OUR TAKE ON... TENET
From the mind of Christopher Nolan, who in the last twenty years has put together an amazing, unique body of work, from “The Dark Knight Trilogy” through “The Prestige” and “Dunkirk”, comes a film that can only be described as a Bond movie, crossed with “Inception” with a bit of the movie “Deja-Vu” thrown in for good measure.
Coincidentally, “Deja-Vu” starred Denzel Washington while in “Tenet” the main protagonist is played by Denzel’s son, John David Washington (previously seen in “Black klansman”) who stars as a CIA agent who is recruited by a secret organisation, the titular “Tenet” and enters a world of high tech espionage, assisted by another agent Neil, played by Robert Pattinson. What follows is a sometimes confusing, always spectacular looking piece of sci-fi action that is the best case made yet for Nolan to be given the keys to the next Bond film.
While it would be easy to describe this is a “time travel” movie wouldn’t be exactly a fair description. There are elements of time manipulation, but for the most part it’s your classic globe-trotting, exotic location visiting, stop the Russian villain spy film. The performances are decent across the board, and John David Washington carries himself with the same charisma as his father. Pattinson continues to add to his impressive post “Twilight” CV, and Kenneth Branagh is having a ball as the pantomime villain.
“Tenet” marks the first film in a long time that Nolan’s long time composer Hans Zimmer doesn’t contribute the soundtrack, but Ludwig Goransson fills the void nicely and delivers a massive score befitting of the scale of the film. It should be noted that the music can be so loud, and the dialogue mixed so low, that subtitles may need to be switched on even by those who are not hard of hearing.
As for the story itself, yes it can be a lot to take in, there is a lot of exposition in the dialogue as there was with “Inception”, and the mechanics of the time manipulation can be a bit of a head scratcher, but the best bet is to take the advice of Basil Exposition from the second Austin Powers movie where Austin is having his own struggles with the concept of time travel: “I suggest you don’t worry about that kind of thing, and just enjoy yourself”.
These are the timelessly traversing thoughts and mindful multidimensional manifestations of our man Kevin Dillon.
Tenet is now available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD from goldendiscs.ie or any of our Golden Discs stores nationwide.
