I’m absolutely relaxed about weirdness for its own sake, and it feels like Nolan makes a welcome return here  to his Memento roots, playing with time and structure in ways that seem knowable only to him. Last time he did this so overtly was with Interstellar and I hated it, but this I liked, even though I never felt terribly invested in it. The temporal Cold War is a cute idea and playing it as a Bond film is occasionally delightful - Big Baddie Out To Kill Us All (Branagh), Suave Secret Agent (Washington), Gratuitous Female Love Interest (Debicki), Pal From Across The Pond (Pattinson), even an M analogue (Donovan). Michael Caine is even given a few scenes to chew up, which don’t affect the story but do lighten the tone. It’s marred by terrible sound (evoking Dark Knight Rises), some appalling dialogue and ultimately never giving us much of a hook to care about any of the main protagonists, even Branagh’s nihilistic Russian is never really interesting, for the most part only really offering the viewer garbled exposition about the ideas Nolan is playing with. Debicki is cruelly badly used, her character wasted and one note, playing more of a noirish gangster’s moll than a leading role worthy of her, and as electrifying as Washington (destined for even greater things) and Pattinson are, their mysterious relationship, only revealed near the end, isn’t difficult to guess. It’s to their credit that the fun they’re having flies off the screen - as action heroes they’re deeply impressive.  It’s long but a lot of fun, the effects are very cool, and I suppose as you’d expect with Nolan it deserves much more and much less thought at the same time. Ultimately it feels like the Second (or inverted?) Act in a much bigger story which we only ever learn about in exposition. It’s a shame in a way, although grand time travel epics rarely work, what remains unseen helps to reinforce the noir tone, and Washington does very well to keep you focused on him and not too much on the script’s flaws. The real world issues, thrown in almost as an afterthought, disrupt the more uneven Third Act, which also criminally underuses the always excellent Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Non Nolan fans may find Tenet infuriating, although the jaunty First Act shows just how urgent it is that the writer-director is given an opportunity to direct a 007 adventure somehow.