TENET

Well I just went to see Tenet and dna teneT ees ot tnew tsuj I lleW

If by some mischance COVID gets me for this I just want you all to know that I died as I lived: Utterly confused by everything, but still having a good time on the whole. It’s a pity this came out so close after Bill and Ted Face the Fact That Keanu Reeves Is 56 Years Old reminded us that time travel stories are all faintly ridiculous since the writer can always have the heroes hide their own car keys for them to find later, as this realization makes all the backwards-running reverse-shooting and I don’t want to think about what happens if you have to go to the bathroom-ing in an otherwise solid actioner faintly risible. It’s JDW and Robert Pattinson’s excellent adventure. Watching the inverted fights just reminded me of the time Red Dwarf went to the backwards planet. Inevitably, as any Star Trek fan could tell you about time travel stories, it ends up being a bit of a narrative and visual ouroboros where the protagonist’s main mission is to make sure absolutely nothing happens. Still, it’s more grounded that Interstellar, less dreamy than Inception and reminds me of Memento more than a little. In short, a solid but unexceptional addition to the Nolanverse Criterion Collection and a further extension of his core philosophy that linear time can go fuck itself, as can people attempting to listen to the dialogue in his movies. The time travel whatthefuckery has some brilliant set pieces, including the airplane crash from the trailer (twice, both coming and going, as it were) and the highway car chase (also twice). Robert Pattinson exudes dapper charm from every hair follicle and in any sane world would be playing Bond, not Batman. But of course this is 2020, a year that hates sanity almost as much as Nolan does. What this movie isn’t is the savior of movieplexes and cinemas the industry had been praying for. The plot needed about three more rounds of editing to get rid of the extraneous excess and make it halfway comprehensible without three diagrams and/or a potentially lethal quantity of LSD, focuses on a dull lead who is effortlessly outshone in every scene by his sidekick, climaxes in an army apparently shooting at nothing, and uses a lot of pretty scenery to disguise the fact it is roughly 50% people standing around explaining the backstory. There are about three key scenes absolutely critical to understanding the movie’s incestuous pretzel of a timeline, and in all three cases the scene is cut as if the lives of the editor’s wife, son and chihuahua (“Bubbles”) depended on nobody understanding the plot points. I used to make fun of all those “The Ending of Return of the Jedi Explained, Jesus Fucking Christ” or “The Blinkingly Obvious End of Avengers Explained, You Complete and Utter Morons” YouTube vids, but I did it, goddamn it I did it, I went online and read a bunch of articles just to understand what the gnikcuf backwards hell was going on. But I won’t hold that against it, because this makes it probably one of about two big-budget movies released in the last year or two that has demanded the audience use somewhat more than two of their tiny little braincells to understand. After months of snacking on Netflix’s made-for-TV movie quality hamburgers, it’s amazing to discover Taste! Spices! Flavors! A plot which doesn’t pander in structure, theme or have a completely unnecessary love triangle! Oh, not being able to predict exactly what is going to happen in each scene, how I missed you. Which is doubly ironic for a movie that is half about things going backwards in time. I haven’t sat on the edge of my seat like that since Mad Max: Fury Road, the other blockbuster this decade to mainly be about people going backwards and forwards. Somebody send this script back in time so that we can avoid the mediocrity of Marvel cookie-cutter movies, or use it to kill baby Hitler, whatever.