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Tenet Reviews

Christopher Nolan’s puzzle box Bond film is one of the most original films in quite some time.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2024

With Tenet, Nolan evolves as a surrealist director, yet his writing style does not similarly advance.

Full Review | Feb 7, 2024

Christopher Nolan's Tenet is a technically flawless, elaborate, immersive experience that needs to be felt in order to be understood.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2023

The most Nolan-y film yet, where he’s fixated entirely on the possibilities and wonder of his creation and entirely ignorant of the people involved in the events. […] It’s gripping but it’s also empty.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2023

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, almost towards the end of the movie, Nolan scores a winning goal. I felt that what's called "movie magic". [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 19, 2023

Tenet undoubtedly boasts an incredibly complex narrative with a unique temporal concept impressively demonstrated through spectacular, loud, jaw-dropping, practical action set pieces.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 24, 2023

An idyllic journey in which Christopher Nolan immerses himself in the physical laws of time through a screenplay that isn't suitable for the impatient. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 27, 2023

the tangled pile of plot threads may look like a jumbled mess, but everything comes together in a frenetic final act, weaving into a fabulously bold and entertaining tapestry... filmmaking on the grandest scale in terms of scope, technique and ambition

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Absurd elite espionage.

Full Review | Nov 8, 2022

Christopher Nolan has once again done what he does best – create an exhilarating cinematic experience aimed at wowing you visually and challenging you intellectually.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

A game cast and topnotch production values are unable to improve upon a clunky script and awkward execution. Tenet fails to reach its lofty ambitions. It also suffers from one of the worst sound mixes in a modern film at this level.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Aug 22, 2022

The production team create some fantastically enjoyable big moments of cerebral high-octane fun that made the film's two-and-a-half hour run-time fly by.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Tenet is an intense blockbuster that doesn’t let up, and we’re swept along with the momentum of it all. Don’t try to understand it, just feel it.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 20, 2022

A story people will try to explain to others, probably badly, who will in turn head to the multiplex to form their own opinion. If the mission was to create a discussion, then Tenet is a huge success.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 26, 2022

Tenet suffers most from its absence of feeling and thinly described characters, leaving Nolan's cinematic puzzle box a contraption with nothing inside for those who attempt to solve it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 17, 2022

Nolan finally seems to admit that he is not interested in people or their stories or their emotions, but rather using their forms, their bodies, to fill them with abstractions. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Dec 9, 2021

The film begins to entangle itself. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 8, 2021

For all its ambition, 'Tenet' is a mushy glob of nonsense.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2021

Tenet is one of Nolan's most cerebral films, as confounding as it is scintillating.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2021

It's interesting to consider that Nolan and the entire team believed in creating a challenging narrative with the escapism, wonder, and thrill of the best cinematic experience.

Full Review | Sep 5, 2021

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Review: In ‘Tenet,’ a time-bending thriller for bended times

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Elizabeth Debicki, left, and John David Washington in a scene from “Tenet.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows John David Washington in a scene from “Tenet.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Robert Pattinson, left, and John David Washington in a scene from “Tenet.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Robert Pattinson, right, and John David Washington in a scene from “Tenet.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

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I went in fresh to “Tenet.” I didn’t have any real sense of the plot, yes, but it’s more that it had been some five months since I was last in a movie theater. That’s a long hiatus — a dark ages for sitting in the dark — for someone, anyone, used to going to the movies more days than not. The last film I had seen in a cinema, back in March, was the Vin Diesel vehicle “Bloodshot,” so you can imagine my eagerness for a new aftertaste.

It’s complicated, in a way, to parse the experience. There’s the feeling of being back in a movie theater, and then there’s the sensations particular to “Tenet.” For Christopher Nolan, whose films build their conceptual architecture around the metaphysics of movies themselves, it’s kind of one and the same. His movies are designed, from a molecular level, to unlock innate cinematic powers and glorify the almighty Big Screen — a lonely god these last few months.

