Tenet reviewed by Mark Kermode

well i went to see tenet um i mean i've been really looking forward to go and see it and going back to the cinema i had seen a few films in the cinema before it um and in fact i saw it in the same day that i saw new mutants i saw this in the morning so the first thing is i enjoyed it it was a big spectacular well-made movie that i was seeing in a cinema and i saw in a very nice cinema with you know great social distancing and you know everyone being very compliant and that was that was really good so that experience was terrific i enjoyed being in the hands of christopher nolan who is a director that i trust and also a director who i trust to trust his audience i said you know on the subject of inception that it's a film that doesn't talk down to its audience it imagines that the audience will keep up um uh i really like the performances i thought donald washington's a great lead i thought elizabeth dubiki does actually does really well with a role i know some people have uh troubles with the problems with i think we'll hear from that in the correspondence later on robert pattinson's great fun kenneth branagh being being the kind of i mean honestly you've seen the clips of him doing well that is the performance that he does it is so incredibly incredibly sinister it's just just great fun typical party was really charismatic looks great you know i know that they originated on 70 mil and imax um and the sound was was big and you know and so you know a big cinema experience but i know there's been a lot of stuff spoken about problems with hearing some of the dialogue and i have to say that i did share some of those concerns there is a lot of noise going on in the background there is a lot of dialogue and there were lines that got lost and here's the problem it a lot of the time that wouldn't matter but when you've got a film which asks you to pay such close attention to detail there is no such thing as a throwaway comment i don't believe that there is a single line in tenet that you could actually get rid of with it being inconsequential because of the way that nolan who has worked on this script for ages and age and ages put it together so it did bother me that some of the what comes down to exposition was muffled and that it is a problem with tenet that you really need to hear every single word now i don't know whether everyone has had the same experience but i know that i'm not the only one to say that there were times i was thinking okay this stuff being said here that i'm not getting and that does bother me um the thing i found most interesting was the thing that actually we talked about before the film was made because of the title the palindromic structure and there were these ideas but you know whether or not the whole film would be palindromic which it doesn't turn out to be but i loved the set pieces in which you essentially see the same scene from two different angles one going one way and then seeing it again going the other way there is a there's a car chase which features very heavily in the trailer in which this works particularly well however in the final confrontation the final set piece i did find myself going hang on hang on again why is why why is that going forward and that going backwards and i had a sense that i'm sure all of this makes sense because i'm sure that nolan knows exactly why everyone is doing everything at the moment they're doing it but i don't and in fact there was a point when i thought okay i i've what i'm gonna have to do i'm gonna have to come back and see this again i will go back and see it again because i just actually didn't i do i did find myself going hold on why is that there why is that who's where's that why get you know and i said because i trust nolan i'm sure it all matches up but it wasn't matching up for me but this is this brings me to the central hesitation that i have about it having said all those things about how much i enjoyed it in the prestige which is you know for me the kind of you know top of the knowledge tree the we're left wondering at the end of the film which of several possible truths is true in fact recently i just read a brilliant essay which suggested that the whole cloning thing is a mcguff it's not that's not what's happening in fact the whole thing is that because there's so much stuff in the film about you're looking for the trick but you're looking in the wrong place you know listen to what this character says you're looking in the wrong place and i thought that was fascinating because you can read the prestige in a number of different ways at the end of inception you know is he awake is he asleep is the spinning top you know is it starting to wobble or or isn't it the problem for me is that i came away from tenet with loads of questions but the questions were technical rather than philosophical they're mechanical why is he going forward when that's going backwards how does an inverse bullet actually work and these are problems i'm sure could be saved it could be solved if not by a second viewing but then by third viewing and i'm sure that if christopher nolan was there and you were pressing pause you go hang on why is that why is that and he would have an answer for every single thing but the answers are less philosophically interesting than for example the reverse narrative of memento or the dream state narrative of inception or the magic trick narrative of prestige so i came out of it thinking okay i'm definitely gonna go back and see that again i did enjoy watching it i have many many questions but the questions are mainly what and how as opposed to the wider question of what does it mean and for me the best nolan films are about that wider question and that's what gives me the emotional involvement and on the first viewing i didn't get that gut emotional involvement that i have had with previous nolan films so i do have many questions i did enjoy it i do want to go back and see it again but the questions are for me primarily mechanical rather than philosophical okay so we'll come to uh your correspondence about tenet the other side of the news just in 30 seconds a friend said to me is it not a failure of storytelling that almost everybody is saying i have to go back and see it again should it not be possible to get and understand and follow comprehend first time round well you know i i think there is something in that um i mean i think one of the great things about inception is that it's a really complicated story but it does it does explain itself um i don't have a problem with going back to see um let's see tenant again because i'm i'm actually i mean i love all those tiny why me things i'm you know it it's that's something that works for me right yeah but you know what i mean by timing why me it's like it it's it's the you know it's the austin powers thing but i think there is a legitimate question which is if you're i mean i uh my uh i've spoken to somebody who went to see it who said this is what they said they said i came out of it feeling stupid and i said why they said because i didn't understand it and i said well it's okay but what point did you stop understanding it and i said well that's exactly the same point that i think everyone stops understanding it and then the question is okay is the problem then our inability to keep up or that the storytelling isn't clear enough okay and i will i'd actually don't know what the correct answer that is but i think it's not that we're all you know um i said i love the fact that christopher nolan imagines that an audience can keep up with things okay it just may be a storytelling issue if we can't

Channel: kermodeandmayo

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Keywords: Kermode and Mayo, Film Review, Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio, Mark Kermode, Simon Mayo, Tenet, Christopher Nolan

Id: IINMq-p7qTE

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020