TIME TO DIE (TENET)

Never has a film had so much riding on its success.

Billed by some in the film industry as the blockbuster to save cinema, Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet' is the first major movie to be released in picture houses five, six months into a pandemic that initially shut them all down.

Studios have been watching closely how the film performs during its rollout across a number of territories and wondering if it will prove to be enough of a draw for audiences nervous about the Covid filmgoing experience.

It looks so but time will tell just how successful it has been.

The weight of expectation for any Nolan film is always huge.

But 'Tenet' is trying to meet those expectations in the context of a radically changed cinemagoing experience.

Audiences must now don face masks, use hand gel and there are reduced capacities in each theatre because of the requirements for physical distancing.

The challenge is all the greater, given that Covid rates are beginning to surge again in Europe following the loosening of lockdown restrictions and the return of schools.

Covid rates remain significantly high in the USA, while Israel has become the first country to reimpose a national lockdown, making the path to a sizeable profit even more arduous.

Even without Covid, film buffs were desperate for Nolan's movie to deliver something special.

So why does it feel like 'Tenet' has landed with a dull thud?

Working from his own script, Nolan once again tries to pull off a cinematic sleight of hand, playing with how time unfolds in his story.

Like 'Memento' and 'Inception,' he sets out to create a mystery wrapped up in a riddle inside an enigma.

But at what point does all the illusion and time manipulation become just too gimmicky?

John David Washington plays the unnamed hero of the piece, a CIA agent who at the start of the movie finds himself part of a military operation to extract an intelligence asset caught in a terrorist raid on Kiev's Opera House.

In a typically spectacular, highly choreographed, bombastic action sequence, Washington's Protagonist shoots his way through the narrow corridors of the concrete opera house while the audience in the auditorium is gassed into a deep sleep.

The agent is extracted by jumping through the window of a box overlooking the auditorium.

There is the first glimpse of an unusual devive and then a frantic scramble as various explosives are lifted from the floor of the auditorium.

During the raid, the Protagonist is saved in unusual circumstances by a mysterious figure in black, only to have his cover blown and to be kidnapped by Russian mercenaries.

Tortured in a railway yard, he refuses to give up his secrets and swallows a cyanide pill, only to wake up alive on a train.

The Protagonist is told the pill was actually a loyalty test which he has passed with flying colours and he is now ready to be brought into the complex - no, make that head scrambling - world of 'Tenet'.

Clemence Posey's scientist Barbara takes him through her study of bullets with inverted entropy which allows them to be fired backwards, travelling through time.

Barbara believes the technology has been invented in the future and could be used by warmongers for nefarious purposes.

The Protagonist's trail leads him to Mumbai, where he has a rendezvous with Robert Pattinson's smooth talking British agent Neil that results in them both being catapulted onto a high rise building where Dimple Kapadia's arms dealer Priya is based.

Priya reveals the bullets shown to him in the lab belonged to Kenneth Branagh's shadowy Russian oligarch Andrei Sator.

His only way to get to Sator is through his art appraiser wife, Elizabeth Debicki's Kat with the help of a fake Goya painting provided by Michael Caine's intelligence officer Sir Michael Crosby.

The Protagonist's approach to Kat immediately arouses Sator's suspicions and he dispatches thugs to duff up the American in a posh restaurant.

Soon the Protagonist is involved in an elaborate art heist in Oslo Airport with the help of Neil, a jumbo jet and Himesh Patel's fixer Mahir.

This paves the way for an introduction to Sator through Kat on his luxury yacht off Italy's stunning Amalfi Coast.

When it emerges Sator is constructing a device which will use time inversion to destroy the world, the Protagonist has only one thing he can do.

He needs to find a way of travelling backwards through time and stopping him.

As you would expect from a Christopher Nolan blockbuster, 'Tenet' is a movie of breathtaking ambition and it is delivered on an epic scale.

Its action sequences are impressive in their scope and execution.

But therein lies the problem because set pieces as good as these need an engaging narrative to match.

But what you get is a frankly preposterous tale whose concepts are so complex, they need an awful lot of explaining.

When Nolan and his cast and crew are not pulling off gripping set pieces, their tale is weighed down by dreadfully dull dialogue and cumbersome exposition.

This will leave some viewers confused.

Others will feel overwhelmed with all the information and ultimately underwhelmed by the movie.

Nolan's film certainly looks fabulous. It also sounds fabulous.

But it is too focused on engaging the eyes, the ears and the brain rather than the heart and, as a result, it is hard to passionately root for the Protagonist in the way you do Christian Bale's Batman in 'The Dark Knight' trilogy, Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb in 'Inception' or all of the characters in 'Dunkirk'.

None of this is the cast's fault.

Washington is a charismatic screen presence and proves he can lead a big budget film - even one as imperfect as this.

Pattinson, Debicki, Patel, Posey and Kapadia do their bit, although Branagh's heavily accented, villainous Russian oligarch veers awfully close to parody.

Michael Caine is good value in the one scene he is in.

Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography is also everything you hope it will be, the stunt work is thrilling and Ludwig Goransson's score is as epic anything Hans Zimmer has produced for Nolan.

However all these pluses are undermined by a script that offers up techno-babble and the odd lame quip.

With its sharp suits and even smarter cars, 'Tenet' may be the closest Nolan had ever come to recreating a Bond movie

But the illusion he creates counts for very little because his screenplay simply doesn't convince.

The film seems so in love with its central premise that it loses sight of the need to secure audience buy in.

But instead of doing that, Nolan serves up a stew of terrific action sequences soured by lifeless dialogue.

Like all great filmmakers, even when Nolan is off his game there is still something to marvel at.

But hen he finally retires, you cannot help but feel that 'Tenet' will be far from the first film people will recall as they look back on an impressive career.

The 50-year-old has created a blockbuster that could have been written by Samuel Beckett.

But that is not the positive it should be because it is like Beckett's work at its most obscure.

'Tenet,' unfortunately, is too painfully self aware, too mannered for its own good to really appeal to a mass audience.

And you suspect Nolan doesn't really care.

It will test the patience of some peopke who see it, who will resent being made to feel like they have missed critical information because their attention may have wandered.

Others will no doubt revel in its undoubted technical brilliance.

However technical brilliance counts for very little if the dialogue grates and you cannot warm to a film's characters.

After all, if you are not invested, what's the point?

('Tenet' opened in UK and Irish cinemas on August 26, 2020)