“Tenet” (M) *

FOR several months, local cinemas have displayed publicity for writer/director Christopher Nolan’s behemoth sci-fi, fantasy, actioner, end-of-the-world movie with overtones of wealth-based class distinction. It’s arrived. Imagine a lemon chocolate sponge cake full of fruit and nuts, cooked by deep-frying in hot oil. Eergh!

The IMDb estimates that it has cost Nolan’s backers $US205 million. If you look at it hard enough, it’s possible to discern a sort of, kind of message about the future of our planet. 

But you’ve got to look really hard among its complex elements. In particular, you need to work out whether what’s going on is now, in the past, or yet to happen.

It’s not completely without merit. A long sequence involving a gaggle of heavy trucks led by a splendid fire engine along a freeway is exciting and sets some sort of benchmark for future action movies. Where would movies be these days without cameras mounted on drones?

Who’s in it? Probably not as many actual people as are actually visible rushing about the screen in various military-style manoeuvres. 

Playing the principal good guy, known only as The Protagonist, is John David Washington. As Andrei the baddest baddie, Kenneth Branagh shouts a lot. As Andrei’s much put-upon wife Kat, Paris-born to a Polish dad and an Irish mom and Melbourne-raised Elizabeth Debicki looks delectable. IMDb lists her first of an essentially male cast. IMDb got it right. Ms Debicki’s enchanting neck reminds me of Anne Boleyn’s remark – “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck“.

Nolan directs with a fondness for destruction – characters, cars, buildings, a Boeing 747, once the queen of the skies but now fit only to taxi into a disposable airport building. He shows wrecks of other buildings then runs the film backwards to show them before demolition. It’s a trick that quickly begins to pall.

After watching “Tenet” in company with four others, I saw another film at another cinema where I asked the box office girl what sort of patronage “Tenet” had drawn earlier that day. It had been more than five. And her next words confirmed an aspect that had troubled me through much of it. Her patrons had complained about the quality of the sound. The dialogue came out muffled, garbled, to the extent that it really was hard to figure out just what the film was trying to tell us aurally that its images couldn’t do.

If you simply must see “Tenet”, I suggest you empty your bladder before it starts and bring a cut lunch. It runs for 154 minutes. I’ve seen longer movies but none of them as ultimately disappointing.

At all cinemas