Nosferatu (2024)

Come To Me, My Melancholic Baby

or

"He's Italian!?"

Robert Eggers' new remake of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is respectful of the original—it's on the director's list of favorite films—but allows for Eggers' darker interpretations of myths, his sexualization of those myths, as well as his emphasis (as with David Lynch) on texture. 

 

Murnau's original (if we can use the phrase ironically) was a knock-off of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the names changed to protect the filmmakers from copyright considerations—although they were sued by the Stoker estate—and is genuinely creepy, owing to the German Expressionist manner of lighting and filming. Plus, Murnau was an extraordinarily clever filmmaker who could use rudimentary special and camera effects to create arresting images. But, then, so is Eggers, and his version of Nosferatu* is respectful, but also tries to achieve Murnau's evocation of dread through its own means, given the advantages of modern cinematography and (something Murnau didn't have access to) sound. More on that in a bit.

Eggers also has an advantage in that he's had over a hundred years of cinema to be inspired by in the years between Murnau's version and his. Watching his Nosferatu one can see the debt he owes to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (with its shadow-play and use of miniatures), but also in the addition of making the attraction between Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) a predestined certainty—Ellen has been diagnosed as "melancholic" for her sleep-walking and agitation in her youth and it only intensifies once her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) falls into the orbit of the Count. This "love for the ages" concept wasn't originally part of the "Nosferatu" heritage.

The other major influence is from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Eggers shares Kubrick's love of framing his shots with the one-point-perspective, but here he employs it the way it was done in the Stephen King adaptation—that one-point-perspective leads the eye to a negative space, which is why the effect is so creepy and audience-disorienting. Here, all those tangential lines may lead only to an empty spot on the horizon...or a castle in the distance. There are whole sequences that give you a vertiginous feeling, as if one could fall into that screen, pulled by gravity and it's not a pleasant experience. For a horror movie, it's ideal. Unnerving, but ideal.

And he does something else: his camera may be fluid, but it's also austere. He'll frequently do a 360° turn of the camera and do it slowly, determinedly, placing the audience in the perspective of the character watching his environment, dreading whatever might be at the edge of the frame. It's been awhile since I've seen either movie, so I can't remember if it was Murnau or Carl Theodore Dryer's Vampyr where the camera makes similarly slow circular movements that, rather than make you wonder why you're making the trip, fill you with dread. They're nice touches and are nice little updates to the story-telling.

And it's a familiar story—anyone familiar with Stoker's "Dracula" knows it. A solicitor is sent to the castle of a count to finalize the selling of an estate. The man is sent through the machinations of his boss who is under the throes of the Count's influence, as the man is, in fact, a vampire. He makes his way to the new estate and begins to set upon the citizens there, most prominently, the woman closest to that poor solicitor.

This leads to visits by doctors, who, being scientists, cannot explain the malady and so a specialist in the "unconventional" is called upon, and it is he who deduces that the plague in their midst is a vampire and must be dispatched. This being Nosferatu, the names are changed, but the situations are basically similar. "Dracula" takes place in England; Nosferatu takes place in Germany. All the arcana we associate with vampires is stripped to the bone—no silver bullets or crucifixes (much in display but ineffectual), not even a clove of garlic is to be seen. Those killed by vampires die and stay dead, and although a stake through the heart is effective to kill them (if one comes prepared), the surest way is to distract him with a nice virginal meal until the sun comes up and...that vampire's toast.

The acting is quite good, with particular nods to the three leads, Hoult, Depp and Skarsgård. Hoult has the unenviable task of having to act like he has no idea what the audience is fully expecting to happen, but manages to make his Thomas Hutter still sympathetic when he makes the effort to complete his job even after all the signs tell him him should just turn around and go home. And Depp's performance is just plain scary. Her fits look truly traumatic with her eyes rolling back in her head and her body contorting and spasming into Exorcist-like exercises.

And Skarsgård's Count Orlok has been carefully distanced from Max Schreck's rat-like vampire. Described as "very old and very eccentric...he has one foot in the grave already" Orlok is a hulking figure, stooped and wrapped in a dark bear-like coat with a coarse, brushy mustache. He is barely visible in his first scenes, just a overpowering presence, but the more you see, the more he resembles a rotting corpse, his skin flayed off in places and as far afield from any semblance to a romantic figure (ala 1979's Dracula) as you could get.

