Protagonist via the corridors of Nolan's storytelling. Both method, the quest shuttles us on a path of elaborately planted MacGuffins from India to Estonia, from the Bay of Naples to the infamous "closed cities" of Russia.
Those vary from the propulsive tumble of its fight sequences to the mesmerizing, carved-in-marble beauty of its stars, clothed in an infinite provide of cloud-comfortable, immaculately cinched suiting by costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and slicked in the oily gloss of Hoyte van Hoytema's black-and-blue lensing. As for what it's really about, "Tenet" locations any reviewer in a familiar bind with Nolan: What's narratively most interesting about it is strictly off-limits in any pre-screening dialogue.
Following the Kiev operation, Washington's stoically imposing character -- only ever identified because the Protagonist -- is promptly launched from the CIA and right into a shadowy, much less identifiable worldwide espionage group. A pounding introductory set-piece plunges us into a packed Kiev opera house because it falls prey to a terrorist heist, infiltrated in flip by an unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) to retrieve some manner of asset.
Yet this apparent prolog can be rife with clues and cues for later reference, as befits a film in which current, previous and future aren't all the time neatly sequential, however sometimes as swiftly reduce via as three lanes on a fast-transferring freeway. But the ultimate goal is Sator (Kenneth Branagh, wielding one other ripe cod-Russian accent), a bottomlessly evil oligarch who may or might not hold the world in his clammy fingers -- often raised in anger to his estranged however trapped wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a brittle art auctioneer for whom the script permits its Protagonist the bare minimum of feeling.
Protagonist early on, and whether or not Nolan intends it or not, this feels like strong recommendation for the viewer too. It performs best when it stops exhibiting us its work and morphs into the fanciest James Bond romp you ever did see, full with dizzy world location-hopping, car chases that slip and loop like spaghetti, and bespoke tailoring you actually need to succeed in into the screen and stroke.
The trick, after all, lies in that misty, sexy idea of time inversion, which is better seen on the screen than defined on the page -- though Nolan, as is his wont as a screenwriter, would not skimp on slightly stodgy, film-pausing explanations both. It's more convoluted than it's complicated, wider than it's deep, and there's more linearity to its kind than you would possibly guess, although it offers some elegantly executed structural figure-eights along the way in which.
Again, his musings are rooted extra in physics than philosophy or psychology, with the film's grabby hook -- which you can change the world not by traveling through time, but inverting it -- explored in terms of how it virtually works, not how it makes anyone feel.
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