Direction: Christopher Nolan
Country: USA
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet gets off to an intriguing start when a loyal CIA agent, merely referred as The Protagonist (John David Washington), is recruited by an obscure organization to save the world from the hands of an abominable Russian oligarch, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). A war world with calamitous consequences is about to happen, and in order to accomplish his time-travel mission, our hero will count on Sator’s aesthete wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a hired handler, Neil (Robert Pattinson), and a fixer, Mahir (Himesh Patel).
The film, which took Nolan nearly two decades to develop and put together, has its thrilling moments but the plot is an intricate house of cards that proves too ambitious for its own good. The inverted time concept with occasional overlaps induces an intrinsic complexity that makes the story feel derivative and unexciting. Hence, the constant back and forth in time becomes fatiguing as the mission proceeds.
This is unmistakably Nolan in his love for highly layered tales and puzzling structures (remember Memento and Inception?), but this time he overstuffed the plot to the point of not making much sense out of it. Moreover, Ludwig Göransson’s (Black Panther; Creed) ominous score often feels intrusive while Washington's performance is not as sharp as in BlackKklansman.
We are told in the film that the word Tenet will open the right doors but also some wrong ones. Well, Nolan seemed to have open the wrong ones for this mediocre espionage sci-fi thriller.