But, it's his vocal performance more than anything that's fascinating. Speaking in a low, rattly and sepulchral growl (augmented electronically so it fills every speaker in the theater) every syllable is e-nun-ci-ated slowly only to be broken off by the driest asthmatic breath-intake you can imagine this side of an iron lung. If the theater allows such things, I would take a big bag of cough-drops or lozenges. Super-size the soft-drinks.

Face it, it's those new approaches to things are what you're looking to see the movie for, because the story has been done to death...and after...and has more lives than Christopher Lee's Dracula. Just when you think you can't squeeze any more blood out of the thing,** it comes back to haunt you. So, just remember: you're the one who invites him back.

 

In the meantime, Eggers' version will do...and do quite well...until the next vampire movie rises from the grave.

* His version? There have been other versions of Nosferatu—aside from the official remakes of the Dracula novel—including one that was released just a year ago. There's also Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre and also 2000's Shadow of the Vampire, which told a tale of the making of the original with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe (who's also in Eggers' film) as Nosferatu player Max Schreck. Plus, little nods to the original can be found in vampire designs of the 1979 TV-version of "Salem's Lot" and in Taika Waititi's original What We Do in the Shadows.

 

** Geez, I didn't even mention the ghastly sucking sounds he makes when he's feeding on his victims.... 

The Fall Guy (2024)

"That Happily-Ever-After Stuff? Unsubscribed!"

or

"What's the Message of My Films?" "Nihilism is a Valid World-view?"

 

Watching Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt's prickly banter when they were presenting at the Oscars this past year made one actually think that their upcoming movie The Fall Guy might be somewhat entertaining. Bear in mind that I'm one of those crusty souls with no heart and no sense of humor (and no taste, apparently) who is not a fan of director David Leitch. Or of producer David Leitch. I stopped watching the "John Wick" series after the first one, which I did not enjoy and I suffered through it wondering if it was, in fact, meant to be a comedy. I mean...c'mon...the stunts were only believable if you weren't considering what would logically be the collateral damage outside the frame. And Wick goes off because someone kills his dog. Really? That would be funny...if it wasn't so damned dumb. I mean, they made fun of it in Deadpool. You know, the good Deadpool...the first one...the one David Leitch didn't direct. I figure you have to have a screw loose to really get off on these films. That they're successful and have spawned their own series of films only further makes me hang my head and despair about the future of the medium.

In this, a loosely-based spin-off of "The Fall Guy" TV show from the 1980's, Gosling plays Colt Seavers (played on TV by Lee Majors*). At the beginning of the film, he's a successful stunt-man, doubling for star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a big box-office draw, and he is having a heating-up relationship with camera op Jody Moreno (Blunt) until he's called to repeat a stunt—a wire-drop inside a high-rise edifice—that goes wrong and he's put in the hospital with a busted back. He emerges 18 months later parking cars at an L.A. Mexican restaurant and swearing off his stunt-man career. 

 

Besides, his phone isn't ringing, the one sure sign that nobody wants you in L.A..

Until, one day, the producer of those Tom Ryder movies, Gail Meyer, (Hannah Waddingham) calls to implore him that his services are once again needed—apparently Ryder has disappeared, whereabouts unknown (something Colt could care less about), but the signing bonus is the movie is being directed by first-time director Jody Moreno—former camera op, former flame. Colt gets on a plane to Australia where the film is shooting.

Told by Meyer that old flame Jody requested him specifically, Colt is sucker-punched when he finds out a) Jody didn't ask for him and b) she's surprised to see at all and c) she's pissed at how they broke up by not breaking up—Colt didn't return phone calls, didn't reach out, didn't do any of those things that men don't like to do, especially when they're fragile, physically and mentally. She proves her affection for him by having him repeatedly set on fire** and trip-wired to be slammed into a rock. Over and over again. Colt's way of responding to all of this is with his laconic "thumbs up" after surviving each take. Jody hates that. But, she still makes him do all that stunt work with a broken back. ("Get...on...a...plane, Colt!")

