Canary Duty - Tenet, and a bit about cinema in the time of COVID

Woo, I'm back!  Now, before I talk about the film itself, I should address the experience of returning to cinema at all.  Since this whole lurgy business began, I've been wondering a bit about whether I've been tempting fate with my title of Canary, as I don't think it's ever been more appropriate than with this trip.  I was hmming and ha-ing about whether or not to go back to the cinemas, however I managed to book for a nearly empty screening at Odeon Swiss Cottage this morning (just me near the front, an elderly couple right at the back), and had a free promo code, so it seemed a relatively low risk in the grand scheme of things.  Besides, I work in a school, so in terms of risk, work will be the bigger one.  In the end, I think Odeon have mostly got the right idea, in terms of blocking off seats either side when you book, making sure everyone stays in their areas, use of masks, and cleaning a lot, I felt pretty safe.  My one concern though is that it's still possible in their bookings to go right in front or behind someone, which is when you think about it a bigger risk than sat next to them, so that's far from ideal, and also being a small screening with a teeny audience I can't talk for when it gets busy.  I say if you're not comfortable with the idea of going back to the big screen yet, I understand and don't blame you at all; I felt reasonably safe the way things were, but I will say that if the screening looked any more busy, chances are I might not have bothered.   So yeah, I felt OK on this occasion, but I'm almost certainly not going back as regularly as I might for a little while yet.  With all that out of the way then, here's the question; is Tenet the experience that demands to be seen on the big screen that will bring us all back to the multiplexes?

No.  No it's not.  I'm going to say it right out, I actually think overall this might be my least favourite Christopher Nolan film yet.  Now the thing about Nolan is that he's gotten a bit too predictable.  He likes threading his films with mindbending tricks of storytelling and use of cinematic time, but the thing about a trick is that if you just do versions of it over and over, people are going be more and more expecting about where it is going. So as soon as the film introduces its inversion gimmick, and we have encounters with characters whose faces are conspicuously not shown, we immediately get a sense of where this is going, as this is the sort of thing Nolan does all the time.  The film is entirely built around these set pieces, the problem being that virtually everything is a set up for them, which makes a lot of the character interactions feel very mechanical; it's less about them as people, more about them as pieces that have to be moved into place for the time shenanigans to work.  What really makes this more of a problem is that there are several moments when plot important conversations happen with a lot of background noise.  I don't know if it's just that I'm not used to a cinema's sound mixing after so long, but there were quite a few times when I think I missed plot details because the dialogue got eaten by the rest of the sound mix.  If you had issues with Bane's voice in The Dark Knight Returns, you're going to be wondering if Nolan has some very weird hearing issues if you see this.

This film also runs into something I call The Nolan Paradox; where slightly dodgy plotting I would normally forgive in other films I have a bigger issue with purely because of Nolan putting so much effort into making everything seem as important, elaborate, grounded in reality, and well thought out as possible.  The film makes very clear how a thing gets "inverted", the process by which they start going through time backwards, but then it keeps breaking those rules at various moments, such as at one point a car being inverted, when only the driver has undergone the process.  Or there's a bit when they mention that because it works by "reversing entropy", heat and cold get mixed up, which really can't work because then how on Earth are the inverted explosives and bullets working?  There's a full on James Bond masterplan at work, but the thing the villain's trying to achieve is very unclear; I get what it is in theory, but we never really see some kind of example of it working in practice, even on a small scale, so it's hard to really get caught up in it.  Oh, and no joking, I really am still having a headache trying to reconcile the timeline of the last act.  Look, I have no issue with silly or convoluted time travel scenarios, but this one is just kind of a mess.  It says something when the Avengers: Endgame time heist, which is one of the first major blockbusters to go with multiverse theory time travel, can convey this to the audience better than Nolan does.

Look, I can't say it's really a bad film, but the whole thing feels really hollow.  The cast are all good, with John David Washington a great lead, not least for subtly going the whole way through "seriously everyone, look, black James Bond, totally works!", I can't deny a lot of the inverted action scenes look very cool, and it's certainly well made, but the whole thing in the end feels rather empty, with plotting that means that the true masterminds behind this ridiculous plot are never seen or heard from directly.  It really feels like Nolan is just repackaging a lot of his old tricks in slightly different ways (we even get a repetition of the business of a major character trying to be united with their kid just like Leo in Inception), to a diminishing return.  So no, if there is a film out there to be the true great herald of cinema in the time of Covid, this isn't it.  I should mention that I only went to a regular screening, not an IMAX one, so you might get more out of it that way, but unless the IMAX version includes a drastically reworked plot, I doubt it.  Just watch a few Moffat scripted episodes of Doctor Who, followed by the Red Dwarf episode Backwards, and you'll have a similar, but way more fun, experience.

Sigh, I really didn't want my first article back to be so negative.  Maybe the next one I go in as Canary for will be better, what's up this weekend?

Aw, man!