In the summer of 2020, with the world gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic, cinemas faced an existential crisis. Forced to close for weeks – even months in some cases – many struggled financially. When they did re-open, distributors were cagey about what should be released to cinemas forced now to reduce capacity by up to two thirds. A package of older favourites was put into release to lure punters back but what people really wanted was the new films they’d been hyped to look forward to. Disney’s Artemis Fowl and Mulan both went to their new streaming service Disney+, largely by-passing cinemas altogether. Bill & Ted Face the Music had simultaneous theatrical and VoD release but most of the year’s big ticket items were delayed – The James Bond film No Time to Die and Marvel’s Black Widow were among the biggest casualties, release days slipping repeatedly.

When cinemas were up and running again in most parts of the world (the primary US market was still patchy and unreliable) great hopes were placed on Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (the palindromic title is a very deliberate choice), a $200 million brain-teaser that had its release date shunted around the schedules before being unleashed on a cinema-going public hungry for new spectacle in August 2020. Was it worth the wait? Up to a point, yes. It certainly delivers on the promised spectacle but the plot is often wilfully obscure, is riddled with holes and in the end doesn’t really amount to all that much.

Essentially a globe-trotting heist thriller, Tenet follows an unnamed agent (john David Washington) – he refers to himself as “the protagonist” at the end of the film – is seemingly killed by terrorists while on a mission to retrieve a fellow spy from the Kiev Opera House which has been over-run by terrorists. He wakes to find the mission was a test to see if he had what it takes to investigate a secretive organisation known only as Tenet. His first port of call is a scientist, Barbara (Clémence Poésy), who shows him a bullet whose entropy has been “inverted” allowing it to move backward through time and the protagonist traces the bullets to a Mumbai arms dealer, Priya Singh (Dimple Kapadia). Aided by fellow agents Neil (Robert Pattinson) and Mahir (Himesh Patel), the protagonist’s investigations lead him to Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), the estranged wife of a dying Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who has received technology from the future and is planning to use it to destroy the world.

Nolan has long played temporal games in his films, from the non-linear Following (1998) through the reversed narrative of Memento (2000) to the time travel of Interstellar (2014) and the overlapping time periods of Dunkirk (2017). In Tenet (where playing tricks with time isn’t called time travel but “inversion”), Nolan plays tricks with time even inside the narrative – in one clever scene Kat’s explanation of a Freeport at Oslo is intercut with the protagonist explaining the same thing to Neil and with the latter’s initial reconnaissance mission to the building.

So Tenet is definitely of a piece with the rest of Nolan’s filmography though it is by far and away the least interesting of his work. It’s not bad by any means – far from it. But for all its head-scratching cleverness it still feels insubstantial compared to his previous science fiction epics, Inception (2010) and Interstellar.

And like Inception, Tenet feels like a very expensive, two-and-a-half hour audition reel for a future James Bond film, an audition that Nolan passes with flying colours. The film is a technical triumph, from Hoyte Van Hoytema’s gorgeous photography to Ludwig Göransson’s pervasive score (Nolan’s usual composer of choice, Hans Zimmer was busy scoring Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2020)) and the inflated running time never feels bloated – we’re barely given a moment to catch out breath and check our notes before we’re on to the next spectacular set piece.

Nolan can often be a cold director, keener on boggling the mind than engaging the emotions. He’ll thrill and excite you with the outstanding action scenes – from the opening storming of the Kiev Opera House through a runaway Boeing 747 at Oslo airport and subsequent time-inverted fist-fight to the climactic battle in which time runs backwards and forwards in the same shot, but he often leaves his characters stranded, there just to explain the plot’s labyrinthine machinations. The convoy hijack in Tallinn is hair-raising stuff, with its inverted car chase that becomes a plot point moments later, but sometimes the cleverness of the action works against the film. In the climax, with two teams of Tenet troops attacking the same location in a “temporal pincer movement” the fact that one team is travelling backwards in time from the mission’s critical moment suggests that it all went well (if it hadn’t, someone coming back from the key moment would surely have said something), rather deflating Nolan’s attempts to generate suspense.

The bits in between the action scenes are mostly taken up with the characters explaining to each other (and us) what’s going on and as a consequence, those characters are hard to warm to though the cast are all very good, gamely trying to breath some life into their thinly written roles. John David Washington isn’t given much to work with, not even so much as a character name, but he brings a muscular physicality to the role, a degree of charisma that one suspects wasn’t in the script, looks great in a string of sharp suits and handles the rough and tumble of the action scenes with real aplomb – his dad Denzil had been here before of course in Tony Scott’s time-twisting Déjà Vu (2006).

The acting honours go to Elizabeth Debicki as Kat and Robert Pattinson who is very good as the shady Neil. Kenneth Branagh is less impressive and poor Clémence Poésy turns up to play Tenet‘s “Q”, mainly there to give the first of the film’s many technobabble-heavy expository info-dumps before disappearing from the film never to be seen again. And of course Michael Caine is on hand is a cameo to fill in yet more of the back story and gets the film’s only moment of humour (when the protagonist accuses the British of having a monopoly on snobbery, Caine’s British security service’s Michael Crosby tells him “Well, not a monopoly, more of a controlling interest.”)

Nolan has long professed a love for the work of science fiction writer William Gibson (he said that the city folded over itself in Inception was inspired by The Spindle, the orbiting city in Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)) and there are times when Tenet is irresistibly reminiscent of the industrial espionage elements of Gibson’s work. There’s a whiff of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004) too, another cerebral take on time travel and which feels like a spiritual cousin of Tenet, though one also can’t help but be reminded of the Red Dwarf episode Backwards (1989) in which Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten find themselves on an alternate Earth where time’s flow is reversed.

“Try to keep up” is the protagonist’s advice at one point and he might just as well have been talking to us as to a fellow character. It’s the sort of film where even a split second’s inattentiveness will spell disaster – miss one of the key character lectures by checking the time, mentally drifting off or taking a toilet break and the rest of the film will be a complete mystery to you. In some respects, though the action scenes were literally made for the big screen – as with earlier films, Nolan shot some of them in the massive IMAX format – it might have made more sense to have released the film direct to streaming services. That would have allowed viewers to do as the characters in the film often do, invert time, rewind to catch up on missed plot details. But Nolan insisted that the film get a theatrical release (he is said to have a clause in his contract requiring his films open theatrically first) and it enjoyed a strong opening thanks to product-starved cinema-goers desperate for anything new, though critical responses were mixed.

Tenet may be Nolan’s weakest film to date but it surely the one that demands the most re-watching. Little details are easy to miss in the plot’s kinetic rush (the tag on a backpack is an important clue) and things that at first seem incomprehensible are revealed to be clearer, though sometimes less important, on second viewing. It’s second tier Nolan perhaps – but then second tier Nolan is often better than most director’s can manage on top form.