Put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it. (No spoilers.)

Tenet
Rated M- Science fiction themes, violence and coarse language
Ticket purchased

I was a little intrigued heading back to the cinemas for the first time in a slowly-inching-towards-post-pandemic world. This isn’t because I thought the movie-going experience would have drastically changed; going during the day almost always means sitting in a deserted cinema, which suits my not-so-well-hidden inner misanthrope just fine.

No, the question was a bit more mundane: in the publicity materials for Tenet, did Warner Brothers do the old trick of giving away the entire movie in the trailer? The film was delayed multiple times before its eventual theatrical release, so it seems like we’ve been seeing trailers and promos for months. Luckily, my fears were unfounded, and the scene that appears to give away the movie’s twist occurs barely 15 minutes in.

Then the real fun begins.

Our protagonist doesn’t even get a name, although he does at least get to acknowledge in as many words that he is The Protagonist. The lead is John David Washington (Ballers, BlackKklansman), a CIA operative who takes the standard-issue cyanide pill after an operation goes wrong. Recovered by the authorities, he’s given a code-word (“tenet”, natch) and a new mission.

As revealed in multiple trailers, certain objects (mostly weaponry or components) are travelling backwards in time rather than forwards, a property known as inversion. The technology doesn’t seem to exist, and so the protagonist’s job is to work out where these are coming from- and why, and indeed when. Along the way he meets a Russian arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh), his wife (Elizabeth Debicki), and a contact from another intelligence agency, Neil (Robert Pattinson).

Tenet races through setting up its premise, which seemed jarring in the theatre. It spends far less time explaining the technology, and just asks you to accept that “some stuff is going backwards, don’t touch it”- which seemed odd in the first half of the film, like some scenes had been cut for time. But by not going into too much Star Trek-speak, it does open up the second half’s pacing. At times the film feels almost like a Bond flick, with car chase following fight scene following travel to an exotic location. (If the IMDB notes are to be believed, this was director Christopher Nolan’s deliberate stylistic choice.)

It also means that as you start to recognise the plot points, the film unravels; things that seemed odd or out of place the first time you saw them, or details from earlier scenes, suddenly untangle themselves in your head. It’s not an incredibly complicated film, and the mysteries and clues are hardly Agatha Christie-level, but if you like having those “aha! So that’s what that thing was doing” moments at the movies, you’ll find Tenet pretty rewarding.

It is perhaps not as rewarding or as deep as Nolan’s other films, like Inception; I mostly found myself marvelling at the technical aspects of the film and how the later action sequences were shot, rather than trying to work out the loose threads of the story. But on the way out of the theatre I was indeed still working my way back through the film in my head. It stuck with me, and on that basis alone I’d suggest readers give Tenet a look.