Um...you can see the crew in the sunglasses..."Props!"

So, immediately I began to question why Colt doesn't just leave as he was obviously there under false pretenses, and, if not the first thing, the second thing I would do after finding that out would be to verify if I was getting paid. Because, obviously, somebody in the front office is lying to him and if they're lying to him about that, there are probably all sorts of things they can't be trusted on. But, by this time, I had given up on the movie being any good and just hoping that it would eke out some entertainment.

It is, on occasion, because Gosling and Blunt are pro's and they can squeeze out entertainment no matter how necrotic the script is.

But, that's not how movies work these days. Entertaining as that may be, what the movie audience apparently wants, and the movie is determined to give them, is wall-to-wall practical action sequences. Things go boom, guys do gymnastic falls and fights, big puffs of smoke and dirt go up in the air for no real apparent reason, sparks fly. A lot. There are spectacular falls where Gosling pops up into the frame as if he did the stunt. Standard Operating Procedure. The movie is a professed love-letter to stunting people and, sure, I'm all for that. I'd rather see practical effects than CGI animation any day. Employ the hell out of 'stunt-people. But, pay them a living wage and make sure they have insurance, first. I mean, stunting is NOT a lost art. The only difference is it's being done in front of green-screens now.

It just doesn't look all that impressive when it's shown being filmed. Leitch doesn't exactly pull off the stunt that the story-stunts are more dangerous than the in-the-movie stunts (and they're still trying to make us believe the guy who cracked his spine a year and a half ago can do these things).

Two things did strike my mind while I was watching the thing scroll in one cortex and out the other: Movies save SO...MUCH...MONEY making a movie about making movies! You don't have to have sets, just people milling around with cameras and eating craft services, and walkie-talkies and cell-phones. You don't have to hide anything, or make believe it's real, and you can even shoot the dressing-trailers. It's so cost-effective as to be ridiculous.

The Fall Guy doesn't have a plot, so much as a thin thread to string between stunt sequences, like some of the really bad Roger Moore James Bond movies or the Mission: Impossible series...or like the Wick films. That seems so ass-backwards a way of making movies—well, of making movies that mean anything, anyway. For someone who sees movies as an art form, and its own unique form of communication, it's really a drag to see a movie like this.

 

The best you can say is: "Well, people were employed..."

Humor example: Blunt and Gosling are talking back and forth about story-approach, 

when she suddenly asks "What about split-screen?"

And before you can say "Oh, they're not..." (which I did),

they go split-screen. 

Laugh? (I didn't)

 

I never watched the TV version of "The Fall Guy"; this is as far as I ever got....

 

* Does Lee have a cameo? Yes, along with Heather Thomas in the post-credit scene (if you haven't walked out by then!)

**  Because she's an "old flame" "carrying a torch"? ...am I looking for sub-text that isn't there? Yeah, pretty sure I am!

 

 

Anna Karenina (2012)

Struggling with writing a review of Cyrano, the latest from director Joe Wright. So, in the meantime, here are a couple reviews from his past work that I haven't put up yet.

Written at the time of the film's release...

 

Artificial Intelligence
or
Anna! Karenina! The! Musical!

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" is considered by many the greatest novel ever written, and has been adapted so many times (two of them starring Greta Garbo!), one is tempted to name any version "The Last Remake of Anna Karenina." So, the task for director Joe Wright and scripter Tom Stoppard must have seemed daunting, or as one of Zsa Zsa Gabor's later husbands stated it: "You know what you have to do, you just have to find a way of making it interesting."

Well, this one is interesting, alright. And it hues closely to Tolstoy's novel in the way that a CliffsNotes Edition sticks close. All the plot points are there, the characters whittled down to their bare essences, or eliminated altogether, and breezily delivered in a theatrical manner, save some significant exceptions. Truth is, Wright makes this version of Anna Karenina the way Baz Luhrmann would, as a grand, operatic experience staged in an extraordinarily choreographed with the emphasis on the "arch" (as in "playfully and affectedly roguish") in Proscenium Arch.

