Christopher Nolan
Tenet

The most cruel time is the one Nolan runs to pack everything into two and a half hours. We travel dazed on the roller coaster of a complicated and compressed plot, suffocating. 150 minutes of effort for our neurons, of almost unbroken paroxysmal tension, of thundering, titanic music that seems to want to burst our eardrums.

An immense and beautiful masturbation from disjointed action cinema like a Rubik's cube, amplified, reverberated upon itself to the point of obsession. Espionage and brawls, car chases, and shootouts, even love and domestic violence. Everything enters the vortex of paradoxes and temporal distortions and comes out transfigured.

The price of the show is immense, a pact with the devil to make sense "a posteriori" of scenes that initially appear anarchic, random. Nolan's madness lies in wanting to explain almost scientifically every gesture, every object, every word of his chrono-palindromic delusion. Yet it's not enough to understand everything.

The value of such a film is measured in the interval that extends between understanding nothing (but it's impossible, there are explanations) and wanting to verify every single step, to track it mathematically in a graph of the absurd. Nolan triumphs when our synapses seize between what is rationally explained and what eludes, that goes beyond. We must enjoy the spectacle (which is unprecedented in the way, I believe, but I don't want to give anything away) and the vertigo of paradoxes, looking down into the abyss but staying in the light.

Cinema is also this, a hyperbolic pretext to shoot that particular scene that obsesses the director. The laws of physics? Who cares! Let's invent a world, a time, a future.

Here we are at the most dizzying peak of Nolan's vision, but the higher you climb, the more the falls risk being ruinous. And after a first viewing, one is inclined to say that the sacrifices laid on the altar of spectacle are very precious, costing us dearly. And I'm not talking about the sci-fi delusions, but precisely about the more classical narrative plane. There are several hurried passages that are scattered in the already difficult comprehension of the central theme; some espionage double-agent weavings do not fully convince. The moment for decantation is missing, we keep chasing the doubt that things don't hold up. And this doesn't benefit the viewing. The logical challenge, yes, the confusion, no.

Perhaps a second viewing will smooth the edges, but I fear at the same time it will take away the charm from the more properly action and sci-fi text. Because the vertigo felt the first time is never the same the second, the very beauty of these films lies in not understanding them completely, in the journey you make with your mind while the sequences flow quickly. Like Inception, revisited, it seems like a great choreography with characters as extras, crash test dummies.

Even more so now that Nolan writes everything on his own, without the help of his brother, and already in Dunkirk he seemed to have chosen to almost deliberately ignore the portraits. In Tenet there are a couple of good actors who lift the human component of the story (I adore Kenneth Branagh, a true villain), but the feeling remains that Nolan uses people as if they were gears, numbers. He is not truly interested in the human side, even if he seems to overemphasize it.

All this is within the acceptable price to pay to ride his roller coasters. And there are no others like it around.