John David Washington – Memphis Flyer

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Entropy increases. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the ironclad rule of physics that most defines our universe. Entropy is a slippery concept. It’s much more complex than “disorder” or “energy flows from hotter objects to colder objects” or just “things fall apart.” The constant, incremental increase in entropy is what defines time itself. Einstein told us that time and space are inseparable, but how come you can move in two directions in the three physical dimensions — forward or backwards, up or down, left or right — but only one way through time — from past to future? Because entropy increases.

Throughout human history, our perspective was trapped in time’s relentless advance. But the invention of the film camera changed that. Very soon after the Lumiére Brothers and Thomas Edison figured out how to simulate motion by quickly flipping through sequential still images, someone had the bright idea to see what it would look like if you ran the pictures backwards. What they saw was something that never happens in nature: entropy decreasing. Broken shards of glass strewn across a floor suddenly rush toward each other, form a vase, and then leap into the air, landing in a waiting hand. Ashes sprout flame and re-form into a log. Waves rebuild sandcastles. Effects come before causes.

Movies have always been obsessed with time. What we film folk refer to as “structure” is really just the order in which events happen in a screenplay. But few filmmakers have been as obsessed with the increase of entropy as Christopher Nolan. His breakthrough film (and, for my money, still the best thing he’s ever done) was 2000’s Memento, a story told backwards to illustrate Guy Pearce’s lack of long-term memory. He loves playing with the rate of time’s passage, as in Inception and Dunkirk. In Tenet, he takes his temporal obsession to new heights.

Tenet begins with a literal overture. An opera house in Kiev, Ukraine, is taken hostage, and a group of CIA special ops troops, led by John David Washington, who is known only as Protagonist, effect a rescue. The bravado sequence is a direct reference to Hitchcock’s famous climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and it’s just the first in a movie comprised almost entirely of bravado sequences.

While in the opera house, the CIA team recovers a mysterious artifact. But things go sideways for our meta-named Protagonist, and he ends up the prisoner of a mysterious terrorist group. Rather than talk, he chomps down on a suicide pill, and quickly loses consciousness. Then, he wakes up. The suicide pill was fake, and the operation was part of a test to see if our Protagonist was worthy of joining a super-secret organization called Tenet. Physicist Laura (Clémence Poésy) briefs him on their mission. The mysterious artifact recovered at the opera house is part of an increasing number of objects uncovered worldwide that seem to be moving backwards in time. In other words, their entropy has been reversed. This is as unnatural as it gets, and Protagonist’s mission is to figure out what’s going on.

The search will lead Protagonist and his partner Neil (Robert Pattinson) on a worldwide hunt. Tracing the bullets from a reversed gun leads them to an arms dealer in Mumbai, India, named Priya (Dimple Kapadia) and a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Sator, it seems, is in communication with people from the far future who are understandably pissed off about climate change, and have a twisted time travel-based plot that is not so understandable. If said plot comes to fruition, it will be the end of everything — or maybe the beginning of everything. It’s complicated.

Tenet mashes up the jet-setting glamor of James Bond with the hard science-fiction of Interstellar. Nolan’s script is as high-concept as it gets, and it uses the premise to stage insane sequences like a chase with half the cars going forward in time and half going backwards in time. But clarity is not Nolan’s strong suit, and by the time we get to the Bond-inspired, climactic paramilitary raid on an underground nuclear test site, I was hard-pressed to figure out who was fighting whom, and which direction we were traveling in time.

Nolan’s visual mastery is undeniable, and he gets brownie points for not leaning on CGI. The vast majority of what’s on the screen is staged in real life, and if there was an Oscar for backwards acting (an underappreciated skill that goes back to the silent era), Washington deserves it. But Tenet’s bloodless worldview is best illustrated by the name “Protagonist.” It’s a too-clever in-joke that covers up an active disinterest in the messiness of human emotion. Tenet addresses some important themes, such as the dangers of technology concentrating world-shattering powers in the hands of unaccountable individuals, but it treats the world as an abstraction of physics, not as a real place where real people live. It feels like an essay with explosions.

