Tenet review

 

Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast : John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Dimple Kapadia, Himesh Patel, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Michael Caine
Genre: Action/Sci-fi/Thriller
Run Time : 2 h 31 min
Opens : 27 August 2020 (Sneaks 26 August)
Rating : PG13

           One of writer-director Christopher Nolan’s well-known trademarks is the way he plays with time and the perception of time. Memento, Inception and Interstellar all have the perception of time as central themes – even his comparatively straightforward World War II movie Dunkirk was presented in three separate time frames that later converge. Nolan takes his preoccupation with time and how it can be presented onscreen to a new level with Tenet.

John David Washington plays the otherwise-unnamed Protagonist, an elite secret agent. He is roped in to achieve no less than saving the world from destruction. At first, all he has to go on is one word, “Tenet”, and a hand gesture of interlocking fingers. Together with his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist must unravel an intricate plot that involves a concept called “inversion” – time affects everything in one forward direction, but an unknown person or organization has figured out a way to reverse this effect, imbuing people and objects with the ability to function counter to the normal flow of time. Key to this mystery is the powerful and ruthless Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whom the Protagonist tries to get to through Sator’s wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who longs to be free of Sator’s controlling grip. The Protagonist and his allies must cross the world and bend the very fabric of time and space to prevent an unfathomable cataclysm.

Tenet’s reputation as a confusing movie precedes it. Early in the film, one character tells the Protagonist “don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” However, the movie seems to actively want the audience to engage with its ideas and unravel the heady concepts that fuel it. It’s up to each viewer how much effort they want to expend in understanding the movie. Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist whose work inspired Interstellar, serves as a consultant on this movie too.

It helps to think of Tenet as a Bond movie with all the sci-fi elements layered on top and below that formula. Nolan has made no secret of being a massive 007 fan, with the snow fortress sequence in Inception an obvious homage to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Indeed, Tenet has a somewhat Bond-like protagonist, a Bond villain, something of a Bond girl, globe-trotting action and even a cold open not unlike a classic pre-title sequence in a Bond movie. Tenet almost stubbornly refuses to feel like a generic big studio action movie, even though the promotion for the film included its trailer premiering within the video game Fortnite, and a song by rapper Travis Scott that plays over the end credits, both things one might imagine Nolan baulking at.

The action set-pieces are astounding, and all feel satisfying tactile. There is a sequence in which a cargo plane veers off the runway and crashes into a section of an airport which was achieved by crashing an actual plane into a hangar at the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville. The other filming locations include Mumbai, India; Olso, Norway; Tallinn, Estonia and the Amalfi Coast, Italy. A car chase filmed on the Laagna Highway in Tallinn, which involves multiple heavy-duty vehicles including a firetruck, is a lavish, kinetic spectacle. The hydrofoil catamaran race combines glamour and thrills the way the best Bond movies do. This is Nolan’s loudest movie to date, with enough major action-driven moments to make the 151-minute runtime pass by at a decent clip.

The film’s visual signature is that of people and objects moving backwards in time, contrary to everything else in a given scene. This isn’t something that is especially new, but just like with the rotating hallway fight sequence in Inception, Nolan has taken something that we might have seen before and amped it up aggressively. There are a few satisfying moments in which the film’s concepts play out visually in grand fashion.

Like many of Nolan’s movies, Tenet had the potential to come off as cold, but Washington brings a spirited warmth and a liveliness to the proceedings. He is exceedingly charismatic and acquits himself well during the many complex action sequences. He also has excellent chemistry with Pattinson, who is extremely watchable as the Protagonist’s right-hand man. The Protagonist is deliberately left unnamed and in the hands of another actor, could have been a hollow cipher, but Washington has enough charm and gravitas to transcend that.

Nolan is not known for writing women especially well. Debicki’s Kat is a better-developed, more interesting character than many others. She still is a damsel in a degree of distress, but gains agency in an interesting way and has a strong hand in moving the plot forward. Branagh, who also featured in Dunkirk, sometimes plays the evil oligarch role a bit too broadly but is often legitimately scary.

There’s a scene in Looper in which the Older Joe tells his younger self that he would rather not explain the mechanics of time travel, otherwise they would end up sitting in the diner all day making diagrams out of straws. Tenet sometimes feels like Christopher Nolan making diagrams with straws, but it also benefits from the director’s “blank check” status – after his various successes, he gets a blank check to make whatever kind of movie he wants. Tenet is perhaps just a touch more opaque and headache-inducing than it needs to be, but it is also an invigorating cinematic experience. Just brace yourself for the hundreds of “Tenet explained” videos that will be popping up on YouTube in the coming months.

