But the final word target is Sator (Kenneth Branagh, wielding another ripe cod-Russian accent), a bottomlessly evil oligarch who could or might not hold the world in his clammy fingers -- usually raised in anger to his estranged however trapped wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a brittle artwork auctioneer for whom the script permits its Protagonist the bare minimum of feeling.

Allied with flip, knowing English handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), about whom we be taught little however his cool knack for working an upturned blazer collar, he is set on a mission that is variously described as stopping World Struggle III and saving the world altogether -- such generically high-stakes aims that you cannot assist questioning if Nolan is taking us, and indeed his bemused Protagonist, for a experience.

As much verbiage as Nolan devotes to unpicking his jazziest concepts, the pleasure is all of their cinematic illustration: The film's eerie photos of bullets hurtling backwards by way of inverted air (the detritus of a coming warfare, we're told) are more putting than the neat idea behind their trajectory. Protagonist early on, and whether Nolan intends it or not, this feels like solid recommendation for the viewer too.

It performs greatest when it stops displaying us its work and morphs into the fanciest James Bond romp you ever did see, full with dizzy global location-hopping, automotive chases that slip and loop like spaghetti, and bespoke tailoring you truly want to succeed in into the screen and stroke. Written this fashion, the setup sounds like commonplace-situation Ian Fleming stuff. Either approach, 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.

Protagonist by the corridors of Nolan's storytelling. The sheer meticulousness of Nolan's grand-canvas motion esthetic is enthralling, as if to compensate for the stray unfastened threads and teasing paradoxes of his screenplay -- or perhaps merely to underline that they don't matter all that a lot. It is extra convoluted than it's advanced, wider than it's deep, and there's extra linearity to its type than you would possibly guess, although it gives some elegantly executed structural determine-eights along the way in which.

Right now, as it belatedly crashes a dormant global release calendar, it seems one thing of a time inversion in itself. The trick, of course, lies in that misty, sexy idea of time inversion, which is healthier seen on the display screen than explained on the page -- although Nolan, as is his wont as a screenwriter, does not skimp on barely stodgy, film-pausing explanations both.

As for what it is truly about, "Tenet" places any reviewer in a well-known bind with Nolan: What's narratively most attention-grabbing about it's strictly off-limits in any pre-screening dialogue. Following the Kiev operation, Washington's stoically imposing character -- solely ever recognized as the Protagonist -- is promptly launched from the CIA and right into a shadowy, less identifiable international espionage group.

A pounding introductory set-piece plunges us into a packed Kiev opera house as it falls prey to a terrorist heist, infiltrated in turn by an unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) to retrieve some manner of asset. Yet this obvious prolog is also rife with clues and cues for later reference, as befits a movie wherein current, previous and future aren't all the time neatly sequential, however generally as swiftly cut by means of as three lanes on a fast-moving highway.