The Sunday Mail
Movie Review
Tinashe Kusema
Let me start off by saying I am neither a nerd nor what some might refer to as a hardcore comic book fan. My knowledge in quantum physics — the concept of time travel — is next to zero.
In fact, my knowledge of science is limited to “Integrated Science” — Zimsec edition.
However, I have clocked a lot of hours watching movies, and seen enough of time-travel movies, including all the classics, to come up with a basic understanding of Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller “Tenet”.
Under normal circumstances, Tenet could have been one of the most talked-about flicks of the year. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic hit, and “Tenet” is one of a handful of movies that did not get pushed back a year.
The movie follows the trials of a CIA agent, only referred to as the protagonist (John David Washington), as he hunts down an arms dealer, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who is peddling futuristic weapons with inverted entropy.
What this means is that the weapons, in this case bullets, can move backwards through time.
Sator is alleged to be slowly building a weapon that can wipe out the past and kill all of mankind in the process.
The protagonist is then recruited by a secret organisation called Tenet, assigned a handler Neil (Robert Pattison) and gets tasked with not only tracking down Sator, but destroying the machine and saving the world from destruction.
Now, this sounds like a very simple plot, but the problem is that there are way too many moving parts on the chess board for one to get a proper grasp of what is happening.
It is difficult to wrap one’s head around what is happening, what is real and what is fake and who is coming and who is going.
On one hand, Nolan ticks all the right boxes on what one might expect in a spy thriller, or, in this case, a Christopher Nolan movie.
You have your charismatic lead in Washington, who puts up a solid performance.
Yes, he might lack his father Denzel’s presence and aura, but he can’t be blamed for that.
The bar is just way too high for any mortal, even if the said mortal carries his DNA.
The fight-scenes and gun fights, especially those involving inverted weapons or individuals, are a sight to behold.
Branagh might have hammed in his performance, but insofar as characterisation is concerned, Sator is your typical Nolan villain.
To quote one of Sir Michael Caine’s best lines from “The Dark Knight” — another one of Nolan’s creations – “some men just want to watch the world burn”.
That, in a nutshell, is Sator’s chief motivation.
However, the problem comes with the many moving parts in the movie.
Top of the list is the film’s two leading men in Washington and Robert Pattison.
I have already touched on Washington’s DNA, and I have always found it hard to watch him on the big or small screen and not compare him to his dad. Pattison is the latest actor to pick up the Batman moniker for the Warner Brother’s 2022 release, and he too is likely to be another distraction in any movie he features in between now and the Batman movie release.
Some might argue that that is a classic case if nit-picking, and, to be honest, I am inclined to agree. What is not nit-picking is the science of the movie “Tenet” being way too confusing.
The notion that there is a person, organisation or entity that creates a time machine, starts sending futuristic weapons back to the past with the intention of wiping out the past sounds a bit out there for me.
There is actually a scene when the film’s lead is getting debriefed on recent events and the science behind the weapons and machine, but looks more confused than the audience is likely to get.
Another character chimes in: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it!” Aside from being a corny line, it says a lot when the characters living this immersed cinematic world don’t understand the science, but the audience is expected to.
There is also the ghost of another Nolan flick, “Inception”. In the build-up to Tenet’s eventual release, it was rumoured that the movies are linked, share a universe or something.
My efforts to connect the dots as I watched the film were fruitless, and the further I dug, the more confused I got.
“I would say Tenet is an in-law to Inception,” said the movie’s lead, Washington, when asked whether Inception and Tenet are linked, a sequel, prequel or exist in a shared cinematic universe.
“They are related by marriage. They get together for Thanksgivings, family barbecues, like that kind of thing. Other than that, one lives in Europe, the other one lives in Compton.”
