Matthew's Journal

This is the last of the films off this year's Hugo Award shortlist. There is a very complex time-travel plot here, which I think doesn't in fact stand up at all, but there are a series of delightful (and delightfully silly) action sequences (a number of which we see twice) which try and keep you from thinking too hard about the plot. It's trying very hard to do a bunch of clever stuff, but doesn't stick the landing. Also, some of the dialogue is a bit hard to make out, which is an error in a film that is already pretty confusing!

The word tenet is a palindrome, and it's also the middle word of the Sator square (all of the other words show up too); the central conceit of the film is that technology has been invented that allows objects to move backwards in time - like in the trailer where the Protagonist "fires" an empty gun only for the bullet to end up moving from the target back into the chamber. Naturally the baddies want to use this technology to end the world. There's also a MacGuffin that the baddies want to hide where baddies in the future can find it to facilitate this Armageddon.

Like many such plots, this immediately lands us with the ontological paradox (here called the Grandfather paradox), which the film has characters talk about confusingly. I think that's an error - you need everyone to suspend their disbelief for long enough not to notice that all this going backwards and forwards in time is probably meaningless, not explicitly remind us of the fact!

And it's almost good enough that you can - you spot the sequences where someone/thing is going backwards and that's cool (and quite neatly done), and the action set-pieces hit that sweet spot of impressive and slightly camp that invites you to enjoy them without taking any of it too seriously. But I don't think the plot holds up, the sole female character of note is well-acted but stereotyped, and Robert Pattinson's slightly louche charm isn't enough to cover for a lot of rather 1-note performances from the other leads. Also, some of the dialogue is pretty hard to make out over the background noise, which made it even harder to work out what was going on sometimes.

All of which is more negative that I quite wanted to be - if you can suspend your disbelief, there are some very entertaining moments in this film; and I like the ambition of the plot even if the execution didn't match up.