12 September 2020| New Scientist | 31Film
Tenet
Christopher Nolan
In cinemas
BULLETS racing towards guns,
not from them; dust explosions
deflating back down into the
solid earth. This, Tenet’s writer
and director Christopher Nolan
assures us, is time inversion.
It is absolutely not time travel.
Nolan has been peculiarly
insistent that Tenet, which is
visually thrilling, superbly acted and
emotionally empty, isn’t about time
travel, but about inversion of the
time stream, causing material to
run backwards instead of forwards.
The thing is, Tenet is actually
very much about time travel. Yes,
there are backwards bullets and
inverted fight scenes so inventively
choreographed that they are
impossible to describe, but people do
also go back in time to try to ward
off some kind of third world war.
If that isn’t time travel, then what
is? Saying that it isn’t seems to be
Nolan’s way of telling us that this
isn’t some kitsch flick for Back to
The Future fans, but a serious film
grounded in theoretical physics.
Reminiscent of the time dilation of
Nolan’s 2014 grand space odyssey
Interstellar, Tenet’s inversion
concept draws on the idea that
time reversal is technically possible.
For the first hour or so, this
doesn’t matter much, because until
the midpoint Tenet is basically just
a Bond film on steroids. John David
Washington plays a secret agent
named simply “The Protagonist”,
who bungee-jumps off apartments
in Mumbai, orchestrates a 747
crash and attends exposition-heavy
ballistics meetings with a physics
whizz played by Clémence Poésy.
Poésy explains about those
backwards bullets and the “detritus
of a coming war” that she keeps
finding and has presumably been
sent back from the future, before
helpfully reassuring her confused
audience, “Don’t try to understand
it. Feel it.” She doesn’t really look
like she understands it all either.
The Protagonist joins forces with
louche British spy Neil, played by
Robert Pattinson, and together they
set about disrupting the inevitably
malign ambitions of Kenneth
Branagh’s heavily accented Russian
arms dealer, doing something with
plutonium and absolutely not time
travelling. They do go back to a
previous moment in time through
an inversion turnstile to help the
arms dealer’s abused wife Kat,
played by Elizabeth Debicki.
But that definitely isn’t time travel,
just inverting time so that they
are in the past. Totally different.
Tenet’s biggest issue isn’t actually
that its “temporal pincer” plot
(a temporal pincer is a... no, never
mind) is a little heavy on theexposition and yet still head-
spinningly difficult to understand.
All that feels somewhat displaced
by the rush of the car chases, the
pounding score, the yachts and the
stunning sets. As a blockbuster to
reopen cinemas, Tenet is great fun.
The problem is that it has no real
heart. Nolan often bends time to
his will, but usually with a narrative
anchored in love. In Inception,
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character's
longing for his wife underscores
the dreamworld compression
of time; in Interstellar, Matthew
McConaughey’s brief absence in
space as his daughter ages decades
in Earth years moves us beyond
the spectacle and the science.
In Tenet, however, the emotional
development seems secondary.
The stakes, despite the coming
apocalypse, never feel that high.
Tenet is slick, solid big screen
entertainment, but it will not,
as its characters ask repeatedly
of each other, cause anyone to
look at the world in a new way. ❚Francesca Steele is a freelance
writer based in LondonRobert Pattinson (left)
and John David
Washington in TenetMELINDA
SUE^ GORDONReversing time
Christopher Nolan’s new film twists time in a fun way,
but it is head-spinningly hard to grasp, says Francesca Steele
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