Tenet

 I went to see this with Russ last week. I was pretty excited about but...

1. Intro. When I was about 15 I was in a maths lesson. Mr Clamp had explained a problem - and solution - to the class and everyone duly started buzzing towards the answer. Except me, I didn't understand and became restless and disruptive, by way of trying to mask my own feelings of humiliation and confusion. 

I had forgotten that day for many years until watching Tenet last week. In an era of spoon-fed Hollywood epics, Christopher Nolan should be lauded for creating cinema that asks the audience to concentrate. Sadly on this occasion, his latest work left me thinking back to the last time I felt humiliated and confused: at least that lesson didn't end up lasting over an hour and costing me a tenner. 

2. Plot. I genuinely can't explain the latter half of the plot. But I'll have a stab at the first. 

An agent, known only as the protagonist, from some government agency, is part of a mission that goes wrong. He's tortured into talking about "the agency" and when he doesn't he takes a cyanide pill and ends it all. 

He awakes in a ship to be told that his teeth have been fixed and that he's now trustworthy enough to begin another mission. 

Far from being dead he wakes up on a ship and is given a new mission which his boss doesn't know anything about, all they have is a gesture and a word, Tenet. He goes to meet Clemence Poesy who is studying bullets that invert through time. She believes they were sent by the future, and there's a weapon coming that's going to destroy the past. 

- Reverse drama. It's a cool idea, and you would hope that the novelty of having elements happening in reverse is that it's doubly exciting! Sadly, it's all a bit meh. A bullet that travels in reverse is less interesting than a bullet that travels forwards: likewise a fight that happens backwards. When you think about it, the bit of drama that we take for granted is that we don't know what is going to happen, because it hasn't happened yet. If you know how a fight ends, is it interesting to watch it in reverse? How about a car chase that you have to watch twice, when you know what happens in the end at the beginning?

Vaguely, once, is the answer. Is it exciting to watch that vaguely interesting fight again later in the film? Not really. 

- Mission. The hope that the backwards nature of everything spills out even into the opponent's master plan. The mission is to prevent something worse than World War 3. What is worse than World War 3? Well nothing really. Tenet argues that what's worse than is all of the people on earth having never existed - thanks to something created in the future. But that's not really worse, because at least all the people that have ever existed have, at least, lived out their lives. While it may be technically worse, it's no where near as bad as an actual war, or even a child dying, for that matter. 

By midway, I'm in a fix, I've seen some cool stuff, but meaning has drained out of it. Many have pointed out that it's a palindrome, however that just means I have to see the same fights and the same scenes again, only this time I'm even less interested than I was the first time. 

- Editing. We're 20 minutes in by this point and I'm kind of not really fussed by this point. Not least because the editing is pretty breathless. If a film is going to be cut pretty fast, you really need to have some slow bits where things play out or things are explained to you. Otherwise, you kind of just skim along the top of it, titillated, but not exposed to anything emotional. 

Pacing. my brain doesn't have time to cogitate what is going on. One suspects this is a deliberate ploy, a way of  stopping the audience from fully stopping and trying to process what they're being told. It feels like a cheap con trick. 

- Plotstrain. Ultimately, this reversedness puts a lot of strain on the plot and gets more and more boring. The huge fallout is that there is no time to shape any of the characters so they all start to feel like idle tropes - and without characters being conduits for our feelings, it all feels a bit staid. 

- The Protagonist. This is most exemplified in the protagonist. Calling the protagonist, 'the Protagonist' belies the film's problem. structural, lack of empathy. 

Having him tortured at the beginning is a quick-fire attempt to achieve this. It may have the desired effect on others, but as I didn't know what he was fighting for in the first place, I struggled to care when he died. 

Likewise, I struggled to care when he awoke to find out he was not really dead - and likewise when he was told that his dying was the ultimate test of loyalty, and in turn that he was now able to go on a secret mission that even his boss didn't know was about. You really need a scene here where he's at least struggling with whether to continue, instead of, "good news you're not dead, here's a new mission on you go."

There's even an opportunity here when he's stuck in a wind turbine training, but the opportunity isn't taken, this is just a pause between more breathless movement. Without these scenes I really don't give a damn what happens the protagonist - he starts to feel a bit smug. 

A protagonist normally has a flaw that is addressed by the actions of the plot. Sam Neil, for example in Jurassic Park is a bit of a cynic and hates kids. Only fair then that he'll go on an adventure where he has to save some kinds and believe in something he thought impossible when he was piecing together bits of old fossil. The Protagonist isn't therefore, the protagonist. The plot doesn't change him. 

Nolan's not stupid - he knows this will be a problem - and indeed he tries to fix it by adding a kind of romantic interest, with a plight of her own. But the truth is that they're never actually romantically involved. The point of a romance is that they can asks question of a character that no one else can legitimately ask them: certainly your enemy is never going to ask you how you're feeling that day. But because the plot is so breathless the protagonist and the heroine never actually have any moment to actually talk to each other - instead they can only talk about the plot, in the hope that the audience can keep up.  

-  Pacing. Perhaps perversely, for a film that is long and dull, I'm left feeling that, if Tenet was two films instead of one, I might even if have liked it better. At least with two films you would have time to tease out and develop some of the characters, with half as much plot.  Tenet feels like an experiment to see how much plot you can fit into a movie with as little explanation as possible. The answer, sadly, is not this much.

- Conclusion:

Had I not been with a friend, I probably would have left after an hour. I watched the final battle, utterly disinterested, not to mention confused and stupid.   The final twist doesn't really land because I didn't understand what was going on. 

Critics, like Mark Kermode, have given this film far too much leeway, in a time when aficianados are dying to keep cinema alive. They say you need to rewatch this a few times to really get the most out of it. 

To which the natural reply is, should I have to? Don't you have to get pleasure out of it the first time to want to go back? Yes you can watch favourite films over and over without them losing interest, but you have to want to. You would probably have to pay me 30 quid to watch this again. 

This is important because part of Nolan's success is built on the rewatch value. But this is not Inception, where you knew what was going on, and a second viewing added texture and nuance. The thought of going back to rewatch a film that left me feeling stupid the first time round is not an appealing prospect. 

ENDS.