Nolan back with elan: My take on Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”
Have you ever taken the “Open book test” in yr school/college days? I haven’t fortunately.
Because people say that the Open book test is the toughest as the professors who set the quiz/test are one step ahead of students and they set the paper in such a way that a student will “Dhoond Te rah jaoge”. (ढूँढते रह जाओगे)
Writer-director Christopher Nolan is one such “thedha” (टेढ़ा) professor who will test you with such out of box concepts. Remember in Inception he made you topsy turvy, in Interstellar he made you squeeze into the labyrinth of space and time in Dunkirk he deafened you with loud music now in “Tenet” he talks about time as a palindrome. No doubt his 34 Oscar nomination and 10 Oscar wins so far in a good enough testimony that he is an Einstein amongst Moviemakers. You will seldom relish his work in one go, Like A R Rahman’s music one, has to ruminate over it to relish the genius of this magician.
With the easing of the lockdown norm, I with my two teenage kids (who are Nolan’s die-hard fans) had decided to watch this magnum opus on the Jumbo screen of IMAX in Dubai. (In fact, Nolan’s work is designed for IMAX projection). I had done the homework and had read about the movie and was ready for this “open book test”. The movie is so complex and confusing that we three returned home with three different versions of it. This open-book test of mine was a disaster.
I would be lying if I confess to having understood the movie in totality, in fact in this movie a scientist says to the protagonist “Don’t try to understand it, just feel it”, hence “my take” will be more emotional rather than a cerebral one.
It is said that Nolan worked on this script for more than 5 years, however, I think the delay could have been due to the German series “Dark” which to dwells on time travel concepts that was going strong with its three seasons. (No there are no commonalities between two, except for the fact that both deal with time travel). The plot is all about a protagonist who is recruited for time travel (temporal inversion) who is set to save the world from the brink of extinction and to stop the WWIII.
John David Washington is our hero and the protagonist, he fits the bill perfectly, he is good in action scenes. He is supported by Robert Pattinson (Twilight wala) who too has given a wonderful performance. The surprise package is our Bobby girl (Dimple Kapadia), she gets a good role which is very important in the whole plot and she has pulled it off with elan. I felt that the antagonist role played by Kenneth Branagh was the weakest link of the lot, he plays the ailing Russian arms dealer who is all set to destroy the world just because he is going to die because of cancer (Main to marunga, lekin sab ko Saath le kar marunga (मैं तो मरूँगा लेकिन सबको साथ ले कर )– la shakaal style).
The high-octane action scenes are simply breathtaking and are out of box experiences, movie is shot in various mind-boggling locations, the flip-flops between the various time travels are most of the time confusing yet riveting. It is a farfetched tall tale that Nolan has packaged with a good concoction of action and imagination. One good thing about Nolan is that unlike Cameroons and Spielbergs he does not believe in green screen technology; hence the movie is sans VFX and CGIs, all the stunts, actions, and pyrotechnics have a real brick and mortar sets. (there is a shot where an actual Boeing 787 is rammed into the building – this was a simply awesome sequence).
I wish the movie concept of reverse time travel was feasible, if yes, then we would have just reversed our timelines to pre-COVID times, isn’t it? Nolan himself would have loved to reset the time as he had to defer the release of the movie thrice due to pandemic lockdown. The movie is heavy with different concepts of physics, metallurgy & Thermodynamics it challenges the second law of thermodynamic which states that “Entropy of a system is always constant” while the premise of the movie is based on “entropy of a system can be inverted”. I am not sure if your entropy while watching the tenet will remain constant, but I am sure that the enthalpy of your brain will soar.
As the title suggests “Tenet”, one may have to watch it “ten” times to understand it.
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