A few months back, one of my movie theaters opened back up from the ongoing pandemic. Even though the once-bustling Egyptian theme theater was a ghost town, it was a refresher to excuse ourselves from the house and be reminded of the good times.
Tenet, directed by Christopher Nolan, takes the concept of inversion and applies it through its world, palindrome movie title, and quality. (If that third part is intentional, then Nolan, you mad, mad man.)
His creativity is envious. His ability to manifest mind-bending physics, or abstract concepts, is fleshed out as very convincing within its functioning universe. Memento gave us a tease of this mindset. Inception demonstrated it exceptionally. And Interstellar went further beyond.
While Nolan's newest entry, Tenet, shows signs of over saturation, there is a divinity to his concept of Inversion that goes beyond a dazzling movie effect, into its placement as a cinematic piece released during the pandemic.
A Slow, World-Building Start
Before I elaborate that, the concept of this movie’s ‘inversion’ is easy to process. There’s one world where we move forward and another where everything is backwards (even the air is inverted), including time itself. If one of these elements transfer to the other world (i.e., humans or reverse bullets), those inhabiting the opposite world will be depicted as bizarre, misplaced beings conducting reversal movement.
Applied visually, it’s pretty damn cool. A rappel propelling the user up the building, one glorious leap after another. A fight scene that devolves between two people, practically acting out a choreographed pre-destined dance where the kinetic motions go hand in hand. There's even strategic use of the inversion to blow up a building, demolished differently in each dimension, at the exact time the structure is fully intact in both dimensions.
I could honestly watch a frame-by-frame montage of all those scenes. This is a return to the cinematic experience, sounds blaring and details sharp, that has been dismal in the year of 2020. I'll get back to that later.
Strangely, the first half of the movie is somewhat dull due to a lack of the aforementioned and instead oversaturated with dialogue and story pacing. It devolves into more of a rambling, stumbling into small pools of action but not quite submerged into it.
What’s more of a headache-inducer is, I guess, Nolan snuck into the sound mixing booth, cranking BGM and foley up tenfold over the dialogue (allegedly/in theory/etc.). I was left only able to process about 60% of the audio while just connecting the dots from educated guessing.
But then comes the second half.
Where the Inversion goes BEYOND a movie element
At the climax of the movie, everything tonally changes when the Protagonist directly confronts the bizarre inverted world. The incredible reverse visuals are more abundant, along with high-paced action overtaking world-building dialogue. The details align to past familiar events, all of it maintaining this spectacular momentum.
It's like if I grabbed a bottle of orange juice, poured it in to a crystal clear glass, and at the same time the orange liquid was flying back up into the carton. The porous shapes, like these events, are connecting to create this mesmerizing infinite whirlpool. My favorite part, however, remains to be the inversion of a german suplex hold (I can explain it but it wouldn't do the scene justice).
(There we go.)
I was on the edge of my seat and frequently turning to my wife to say, “This is so damn cool.”
Because it is. Tenet displays inversion in its story beautifully, and it somehow matches that in the movie's quality. A mediocre first half transitioning to a spectacular climax.
Cue credits. Even as I walked to the theater and left the faded Egyptian structure, Tenet flung me back to a nostalgia that welled my heart up. Like finding your favorite toy, covered in the dust particles floating around the forgotten space, that you thought you had lost as a child.
Only to be unintentionally forgotten, months later. Tenet, for many, would be the first movie out in cinema that people have clamored to see. In our current time, a different meaning shines through this piece of cinema.
And with the recent scarcity of moviegoing experiences (and an asinine attempt for some to do a $30 digital movie pass), this brings us to Tenet’s significant impact as a piece of cinema. It is more than Nolan’s ambitious perspective on time and space sprinkled throughout, but a return to the form of everyday life to an extent. A glimmer of inversion between this year and the previous.
That's my take. How the definition of a cinema, or any media, can be altered by not just an interpretation of the narrative, but its place in time alongside current events.
Supposedly, and to my surprise, Tenet is still in theaters as of the date of this blog post. If you can handle social distancing regulations, go check out Tenet. Or any other movie that’s out right now to remember a fraction of these good days. I heard drive-ins are making a big comeback.
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