The sign of a great film is one you want to see again, says Simon Morris. So how does Christopher Nolan’s latest Tenet measure up?
If you want to tangle audiences up in knots, there’s no business like the time travel business. And there’s no-one who does it like British writer-director Christopher Nolan.
Photo: Supplied
From the time-games of Interstellar and the dreams within dreams of Inception, right back to Memento where he told the story backwards, Nolan can’t leave time alone.
His latest, Tenet – like its name - reads the same backwards and forwards.
Generally, I pride myself in not getting lost in a Christopher Nolan film until at least halfway through.
OK, I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of mystery going in – like a terrorist attack on a classical concert in Moscow, countered by American troops pretending to be Russians. Hey, why not?
Our hero is captured but avoids questioning by taking a suicide tablet.
He wakes up – he’s star John David Washington, so of course he wakes up – to be greeted by Martin Donovan in that thankless role, Basil Exposition.
It turns out the Battle of the Opera House was a test. An incredibly elaborate, costly test to see how brave and patriotic our man is.
I call him Our Man. John David Washington – son of Denzel Washington – doesn’t actually have a name in Tenet. But he does have a mission, - to prevent World War III.
That’s the sort of thing Nameless Heroes have been doing since the days of 007.
But it’s not as easy as this. Is there a nuclear holocaust on the horizon? No, something worse. Something involving time travel.
And when I say “something involving” you know I mean, something incomprehensibly entangled, where ratbags from the future are invading the past. Like Terminator – but doing it backwards.
That’s right; one time line goes this way, the other goes that way. We’re going to need some help.
One thing Nolan can do is rope in a particularly attractive cast.
Aside from Clemence Poesy, we’re joined by Robert Pattinson as a mysterious sidekick, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as an even more mysterious sidekick, possibly from the future, and of course Nolan regular Sir Michael Caine.
As always with Caine in a Nolan film, you wish there was rather more Michael and rather less film.
Time to introduce the villain – another Nolan regular - Sir Kenneth Branagh as a dodgy Russian billionaire with a hotline to the future, and a troubled wife - the gorgeous and statuesque Elizabeth Debicki, who’s worth watching in anything.
The idea of time running both forward and backwards is bad enough. I defy anyone to watch an action sequence in two time-directions at once and not get confused. Even when it happens again later in the film from the other direction.
I know. That sentence makes no sense to me either and I wrote it.
So, since I’d basically been cast adrift from the narrative at this stage, I looked out for other things to divert me. Of which there are surprisingly many.
Nolan may be too clever by several halves, but he knows how to stage a scene and fill it with interesting characters.
Pattinson and Washington as the two time-traveling buddy cops are surprisingly likeable, as are Poesy and Debicki with rather less to do.
And I’d like to put a word in for an actress with the best name since Tuppence Middleton last year, Bollywood star Dimple Kapadia.
Kapadia plays anti-heroine Priya, whose job is to confuse Our Nameless Hero. If ever there was a job that didn’t need doing…
So, I watch the cast doing whatever they’re doing throughout Tenet and relish the scale of the action. I can’t remember when I last saw such gigantic, big budget action on a big screen. March? Christmas?
But even halfway through, not only was I not remotely tempted to see Tenet again sometime in the future, I was starting to regret having to see the rest of the film even once.
As Tallulah Bankhead once said about an equally hollow experience – there’s rather less here than meets the eye.
