It’s about time.

For a man so preoccupied with time, it’s more than a little odd that Christopher Nolan seemed in such a rush to get Tenet into theatres. While some have framed it as a noble attempt to save cinema from impending coronavirus doom, to others it’s a pompous, borderline reckless attempt to put his film and ego before the health of theatregoers.

There are certainly arguments to be made both ways, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide where you stand on the matter, but there’s little doubting that, as the first major cinema release for over five months, there’s a hell of a lot of pressure on Nolan and his film’s shoulders. But is Tenet the saviour of cinema that it purports to be? And, most importantly, is it actually worthy of your time?

Caught in a twilight world of international espionage, a CIA operative known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is recruited by the enigmatic organisation, Tenet, to participate in a globetrotting assignment that will unfold above and beyond time as we know it. With the help of his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), our protagonist must harness time itself to prevent renegade Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from sparking World War III.

“Does your head hurt yet?”

As Robert Pattinson poses this pertinent question to John David Washington’s Protagonist after a hefty unload of time-based exposition, he may as well have looked right down the camera while doing so. As a rare moment of self-awareness, this is not only a pivotal point in the film but one in which even Christopher Nolan himself seems to realise that we may be struggling to keep up.

In a career built on baffling audiences with time-bending narratives, Tenet sees Christopher Nolan at his wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey zenith. With a hint of Memento here, a dash of Interstellar there, and a huge dollop of Inception everywhere, Tenet operates at peak-Nolan as it brings together elements from all corners of the director’s career for a timegasm of epic proportions.

Tenet is a truly perplexing proposition, even by Chris Nolan standards. Its plot twists and turns rely heavily on its central ‘time inversion’ conceit, and, as such, the entire film ultimately becomes irrevocably intertwined with its own bewildering complexities.

Some of this bafflement is a good thing, much of it great, a chunk of it bad, yet you can’t deny just how engrossing the whole thing is. As Nolan looks to out-Nolan himself, Tenet is a heady mix of fascinating temporal pseudo-science that comes off as much muddled as it does inspired.

Like Interstellar and Inception before it, Tenet heavily layers itself up with dense time-based theories and, as with its predecessors, you will likely come out of it both scratching your head and nodding in awe. It will also not take much digging under this complex surface to appreciate Tenet for the more basic delights that it offers.

Beneath it all, Tenet is a pretty straight-shooting spy movie. By no means a bad thing, this straightforward undercurrent allows the film to anchor itself even as time warps around it. Full of classic twists, turns, subterfuge, and world-ending stakes, the film feels akin to something from the Bond or Mission: Impossible franchises, with a hefty dose of Hitchcock thrown in for good measure, and the result is an immensely fun, surprisingly accessible spy flick underneath the sometimes impenetrable narrative mechanics.

Of course, there’s no way on Earth Christopher Nolan would be serving up your average spy film, so while there are plenty of baseline thrills to be had with Tenet, the real hook is the film’s time-inverting shenanigans. It’s a lot to get your head around at times, tying the plot up in knots on more than one occasion as it attempts to keep up with itself, yet it’s never anything less than enthralling.

Like many a Nolan film before it, Tenet frequently feels compelled to indulge itself in a hefty amount of exposition, yet, unlike its predecessors, these lengthy reams of expositional dialogue, while certainly excessive, stop short of over-explaining its inner mechanisms. Whether or not its time travelling details are scientifically sound or not is beside the point and the film knows it, dropping much of it on us without too much heavy-handed backstory.

It’d be all too easily to get hung up on the plot’s finer points, however, roll with the (reverse) punches and you’ll be rewarded with one of the most compelling, tense, and gripping entries in Christopher Nolan’s filmography. With some of the finest action of any of the director’s films, Tenet is a true spectacle, as cerebral as anything he’s ever done, but one with the beating heart of a summer blockbuster that warrants viewing (if safe, of course) on the biggest screen possible.

While the recurring Nolan issue of an often-incoherent sound mix leaves much of the film’s dialogue borderline incomprehensible, it thankfully doesn’t detract too much from just how impressive the film is as a cinematic spectacle. Taking over from long time Nolan collaborator Hans Zimmer, Ludwig Goransson’s score, while undoubtedly too loud in the film’s mix, is equal parts epic and stress-inducing as it embraces the film’s brevity while perfectly encapsulating its ticking timebomb energy.

Supplementing this, Tenet delivers fantastic performances from its entire cast, with John David Washington as the standout in a calm, calculating, and effortlessly cool turn that follows up on BlacKkKlansman to solidify his status as one of Hollywood’s brightest prospects. It’s a performance as good as any other Nolan protagonist and one bolstered by an outstanding ensemble, with Robert Pattinson in dapper wingman form, Elizabeth Debicki utterly captivating as she channel’s her inner ‘Hitchcock Blonde’, while Kenneth Branagh is clearly having a whale of a time as the scenery-chewing villain.

As one might expect from a Nolan film, there’s precious little in the way of character or emotional depth going on, however, the strength of Tenet’s performances ensures we’re never cut adrift. To this end, while many of the characters appear ice-cold and clinical, Elizabeth Debicki’s Kat plays a crucial roll in keeping us invested, as she offers the closest thing the film has to an emotional core and a vital key to making the narrative tick.

But then, no one in their right mind goes into a Christopher Nolan movie looking to have their heart warmed. As a technical filmmaker, he’s one of the very best in the industry, but affective he certainly is not; a dichotomy that Tenet lays bare once again.

As such, for better or worse, Tenet feels like the ultimate Christopher Nolan film. Bringing together elements from almost all of his previous efforts and building on a number of narrative components from its direct predecessor, Dunkirk, Tenet is peak-Nolan, and while it may not change the minds of those that don’t jive with his particular brand of filmmaking, for those that do, it will be a rewarding viewing experience.

By this point, it feels like we’ve been talking about Tenet for an absolute age. Which kind of feels appropriate for a film so obsessed with the concept of time. This elongated conversation about the film, exasperated by a global pandemic, has shifted the narrative surrounding it, going from the next highly anticipated Christopher Nolan blockbuster, to something else entirely, something that it was unlikely to ever fully live up to.

Whether intentional or not, by being the first major cinema release since we all went into lockdown, Tenet has very much positioned itself as the saviour of cinema, but while it may not be the messiah its director wants it to be (only time will tell if it will bring in enough box office cash to warrant such a lofty label), it is nonetheless a thoroughly engrossing and highly enjoyable Christopher Nolan joint.

Delivering the kind of highbrow blockbuster spectacle we’ve come to expect from its director, Tenet is a baffling enigma of a film that confounds as much as it dazzles. For better or worse, Tenet is a Christopher Nolan film through and through, bringing with it the very best of the director’s traits, together with some of his most infuriating, and while it’s sometimes one of his more muddled efforts, the spectacular results are truly timeless.