Tenet: Christopher Nolan Comes Unstuck in Time

Spike Lee is many things, but subtle is not one of them.

Some directors like to seduce you into their world by offering up a figure with whom you can relate, then putting them in jeopardy. As the relatable hero feels threatened, so do you, and the thing which threatens them becomes, by proxy, your enemy, too. When Clint Eastwood opens American Sniper with his hero killing Iraqi women and children in order to “protect his brothers,” he assumes that you will identify with Chris Kyle because he’s a red-blooded American Navy SEAL.

Lee has never been like that, even when he’s doing a traditional war movie like 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna. A Lee hero is faced with an ethical dilemma and spends the film either weighing both sides before deciding to act, or explaining why he made his decision. The classic example is Mookie, the protagonist played by Lee himself in Do the Right Thing, but you can also see the same dynamic in 25th Hour. The central question is not “will our hero prevail?” so much as “will this person choose to act heroically?” The fact that, decades later, people still debate whether or not Mookie did the “right thing” speaks to the intellectual and moral power of Lee’s approach.

But while Lee’s approach to heroism is nuanced, the way he presents his heroes’ worlds and their choices is stark, bold, and in your face. Some directors are afraid to do anything that might puncture the veil of realism. Lee’s concern is immediate emotional impact. If a split-screen is what’s needed to drive the point home, Lee’s gotta have it. If he thinks an exaggerated, stagey performance will create the emotional beat he’s looking for, he’ll rev up his actor: Compare Giancarlo Esposito’s manic turn as Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing to his stoic, richly textured portrayal of Gus Fring in Breaking Bad. When it works, we get the majestic sweep of Malcom X. When it doesn’t, we get the disjointed, barely watchable Chi-Raq.

With the republic under siege by Trumpism, the time for subtlety has long passed. Lee rises to the occasion with BlacKkKlansman. When we meet Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), he’s fresh out of the police academy when he gets a job at the Colorado Springs Police Department. At first, he’s assigned to the evidence room, but when Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael, played by Corey Hawkins) comes to town to speak at the university, Stallworth is assigned to infiltrate the local campus activists, because he’s the only black man on the force. Stallworth just wants to keep his head down and do his job, but the speech pricks his conscience. When he meets the supposedly menacing black radicals, they turn out to be nerdy kids led by beautiful student Patrice (Laura Harrier). Lee’s impressionistic presentation of Ture’s speech — and Stallworth’s awakening — is the film’s first transcendent moment.

John David Washington and Topher Grace in BlacKkKlansman

To deepen Stallworth’s dilemma, his superiors are so impressed with his first undercover assignment that they promote him to detective. While perusing the newspaper at the office one day, he happens across a recruitment ad for the Ku Klux Klan, and on a lark, calls the number. Expecting to hear a recorded message, he’s shocked when someone actually picks up the phone. Stallworth was not raised in the South and his years among cops at the academy have helped him perfect his code switching, so he sounds white enough to convince the Klan recruiter to set up a meeting. It’s all so unexpectedly easy, he makes a rookie mistake: He gives out his own name instead of making up a cover identity.

Since Stallworth’s giant natural haircut won’t exactly fit under a Klan hood, he has to send in a ringer, in the person of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver). Flip finds that the local blood-and-soil types aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and is instantly accepted into the haters club, despite the fact that he is clearly Jewish. Meanwhile, Stallworth works the phones until he’s on a first-name basis with the Grand Wizard himself, David Duke (Topher Grace).

In Washington and Driver, Lee finds two actors who understand his methods and deliver exceptional performances. If Lee is unsubtle, it’s because he’s trying to point out America’s racial blind spots to half his audience. His didactic tendencies that came off as too preachy in the Obama era seem all too timely now. Personally, I would have cut the coda that ties the “for real shit” of BlacKkKlansman to last year’s deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, leaving it to the audience to make the connection on their own. But this is a Spike Lee joint, and the great director wants to be damn sure you understand.