Tenet Review: Immaculate complexity.

Christopher Nolan has been romancing with time or its elements for quite a while. Deepening his fascination with the workings of time, Nolan crafts out an espionage-thriller which is layered with twisted and complex ideas – Tenet.

Tenet is a protagonist’s journey on a mission, which is set to unfold something beyond real-time to save humanity through a twilight world with just one word – Tenet. Nolan is quite like comprises of three parts, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. In Tenet, Nolan introduces an ordinary espionage thriller (the pledge), takes the ordinary and turns it into an extraordinary something with his concept of time-inversion (the turn), and ties the loose ends in the film, with his grounding elements (the prestige).

Executing his nuanced idea is the part we all focus on, but do we? Okay, I might be reading too much into this, but we want to get fooled, we don’t really want to know. Even with his wild ideas of time and time inversion, Nolan highlights some very pertinent problems the world is facing right now.
The film wants the viewer to know that, be it the past, future, or present, without humanity no technology or concept could be executed perfectly, that some naturistic elements exist in all the concepts of time. The protagonist is the audience, and we are left to scratch our heads, just like our protagonist. 

John David Washington, Robert Pattison, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh, do justice to their parts with the required poise, cockiness, and elegance.

The film is shot exquisitely well by Hoyte Van Hoytema, and it is a treat to watch the spectacular action sequences unfold. The sound design and background score, composed by Ludwig Goransson, are brilliant. The grandeur of the film seldom takes over the narrative, but it is no-doubt a surreal experience. But, the film just like time-inversion is flawed. It has some cliques and some of the characters are needlessly condescending. Nolan’s writing lacks the depth comparatively, which the stalwarts say “style over substance”, but it still retains the “Nolanism”.

WATCH OR NOT:

Christopher Nolan’s complex thriller Tenet makes for an astounding viewing, and as one character in the film utters this dialogue – “don’t try to understand it, feel it”, go and feel the experience of superbly orchestrated complex storytelling on the big screens. WATCH IT.