and into his gun - killing the guy in between.

After some contretemps, Michael Caine inducts Washington into Tenet, an organization based on the secret of time-reversal. He is shown several bullets that move backwards in time: They roll around on the table and then jump up into your hand. He gets sort of swishy Robert Pattinson as a handler, and a mission: To get the guy who has the McGuffin. To do that, they need to get at his wife, Elizabeth Debicky. To do that, they need to get a Goya drawing out off a Freeport storage facility...

So we're a little ways into this time-travel movie, and we find ourselves in a heist film. Here's where I am scratching my head, but, you know, it's pretty good for a heist film, so I'm rolling with it. Then a time reversed guy comes through the door and there's a big fight scene, with one guy going backwards in time, and the other going forward.

First of all, this is quite a cinematic trick. And --SPOILER-- you get the same scene later, but from the point of view of the guy going backward. I'm pretty sure this effect is the reason Christopher Nolan made this movie. Unfortunately, at least for me, watching for the first time, it just barely works. Like the Michael Bay Transformer movies (I've heard), the cutting/editing makes it too hard to follow the awesome action, so you never really quite get what's going on - except ACTION!

It isn't as bad as all that - I actually like the action. Nolan is a good director, I guess. He also got some good actors in small parts (Kenneth Branagh is the big bad). He gets a solid performance out of Washington, although he's kind of a cypher - he doesn't even get a real name. 

So this was far from our idea of Nolan's best movie. It wasn't as clever or as personal as Memento, or iconic as the Batman movies. I kind of felt the same way about Inception - looks good, nice gimmick, hollow in the center. But it turns out I kind of like that kind of movie. So no complaints - at least I didn't see it at a theater