Big-budget bravery… just when we need it

Tenet

Cert: 12A

2hrs 30 mins 

Rating:

Christopher Nolan is a brave, brave film-maker, and never more so than when it comes to his much-anticipated, oft-delayed new film, Tenet. He’s brave when it comes to pressing ahead with a brain-befuddling plot, often opting to elaborate when others might simplify. He’s brave when it comes to casting decisions, too, choosing a little-known African-American actor – John David Washington – as his leading man in a film rumoured to have cost some $200 million to make. He’s even put the willowy Elizabeth Debicki, already 6ft 2in in her bare socks, in four-inch heels.

But most of all he’s been brave about finally pressing ahead with the film’s release at a time when most big-budget movies remain firmly locked in Hollywood studio safes, waiting for better times at the box office. Tenet, however, is just what these difficult times for cinema need, and Nolan should be warmly congratulated – and thanked – for his bravery.

A film that effectively rewrites the second law of thermodynamics (that’s the one about entropy, if your chemistry and physics are a bit rusty) definitely won’t be for everyone, but, make no mistake, this is proper event cinema. Love it or leave it horribly confused, people – and a younger audience in particular – will want to go and see it, not least so they can take part in the debate. What on earth is going on? Hmm, we might come to that…

Explaining its style is easier. With Washington playing a deliberately under-established character known only as ‘the Protagonist’ who might – or equally might not – be working for the CIA, Tenet initially purports to be a pretty standard, action/espionage thriller with echoes of Bourne, Mission: Impossible and Bond, a franchise I’d love to see Nolan get his hands on one day.

But from the moment a bullet emerges from a rock and flies back into the Protagonist’s gun, we know we’re heading somewhere Messrs Bourne, Hunt and Bond have never been. Turns out the bullet has been ‘inverted’ – its entropy reversed – so that it’s travelling back in time. That makes it either the biggest threat mankind has ever faced or possibly the opposite, depending on your view. Which will probably change several times over the next couple of hours – I know mine did.

But who is behind all this lethally inverted weaponry and, indeed, with Terminator also coming to mind, when? Let’s just say the search involves an Indian arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia), a sadistic Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) and said oligarch’s beautiful but unhappy wife (Debicki). Meanwhile, the brilliantly staged, gun-bristling action – and goodness there’s a lot of it – shifts from Ukraine to London, from the Amalfi coast to Mumbai. Geography and spectacle-wise, you definitely get your money’s worth.

Like Nolan’s previous ‘high concept’ offerings, such as Inception and Interstellar, Tenet is a film almost designed to reward multiple viewings or, to put it another way, I was somewhat confused for most of the last hour.

But while my brain wrestled with ‘temporal pincer movements’ and a double helping of high-speed car-chases, what keeps you going is Nolan’s obvious sincerity (he’s directing his own screenplay), his love of real cinematic spectacle and his tremendous talent for staging it. Why use computerised visual effects is his mantra, when you can blow things up and crash them for real?

Performance-wise, a heavily accented Branagh is terrifying, Robert Pattinson – channelling echoes of Graham Greene, with a louche dash of Richard E. Grant – intriguing as the astonishingly well-informed Neil, while Debicki suffers from having a lot of screen time but not much to do. As for Washington, he’s a little one-note but certainly does enough to make me look forward to a well-signalled but as yet unannounced sequel.

Nolan’s courage has definitely paid off. Others must follow his lead.