Mission: Dark – “Tenet” movie review

Is it future, or is it past?

To avoid brutal death at the hands of fierce opponents of all sorts of spoilers, it is better to talk about the plot of Nolan’s latest work – Tenet – less than more. So I will only reveal that the stakes are very high, the destruction of humanity is at stake, and the nameless Protagonist (John David Washington) will try to prevent it – a former CIA agent, declared dead years ago. He will be supported in the mission by, among others quite mysterious Neil (brilliantly played by Robert Pattinson, who is still trying to shake off the yoke of Twilight ) and an equally mysterious organization – the title Tenet. On the other side will be Andrei Sator, a Russian oligarch, officially – a gas industry tycoon. In this role Kenneth Branagh, an Irish actor, as prompted by both logic and intuition.

In his typical style, Nolan immediately throws the viewer into the action, arranging the exhibition “on the fly”. From the very first minutes, a lot is going on, intense and loud. This has consequences. For while the events take place rapidly, we watch spectacular chases and fancy duels and precise spy sequences, the characters themselves are surprisingly sketchy. The plot is calculated with the pedantism expected from Nolan, but leaves no room for a single “heart”. I suspect that the emotional core of the story was supposed to be the plot of Andrei’s mentally battered wife and their son, but the characters are so papery and the stakes are so absurdly high (I repeat: really high) that it’s hard to feel so hard to feel sorry for them. Anyway, paradoxically, there is no time for that anyway.

But it was already …

It is impossible to resist the impression that Nolan has become, in a way, a prisoner of his own success and – having educated his audience to perceive storylines constructed in a specific way – he condemned himself to repeating the same motives and treatments over and over again. The subject of industry legends is, for example, the obsession with time, which is here the main narrative “gadget” (the protagonist faces opponents with the technology of “inversion”, reversing the course of time). The rules, which the director has been consistently adopting for years, he adheres to ruthlessly, not looking back at the viewer, who, moreover, rebukes the audience with the main character’s mouth: “If you don’t yet play on my terms, what are you still doing here?” The problem is that for Tenethave a good time, you should squint your eyes very hard. The film is full of exaggeration typical of spy movies (like Bond and Mission: Impossible ). The convention was probably supposed to make the fictional subversion in a form that was virulent to the masses – because it is still, after all, a blockbuster that is supposed to earn for itself. The icing on the cake is the arcydzielcharakter performed by the charging actor Branagh – because Sator turns out to be not only a conventionally exaggerated greedy with a God complex, but also (and here a slight spoiler) an anti-natalist worried about climate change. Losing, in the more emotional impulses, an Eastern European accent.

He pervaded

At this point, it could be considered that I hyperbolize, complain, and TenetI consider it an extremely unsuccessful film. Well, no – it is still a spectacular spectacle, and at the same time a skillfully and precisely complex puzzle (interestingly enough – composed, like the title itself, in the form of a narrative palindrome and a quantum paradox at the same time), which is still fun to put together. It is impossible to underestimate the tremendous work of the entire team. Pictures of Nolan’s permanent associate, Hoyte van Hoytema (a graduate of the Łódź Film School) enjoy the eye, the ears – the accompanying soundtrack from Ludwig Göransson, definitely less intrusive than Zimmer’s thunders. However, the choreography deserves the highest praise – not only of the fight scenes, but above all of the group fragments, in which both “ordinary” and “inverted” characters appear at the same time.

Ultimately, the screening ends with a slight disappointment. That’s still one hundred percent, maybe even two hundred percent of Nolan in Nolan. On the one hand, this guarantees a certain dose of innovation and originality, on the other, however, unfortunately, it is difficult to resist the impression that the director has already started eating his own tail in many respects.

Christopher Nolan seems to have finally fallen into a self-set snare, raising the stakes (and his own bar) to an absurdly high level. It turned out to be a very spectacular film, though overcomplicated and essentially… empty.

We invite you to watch the Tenet movie to the Cinema City cinema network all over the country.