Jim Emerson had a fascinating article* (based around Skyfall) on his "Scanners" blog on the difference between a "theatrical" film and a theatrical film and its use of space as defined by the limitations of the frame and a stage directors' tendency to reflect that frame with its own limitations resembling the dimensions of a stage. 

Wright fully embraces that concept and goes further; for the main story of the hoi-polloi and their social and political gamesmanship, all of the action takes place within the false spaces of a theater (at times even using the rafters as locations for traditional street-scenes): train and carriage scenes are decidedly set-bound with no effort made to reflect a "real" world outside the windows; transitions are made "in-camera" without editing, so a very stagy and choreographed bureaucratic work set-up with synchronized rubbing stamping (set to Dario Marianelli's interesting score) segues to a restaurant scene by merely having the "extras" trade in their black business suits for waiter-whites; a formal society ball is not an intricate commingling of dancers that Wright so effectively engineered in Pride and Prejudice, but is an elaborate ballet, where the participants barely touch and their hand movements are intricately swanning in nothing that approaches a traditional dance (at times, to keep track of the principals, the foreground dancers in our field of vision "freeze" to better make out the focus of our attention). Like Francis Ford Coppola's set-bound version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, It's all very elaborate, "stagey," false, and at times clever but, a lot of the time, merely "showy," like a musical with no libretto, something to separate this "Anna" from the more realistic, even if filmed in-studio, versions. 

The performances run that way, too. Keira Knightley is an exasperating Anna, conflicted but fatally committed to fully expressing whatever is on the surface of her heart. Her P & P co-star, Matthew McFadyen is a burlesque cousin Oblonsky, fatuously showy in a way that reminds of Kevin Kline performing a burlesque role. Jude Law—not one of my favorite performers—here is exceptional as Anna's cuckolded husband, and is so restrained and non-theatrical, that it sets him apart from almost every other performer, isolating him, and is a good short-hand way of showing why Anna might be dissatisfied with him. Olivia Williams has a small part as the Countess Vronsky, whose son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is the very florid object of fascination for Anna.

Anna (Keira Knightley) runs from Vronsky at the Ball
and experiences a little fore-lightening from an approaching train.
It's dangerous in a Joe Wright theater.

But, almost the entire film is deliriously fascinated with the artificiality that it undercuts the very real passion and consequences of actions of the people in the film, reducing them to "players" as opposed to human beings.

I say "almost" because Wright does change things up to "open up" the segments featuring Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and Kitty (Alicia Vikander), who already have their disappointing encounter with Vronsky and move on. When they reunite, their segments are set in a real world of sky, clouds and fields befitting the couple who exemplify wisdom, forbearance and patience. Wright puts them in our world, relegating the others to an artificial world that is essentially stage-managed (even at the end with a coda of Karenin and the remains of his family, it is contained in the stage-world that Wright has chosen to house his film.

It's different, even interesting in an oddly disrespectful manner, as the flightiness of the bourgeoisie and their concerns are merely shadow-play and window-dressing—it is true to an extent—but by pushing the metaphor so aggressively, it undercuts any feeling one has for the players in the majority of the film itself, and reveals itself as resembling the tut-tutting of the hypocrites who turn against Anna. I'm not sure that Tolstoy had that intention (even strained through Stoppard), and this film might have benefited  from a less facile presentation that required less stage-craft and something more resembling (I don't know) empathy?

The King's Man

Mannered Maketh Malarkey (Dulce et decorum est cogitare hanc pelliculam sugit)

or

The Prequel To End All Prequels

 

I wasn't a fan of Kingsman: The Secret Service, although I enjoyed most of the performances, particularly Taron Egerton's, I felt that it was pretty sloppy without much holding it together, although the satire was there and recognizable as such. It was meant to be a breezy jocular look at spy thrillers,  located somewhere in between the Bond Series and Austin Powers, hewing closer to the latter in terms of cleverness (or lack of it) and amping up the violence to the point that—despite containing the adage that "manners maketh man"—it became decidedly unmannerly.

 

One couldn't take it seriously and so any connection to a thriller goes right down the chute as the stakes are as high as they are in a "Looney Toons" cartoon. Samuel L. Jackson had it right in the first one by playing the arch-villain with a silly lisp, which has become his signature tic for showing he has no respect for the material he's playing—he certainly doesn't use it when hawking Capital One.

So outlandish actions and jolly good manners was the joke of the first two films, but director Matthew Vaughn's latest, The King's Man—boasting original material from Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek (good villain name, that)—goes back in time to show the origins of the secretive Kingsman organization that bypasses political discussion and goes right for the jugular. Why this was thought necessary is anyone's guess, but I suspect—with another movie featuring Egerton in the works at the same time—they may be offering material that will relate to the next sequel. There are a couple of prominent names in cameo's and perhaps they'll be part of the next one.

The film concerns the exploits of Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes and bloody good, if seeming like he's in the wrong movie), the Duke of Oxford, who, at the time of the film's opening is a former war officer now working for the Red Cross and inspecting a concentration camp in South Africa in 1902. He is there to see General Herbert Kitchener (Charles Dance) about the deplorable conditions and talk strategy. In the course of the visit, the party comes under attack and Oxford's wife Emily (who encouraged Oxford's humanitarian duties) is killed before the eyes of Oxford—who has been wounded in the attack—and their young son Conrad. With her dying breath, Emily swears Oxford to "protect our son, protect him from this world, and never let him see war again."

When Conrad grows to the age of 17 (and embodied by Harris Dickinson) is looking for a life of adventure, which his father vehemently opposes. He wants to join the Army when of age, but Oxford keeps him at home under the watchful eyes of associates Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and Polly (Gemma Arterton), who are crack spies and soldiers of fortune, but hide in plain sight as part of the Duke's staff. Presumably, it was so hard to hire good marksmen in that day. Oxford has good reason to be worried. Somewhere on an improbably high, flat and unscalable escarpment a group of terrible people are plotting to destroy the world and make money doing it. Headed by a Scottish separatist code-named The Shepherd, the group contains as members from around the globe including Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl) and Gavrilo Princip (Joel Basman). 

Oh, and Erik Jan Hanussen (Daniel Brühl).

Who? Well, I'll bet most audience-members don't know who Rasputin is, so don't feel bad. And I'm sure that a lot of them don't know the significance of Arch-Duke Ferdinand (played in the film—briefly, which is historically accurate, by Ron Cook).

Hell, ask the common man about World War I and you'll get a response like "World War II had a prequel?" or "Yeah, Wonder Woman was in it" Be that as it may, the group is trying to exacerbate the already bad relationship between three head-strong cousins, King George V (of England), Kaiser Wilhelm II (of Germany), and Tsar Nicholas II (of Russia), all played amusingly by Tom Hollander (bravo, sir!),* starting with the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand, and the poisoning of Nicholas' son Alexei.

In his attempts to protect his son Oxford nearly gets him killed protecting the Arch-Duke and taking out Rasputin. But, then, this film has a habit of having people saying things and doing something that is contrary to their words. Oxford makes grand speeches about colonialism and imperialism and the exploitation of the indigenous people, but his comfort in his class and power has him being a very good example of all that. The only folks who seem to actually mean what they say are the villains, who are all so single-mindedly evil that they barely register as real characters—these were all very powerful and influential people and they're treated like puppets in this film's Grand Scheme.

But, at least they're consistent. The movie, on the other hand, careers between goofiness and sanctimony. Words are meant to be taken seriously, but the action sequences not so—deft (and unbelievable) as they are. Rasputin, Oxford, Conrad and Shola have a three-to-one duel set to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, there's a weirdly impractical assault on that villain lair, and there's a World War I trench assault that, as completely unbelievable as it is, is still meant to be taken seriously if we're to have any feelings for the character.

It's a film of duplicity and two-facedness, delighting in "hilt-cams" and elaborate torpedo shots and a flash-zip of two years of World War I to see the the reduction of a hamlet town into a No Man's Land. Jeez, there's even an mustache to mustache edit in the thing. One starts to think that the film-makers are just so pleased with themselves and their own cleverness that they can do such little miracles that they don't see that the movie is clumsy and ham-fisted. So ham-fisted that the "surprise reveal" of "The Shepherd" is easily guessed just by the way shots are held unnecessarily before cutting away from them. Clever.
  

