the 20 of 2020
1 Tenet
You have to admire Christopher Nolan’s mettle. Not only did he and Warner Bros commit to releasing his $200 millionplus blockbuster theatrically when such heroes as James Bond, Wonder Woman and Maverick were all cowering behind the sofa, but he also hit us with his biggest mind-scrambler since Memento: a sci-spy actioner with physics and philosophy to go with its sexy suits and kamikaze car chases.
On one level, it was standard stuff, as a CIA agent we know only as the Protagonist (John David Washington) joined another, even-more-top-secret espionage outfit to trot the globe (India, Oslo, Italy, Russia) in an effort to stave off a terrorist threat, or perhaps even save the world. The Protagonist’s gallivanting brought him into contact with a British intelligence officer (Robert Pattinson), an Indian arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia), and a dastardly Anglo-Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) with a sad, beautiful, but oh-so-capable wife (Elizabeth Debicki)… But such genre tropes acted as much-needed handrails given the world (-building) in Tenet was to spin so far off its axis it made that tilting-corridor scrap in Inception seem like a stroll in the park.
As everyone knows by now, ’s trump card was its concept of ‘time inversion’, whereby objects can be sent from the future back to the present. For those wanting to understand what, exactly, that meant, there was a plethora of Time Inversion For Idiots guides published after the film’s release, meaning we could all start dropping phrases like “reverse entropy” and “effect followed by cause” like we knew what we were talking about. Scientists were co-opted