Summary: The singular vision of an accomplished filmmaker, Tenet is as perplexing as it is visually stunning, something that will leave audiences discussing it even as their heads spin.

RATING: 4 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

 

Greenland review

For F*** Magazine

GREENLAND

Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Cast : Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, David Denman, Hope Davis, Andrew Bachelor, Holt McCallany
Genre: Action/Disaster
Run Time : 2 h
Opens : 13 August 2020 (Sneaks 7-12 August)
Rating : PG13

Gerard Butler’s last brush with the disaster movie genre was the delightfully bombastic, ludicrous Geostorm. This time, Butler stars in a disaster movie of a different stripe, one that strives to be serious, harrowing, and relatable.

A comet designated ‘Clarke’ is headed for earth. While initial estimates were that the fragments would burn up on re-entry, they instead begin decimating cities around the world. Structural engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and their son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) are selected to be relocated to a shelter at a classified location, later revealed to be Greenland. Mass unrest ensues as people learn of the existence of these bunkers and fight for a chance to be taken there. John and his family must get to safety within 48 hours, when the largest fragment is estimated to strike, causing an extinction-level-event akin to what killed the dinosaurs.

Greenland takes a different approach from the typical Hollywood disaster movie formula. The focus is kept on the Garrity family, such that there aren’t a thousand subplots fighting for viewers’ attention. This isn’t about NASA sending astronauts to destroy the comet in its tracks, and we don’t get any scenes set in Mission Control. The intimate scope is juxtaposed against a global disaster and there are multiple tense sequences that keep viewers invested in the protagonists’ desperate journey. Brief appearances by Scott Glenn and Holt McCallany add texture to the proceedings without distracting from the Garritys. This reviewer was worried that Vine star Andrew Bachelor, better known as King Bach, would be distracting, but his cameo was not an obnoxious one.

Greenland taps into the paranoia of needing to count on strangers in a time of crisis and not knowing if they can be counted on. Some of the side characters that our heroes come across are kind and selfless, while others are opportunistic and selfish, and this seems to reflect the spectrum of responses one sees in any disaster scenario. Butler, Baccarin, and Floyd are reasonably convincing as a family unit, and unlike many American movies Butler has starred in, this film acknowledges his Scottish roots and uses that as a plot point. He is not an invincible action hero here and the movie is all the better for it.

The movie strives for grounded realism, but a degree of implausibility is unavoidable given the premise. Director Ric Roman Waugh, who previously collaborated with Butler on Angel Has Fallen and whose other movies include Snitch and Shot Caller, is a competent journeyman director with a background as a stunt performer. He is most comfortable staging sequences involving vehicular collisions, an action movie staple, but that is not as compelling as everything else that is happening in Greenland.

Greenland wants to be emotional but not gooey and sentimental, but it sometimes tips towards the latter, especially with the gauzy flashbacks of the family in happier times, and some clumsy heart-to-heart dialogue. The film’s limited budget is also noticeable in scenes involving mass hysteria, where there are a great many extras, just not enough. The full-on CGI destruction sequences are just a touch synthetic-looking, but they are not the movie’s focus and they get the job done.

Current events have put many audiences in an apocalyptic mindset – one would think that audiences would actively avoid watching movies that remind them of real-world fears, but movies like Outbreak and Contagion received renewed popularity during lockdown. Movies allow us to face our fears in a physically safe way, and disaster movies usually contain an element of “this could happen to you” that is scary but also exciting. The problem is that disaster movies often trade on spectacle, and it is hard to accept said spectacle as entertainment if it hits too close to home. Greenland’s approach is much closer to the Norwegian disaster movie The Wave and its sequel The Quake, and maybe this is an overall better direction to head in than the “destruction porn” style of disaster movie popularised by directors like Roland Emmerich.

Greenland is not especially sophisticated and succumbs to some disaster movie clichés, but it is generally more believable than most movies of its ilk and is effective at generating sympathy for its central characters.

Summary: Greenland is sufficiently harrowing and engaging, reimagining a familiar disaster movie scenario with intimacy and immediacy.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong