Saturday 6 February 2021

The Writing in the Mirror – a review of 'Tenet'

“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.“

Walter Benjamin on ‘The Angel of History’


There's something which happens in the opening minutes of Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet (2020) that in retrospect, now seems utterly extraordinary: We see an audience taking their seats in a packed European opera house, as an orchestra is tuning up for a live performance.


For a moment, it seems genuinely astonishing, like the scene in Kevin Costner's epic Western, Dances With Wolves (1990) where a herd of wild buffalo stampedes across the widescreen plains. I found myself thinking, "How on earth did they film that?", which is pretty poignant considering that, not very much later, Nolan notoriously crashes a Boeing 747 into a building at low speed because it's apparently cheaper than doing it with computer graphics. Who knew?


But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's that kind of movie.

-o-

Tenet is a high concept science fiction espionage mash-up, a sort of time-travelling version of BBC1's Spooks. It was billed as the film that would save cinema after the devastating economic effects of the first coronavirus lockdown and yet, here I was, one of four people in an otherwise empty auditorium. Two of us wore surgical masks, while another couple took selfies on their mobile phones at the other end of the room.


On-screen, just as the conductor lifts his baton to commence the overture, the opera building is stormed by paramilitaries, who, in a series of confusing rapid jump-cuts, pump gas into the theatre to put the audience to sleep and exchange automatic fire with terrorists. Having spent a long time deliberating about whether it was responsible to go to the cinema at all, and still feeling a little exposed by the unfamiliarity of the new safety precautions, I could easily have gone home in tears at that point.


The central character of Tenet, known only as the Protagonist, is an undercover agent whose job it is to intercept intelligence and take military action to avert disaster. Following the botched opera house operaion, he is told that the whole scenario was actually just a test, that he is to be given a new identity and that he will be inducted into a top secret programme where specialists are investigating the possibility that technology is being used to time-reverse weaponry.


I’m not even going to attempt to explain the rest of the story – it’s just a sensory onslaught after that, albeit a brilliant and meticulously plotted one. If that sounds like your kind of thing, go see it, on the largest screen you can find. Alternatively, if you prefer some gentle theological reflection, stick around for the rest of the review.

-o-


The concept of the time-reversed bullet is one of the central ideas at the film’s heart. Such a bullet, travelling backwards in time, appears to be caught rather than fired, and if it penetrates anyone en route it damages much more seriously than a conventional projectile. It reminded me that there are events in one’s life that can compound earlier griefs, as though one has been hit by a shockwave that was actually triggered long ago. I certainly think the pandemic is one of those events that finds the collective and individual fault lines of old wounds in this kind of way.


As the film progresses and the Protagonist learns to navigate in the time-reversed world, the second half of the film unfolds as a mirror image of the first, with the hero literally encountering himself coming back as he fights to prevent the oncoming catastrophes that he has already witnessed. We’d almost mistakenly booked the 4DX screening where the chairs mechanically pivot and throw you about in sync with any on-screen explosions or car chases and so, for my part, I felt a wave of enormous gratitude that we’d managed to dodge that particular bullet.


As crazy as it may seem though, I think it is gratitude rather than spectacle that the film ultimately aims to inspire. By the end, with the perspective of a divine angel, the Protagonist has learned to anticipate and prevent evil events before they even happen. In the closing moments he says, wistfully in voice-over, that his work is actually invisible now, because no one remembers the bomb that didn’t go off.

-o-

I waited in vain for the otherwise perfect symmetry of the film to revisit that opening sequence. I desperately wanted to see the audience awaken from their unnatural slumber like the court of the sleeping beauty, but it never came. It took me 24 hours and a night of upset sleep to realise that this was a film that was designed to be screened in a packed multiplex, with families, young people and lovers eating popcorn, in a time when people felt safe, perhaps even complacent. I found myself wishing that I could travel back in time myself, perhaps even just 9 months earlier, to such a period of unrecognised innocence.


It would have been the most magnificent wake-up call ever.




*This article originally appeared in Radius Performing magazine in Winter 2020









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