Tenet

1 THE OPERA HOUSE

Nick de Semlyen: Christopher Nolan likes to start a movie with a bang. And here he orchestrates — literally — a memorable one, with the conductor at the Kiev Opera House raising his baton, cueing up the gunshot that kills him and the subsequent mayhem. The next ten minutes is sometimes incomprehensible on a first watch, but it’s breathlessly exciting stuff, phalanxes of militarised police marching in, inverted bullets whizzing (technically gnizzihw) past the hero, and even a suspenseful moment in the cloakroom. It’s an almost intolerably intense way to kick off a film, and enough to put you right off a cultured night out.

The explosive set-piece at the film’s start is, arguably, the least comprehensible sequence in the entire 151 minutes. The culmination of an operation in progress, the sequence appears to see The Protagonist (John David Washington) as a CIA operative working undercover in Ukraine. Terrorists take hostages at the opera (a smokescreen for their true objective) and when the police arrive, The Protagonist’s team put on the appropriate uniform patches and blend seamlessly in with