So clever it's stupid.

 

* Yes, it's true. Those heads of state were all related to each other (and you thought the Daniel Craig Bond movies were too in-bred!) No wonder the 20th century was so fucked up. And no wonder people wanted to do away with the Right of King's.

Tenet

Ohmigosh, it's a new movie...in a THEATER!

En-tropical Adventure ("Well, Try and Keep Up")
or
We Live in a Twilight World ("And There Are No Friends who Understand This Movie, Either")

Christopher Nolan finally gets to do his "James Bond" movie, but—being Christopher Nolan—it had to be with a twist. In this case it's the twist you find in a möbius strip for his "Yeah, you can only release this in theaters" spy/sci-fi hybrid Tenet.

And, yeah, at least for the first four/five viewings, it should only be seen in theaters. Having access to a "Rewind" button would only confuse the issue. Plus, the details...the details...some things will get lost on a small screen given some of the intricacies going on, and at times the film is so disorienting that a large screen will make you a bit more sure of what you're seeing.

Nolan likes to stretch the underpinnings of his movies, fracturing time-lines, setting up nesting dolls of narratives, and investigating the possibilities of the image and editing while maintaining a forward momentum. Here, though, he has it both ways.

The film begins with a terrorist attack on a Ukrainian opera house, the perpetrators appearing from the stage as if part of the performance. How they planned all this without somebody noticing off-site that a major counter-terrorist operation was being set up in the general area is one of those post-"Dark Knight" "just-go-with-it" sleights of hand that directors have been taking advantage of when going for spectacle rather than logic. But, Tenet is so full of such things that it would be better to switch one's mind off if one is to experience any enjoyment out of this.

During this sequence, Nolan has one train going forward and one back.
It's a sort of subliminal training for what we're about to see.

 

The operation is two-fold: the extraction of a personage from the scene and the retrieval of stolen plutonium and the situation is so dire that the agent we're focused on—played by John David Washington—basically has to make it up as he goes along. During the raid, he comes to understand that the plutonium is not as it appears and that, at some point, he is nearly shot by a bullet coming out of one of the auditorium steps. Part of his team is captured, and, rather than give anything away, he takes a cyanide pill. He dies.

Short movie.

He wakes up...from a medically-induced coma. He's told that he survived the cyanide...that his jaw has been rebuilt*...but he is officially "dead" and he is to recover and has been chosen for a special assignment as his willingness to take the pill rather than give away secrets makes him a valuable asset. A further briefing tells him there WAS no cyanide...("eh?"), but that his devotion and the planned mission are real. He is given a gesture—interlocking fingers—and the word "Tenet" ("It'll open the right doors. Some of the wrong ones, too" he's told in the evasive generalized way that passes for exposition in the film). 

"Is 'bunjee-jumpable' a word?"

He's taken to a facility—for a second briefing—of what his next assignment (his first as a dead man) is, more specifically what the mechanics of the assignment entails. Turns out the issue isn't plutonium, but a possible WWIII is the end-game. This turns out, also, not to be true, not in the strictest sense, but a world-ending scenario is involved. He is shown what caused that little surprise of the backwards-bullet at the Kiev Opera House was all about: that bullet was manufactured in the future with a technology that allows it to move backwards through time by means of its own inverted entropy. If that's confusing, the scientist studying the ammunition has a handy piece of non-advice that will work for the viewer: "Don't try to understand it. Feel it." Especially when you point a weapon and the bullet jumps back into the gun. The kick-back must be intense.

Already, this is a little headache-inducing. But, it would help if we recall an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" (Season 3 Episode 22—"The Staircase Implementation") and Section 9 from Dr. Sheldon Cooper's Roommate Agreement: If one of the roommates ever invents Time Travel, the first stop has to aim exactly five seconds after this clause of the Roommate Agreement was signed. "Well, that's disappointing..." is Sheldon's reply when nobody shows up. If you laugh at that, you might be alright.

