New film "Tenet" - Back to the cinema
In his new film, director Christopher Nolan is not stingy with opulent pictures for the big screen. As usual, it also delivers complicated time-space structures in which time not only runs linearly forwards, but also backwards.
What if we can't even count on time anymore? At the beginning of “Tenet”, during the attack on the Kiev Opera House, our gaze falls on a bullet hole in a concrete plinth. Suddenly the bullet shoots back from it and the hole is closed again. Something is wrong here. Clear! John David Washington, main character in "Tenet", only called "the protagonist", gets the problem with this anomaly and with the apocalypse explained by the scientist:
“I don't see Armageddon here. No, something worse. "
We learn: someone in the future has a technology that the future uses to attack the present. The mega villain: A Russian oligarch who masters this technology from the future and can use it to change the time and space levels. Inversion! So time reversal. The scientist explains how this works to the astonished protagonist and thus to us: shooting a bullet from a pistol that then hits the target is one thing. But in the inversion it works the other way round:
"You don't shoot the bullet, you catch it."
Or also like this:
"One of these balls moves forward through time, while the other moves backwards."
And later the protagonist sums it up again for his buddy:
"Time travel! - No, inversion! "
That later in the film there is always a trip back to the past or the future or the present. “Tenet” is a time, science fiction and agent thriller. By the way, Christopher Nolan, an avowed fan of James Bond films, also shot something like the first Bond film with a black quasi-007 with John David Washington as a secret agent. Including the typical trips around the globe - Mumbai, Tallinn, London, wind farm in Denmark and and and ... and back. Always on the lookout for an algorithm that “inverts the entropy of the whole world” should mean: If the present and the future are intertwined by means of this algorithm and the inversion, everything dissolves. End of the world! Roger that? Well
Black secret agent
"Tenet" is intellectual overwhelming cinema, and the almost merciless force of Ludwig Göransson's soundtrack does the rest. The whole thing - in addition to the perfectly staged action scenes - always garnished with such aphorisms from the philosophy of the time:
"If the flow of time is reversed, that doesn't mean that if we're here now, it never happened."
"Tenet" offers both eye and brain food. Which maybe has to do with the fact that the laborious thinking about the time in the film always triggers the stimulus to think about us and our being. Up to the limit of the dissolution of the thought that we thought we had, but which then usually slips away from us like a bar of soap in the shower. In “Memento”, where the plot ran backwards, through to “Inception” or “Interstellar”, Christopher Nolan has undoubtedly proven himself to be a time philosopher of cinema, but also an architect of his very own time-space structure. The scientist formulates the premise of this work at the beginning of “Tenet”, so to speak in our direction as moviegoers: “Don't try to understand it,” she says, “feel it!”
Overwhelming cinema with little feeling for the characters
But with the feeling, or better: the feelings have always been a problem with Christopher Nolan. The architecture of his works, whose form always seemed more important than the figures, the characters. John David Washington as the protagonist like the no less brilliant Robert Pattinson as the sidekick, the diabolically great villain - Kenneth Brannagh - and Elizabeth Debicki as his tortured wife: They play great, but their characters only look like in Nolan's time-space machine Cogs in the gears of the godlike creator, in other words: director and author Nolan. "Tenet" repeatedly pushes our understanding capacities to the limit, which in itself is not bad. But "Tenet" also appears extremely cool in its complex construction, and you get the impression as if someone were exhibiting their own creation with relish, which only he, and only he, understands and masters. “Tenet” is exciting and “Tenet” is annoying at the same time. The fact that both properties are intertwined in a film is at least of high quality.
