Let me take you on an adventure. It requires some imagination, dear reader, to remember a time in the past. A blissful time where our current state of things was not in the back of our minds. The prospect of walking into a theater for a new release was an open invitation, not something we would debate over. It may not feel dire, but the sense is in the air like the autumn chill. All of this sounds like the plot of some international thriller where our Protagonist must take on a dangerous madman hellbent on destruction. No, I am not talking about any real person or situation in particular. This is just the basics of âTenet.â
However this movie is anything but basic. Like most of Christopher Nolanâs films, complicated ideas are part and parcel. Most people will have seen his âDark Knight Trilogyâ if they are fans of comic book movies. Those are his more straightforward features. When you think of his less penetrable films: âInceptionâ, âMementoâ and âInterstellarâ come to mind. Scripts that are more preoccupied with headier concepts like time, physics and their manipulations are all hallmarks of Nolan to lesser or greater degree. This has been sometimes at the sake of characters.
You may have found my use of the word before unusual but the actual name of our main character is âThe Protagonist.â No name, no backstory, not even a hobby; what a dating profile he must have. Played by John David Washington he is a blank slate, a James Bond without a dossier to reference. Even the side characters with names are the most barest of bone, more tropes than three dimensional. The damsel married to the villain, the Felix Leiter sidekick, the larger than life antagonist; starting to sound all a bit familiar? Only problem is we are not given any reason to care beyond such.
Much has been said about the visuals and how they should be experienced on a large screen. The viewing that I partook in wasnât IMAX, but agreed. The scenes of buildings reassembling and exploding again, car chases where some crashed vehicles flip back upright; these uses of practical effects are stunning. All of this is predicated on quantum science theories Nolan uses to explain what is happening. I am not going to get into them besides they involve time inversion (fancy word for time travel), the Grandfather paradox and the Sator square. Problem is that if your film needs a bibliography, then maybe you should write a book. If this is all sounding confusing, it is. And this is coming from someone who watches European art film.
So maybe this wasnât the best film to triumphantly usher audiences back into the theater. And what of my theater experience? Not to be anticlimactic, but it wasnât much different than before. Besides wearing a mask, most weekday screenings in the past where barely filled to begin with. Of the six other viewers, none were seated near me and with the auditorium seating all were far apart.
After the film, I stayed to watch the credits (in hopes of seeing that reference appendix in order to understand what I had just watched). The usher came in to clean the theater and I was treated to watch her use a special disinfecting device to spray down the chairs. All this made me even more confident of my choice to return. If only it was for a more crowd-pleasing film. Hopefully âWonder Women 1984,â âDune,â or the actual Bond film âNo Time To Dieâ truly announce filmgoers back with the applause theaters deserve. Silence is what this film was met with; maybe we were just too stunned⌠or bewildered.