Our Man in Confusion meets up with a British intelligence operative, Neil (Robert Pattinson), who helps him meet up with an arms dealer who gives him the low-down—the man who's behind (or in front of) all this reverse-entropy stuff is a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who has seen the future and wants to exploit it to his own ends. The Protagonist (as he's called in the credits, but the arms-dealer tells him "You're the fresh-faced Protagonist, and you're as fresh as a daisy" so I will call him "Daisy") is told that he can get to Sator through his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who is kept in a bad marriage by her error in selling Sator a fake Goya. 

That is all the story I want to relate, because at this point...or later...or earlier (I'm not sure which) my understanding—or my willingness to understand—started to get a little hazy. My appreciation for what I was seeing didn't dampen, because the logistics and the talent to pull these things off (imagine if you will a "Bourne" type fight where one fighter is moving forwards and "the other" is moving backwards) and you begin to shake your head in wonder at the logistics needed to imagine, let alone carry off, such a sequence. There's a chase down a freeway involving cars moving forwards and backwards that is as twisty and GPS-frying as all get-out, and the final showdown with troops advancing and retreating (backwards) simultaneously has to be seen to believe.

"What happened here?" "It hasn't happened yet."

Or not. One of the stipulations for the production of Tenet is that all the explosions and practical effects had to be practical—in other words, no CGI—things had to really happen. So, yes, troops are running forwards into battle-areas where explosions are reverse-sucking into the ground. Fights happen forward and in reverse. Why, Branagh even had to learn to speak backwards (with a Russian accent, yet...or "nyet"). It's all done for real, so that when things are reversed, it's the real deal backwards. This still produces a feeling of visual deja vu, where you begin to suspect everything of being reversed...at least looking for tell-tale wisps of smoke not rising, but falling.

It's happening...

It's disorienting...like a kind of "magical seeing" where thinking doesn't come into it because that would lead to some sort of synaptic anarchy that would make you distrust the simple action of putting popcorn in your mouth. At one point, "Daisy" is seen doing his customary pull-ups on a ship going backwards—he's been reversed temporally but the ships are going forwards, obviously, because that is what they do. But, from our perspective (which is constantly his) the ships are going backwards, reversing into their own wakes. Okay, but if he's inverted and doing everything backwards, what does he eat? How does he eat?Is there enough negative entropic infrastructure that they have entropic meals? At least, reverse Tang? And if everything he experiences is working backwards, I don't even want to think about how the toilets work!

Kenneth Branagh counting backwards...or is it forwards?

This leads to an audience-disconnect where you begin to suspect everything in the film of being untrue...or at least, the natural order of things. The Daniel Craig Bond's have made an entire through-line of its hero learning not to trust anything, not even his past...but, at least, he's still got his senses. Most movies endeavor—from their core—to create a belief in their reality; "Ignore the crewman out of frame with the pastry in his hand, this is true." Yes, there is music—from an unseen orchestra—and we're directing your point of view, so you don't see the reality we don't want you to see, but we're trying to make this as real as possible. Nolan is making as radical a move in breaking "the rules" as when Hitchcock killed off his leading lady half-way through Psycho: He's trying to make the "real" fantastical, in a way the Wachowski's with their computers couldn't with the Matrix movies.

It is mind-bending. And revolutionary. But, then Nolan has always played with the rules and mechanics of film, both in terms of story-telling and in its expectations. He can leave an audience gob-smacked...and deceived. Sometimes both, simultaneously.

Here's the same car-flip backwards and forwards...hope they called insurance before.

I don't know how advisable it is to question or not question the mechanics of what goes on here. In an era of "deep-fakes," one should always be suspicious of "face-value" and just not take things as they appear. Nor, can I interpret the measure of enjoyment you'll have in the movie if it doesn't make any sense. "Seeing is believing" is the old saw, and though I accepted the images, there was the doubter in my mind that kept kibitzing through the movie saying "that just wouldn't work." The answer, in retort, is to recall Hitchcock's rejoinder—"it's only a moovie."  

At least, Tenet is entertaining enough that you don't want to re-live those 2 1/2 hours...backwards or forwards.

Here's a shot from the battle-climax of Tenet:
Take a moment and think about what you're seeing here.
It looks spectacular...but is it possible?

* Yeah, that's usually not how potassium cyanide works—unless you've seen Skyfall.