Tenet - it's the same forward and backward. Is your mind blown yet?

Tenet was supposed to be last year's blockbuster, but here I am paying £4.99 to watch on Amazon Prime rather than 5 mins up the road at Cineworld.  As to if the Covid pandemic has changed cinema forever - the jury is still out.  The distribution company behind the new James Bond film are holding on to their product until crowds are allowed back at the big screen.  There's a chance that'll soon look like the last throw of the dice of an outdated era, as home cinema distribution becomes the new normal.  Only time will tell.

Time eh?  He segues neatly into the film.  Tenet probably works better the less you know about it, but I want to do a bit of a deep dive into it here so following this paragraph I'm going to liberally drop the spoilers.  Suffice to say that time is a big component.  John David Washington plays The Protagonist (literally - that's all we get) in Chris Nolan's latest epic exploration of shifting time, reference frames and non-linear story-telling.  Go in with an open mind, and expect to have a conversation afterwards.

Spoiler time.  We are dropped into the middle of a storyline, but from the point of view of us and The Protagonist this is the start.  The drama unfolds as The Protagonist slowly comes to understand that he in the central actor in a potential apocalypse playing out both forwards and backwards in time.  This is titillatingly interesting; but though Tenet is very clearly smart, it has no heart. The film constantly tells its audience about its drama, rather than showing it.  The biggest example of this is probably that we are introduced to the central antagonist - a Russian-accented Kenneth Branagh who is a bad man.  But we never see why he is bad.  We are told he is terminally ill and so wants to end the world, but we never see any visualisation of it.  We are told, not shown.

With no heart to it, one is drawn into picking at the threads of the multi-directional storytelling.  Nolan has proven himself an expert at using this sort of temporal multi-layering in much of his other work, but Tenet tends towards technobabble and far too often resorts to explaining its own smartness to the audience.  There are reams of material online nit-picking the film's internal logic to death.  I have had a go myself but I don't want to get into that here.  I'm happy to accept an extremely high level of internal illogic if it works in service of the story, but the primary purpose of Tenet is to be smart - and only then tell a story.  This is the biggest criticism I can lay at the film, as it actually makes it boring.  It must have taken a lot of smarts to construct 10-minute battle sequence in which half of the combatants are actually travelling backwards in time - kudos to the production team.  But I just didn't care what was happening.  No heart.

So how could the film be better?  For a start whoever was mixing the sound could get off their elitist high horse and mix a version that's suitable for home-viewing.  An easy win would be to fix the sexual politics.  Cat (Ken Branagh's wife) exists to be saved and delivers a cringing "won't someone please think of the children" line.  The Indian lady who tells us all about the future apocalypse war could have been revealed as the actual scientist from the future who invented all this crap that's going to kill us.  Maybe she could have been on a mission to come back and save us?  Mostly though just take out all the technobabble that Robert Patinson delivers, and show-don't-tell.  It's maddening that a part-time film blogger with zero followers should need to point this out to one of the most successful film-makers of the last 20 years.  Whatever.

Ultimately Tenet is Cowboys and Indians with time travel.  It's trying to be clever more than it's trying to tell a story; and it suffers hugely as a result.  If you want a real arthouse time travel film - watch Primer.