As the first major film released in theaters since the pandemic began, “Tenet” has swelled in the minds of anxious moviegoers , adopting the role of savior. Nolan vs. COVID-19 is as much part of the drama of “Tenet” as anything on screen, and just as convoluted and disorienting. Seeing “Tenet” for this critic meant crossing numerous state lines and watching it at a nearly empty movie theater — a luxury of social distancing that won’t be possible for most, even in reduced capacity theaters. At its best, moviegoing has always been thrilling, even dangerous. That may be doubly so right now.

For better and worse, “Tenet” is just a movie. It won’t beat the virus and it won’t single-handedly save movie theaters. It won’t even really blow your mind. But for much of its 150-minute running time, Nolan’s globe-trotting sci-fi riff on the spy thriller will provide a dazzling escape, one dense with singular imagery and intellectual puzzles. And, perhaps most vitally, it will give a cool, brutalist refresher of the movies’ capacity for awe, for imagination, and, yes, for tiresome grandiosity. For the palindromic “Tenet,” it cuts both ways.

Naturally, “Tenet” opens on a crowded auditorium. At an opera house in Kyiv, just as the conductor is raising his baton, a barrage of bullets rings out and masked men take the stage. Outside, a squadron of covert American agents are stirred. They pick a local police patch for their shoulders, and one among them (John David Washington, known only as “the Protagonist” in the credits) maneuvers to rescue a man who sits in a closed balcony. He greets him with the coded phrase “We live in a twilight world.”

As he’s trying to stop bombs from going off in the theater, an odd thing happens. Tussling with one of the terrorists, a bullet seems to fly backward into the gun. After being taken hostage and tortured, he blacks out. When he wakes up much later, he’s told that he’s been released from the CIA and been enlisted in a shadowy organization known as Tenet. The mission goes beyond borders, he’s told. A Cold War — “ice cold” — is brewing. He’s to try to prevent World War III and an apocalypse worse than nuclear holocaust.

The details of this secret war — who’s on what side, what’s at stake — take a while to unspool. But just as Nolan’s last film, the gorgeously synchronized WWII survival tale “Dunkirk,” was arranged elementally by land, sea and air, “Tenet” is spliced between past, present and future. A heady genre movie that puts James Bond-like tropes through a collider, it’s very much a companion piece to “Inception” (a heist movie with a sci-fi spin) and just as laden with continual explanation.

The central conceit here is that a rare mineral can reverse the entropy of objects. That means time travel, inverted weapons, car chases that speed both ways and the biggest blockbuster to ever look a little like the backward-running Pharcyde music video “Drop,” by Spike Jonze. These weapons are the “detritus of a coming war,” we’re told; the future is attacking the past.

The Protagonist’s journey brings him in touch with a British fixer named Neil (a delightfully knowing and especially dashing Robert Pattinson; you want him always to say more than he does), a Mumbai arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia) and ultimately a Ukrainian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). To reach the insulated Sator, the Protagonist finds an entry through his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki, the film’s most suave and affecting performer), an art dealer who has come to detest her husband.

As a film, “Tenet” rumbles like a jumbo jet. Its sheer tonnage is what most strikes you. There are trucks and ships, giant turbines and helicopters, concrete masses and 747s. It’s a literally heavy movie. The settings, which span from the Amalfi Coast to the “closed cities” of Russia, give “Tenet” a technological backdrop of ecological destruction. If anything, I wish Nolan had taken his future vs. past concept further, instead of situating it so firmly in the more familiar (in movies) world of black-market weapons dealers.

“Tenet” lacks the elegant mastery of “Dunkirk” or the cosmic soulfulness of “Interstellar,” but it has a darkly grand geometry. As instruments in an abstraction, most of Nolan’s protagonists verge on the hollow. Washington glides through the film with charisma and preternatural smoothness but his character’s inner life goes unexplored. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb in “Inception” wasn’t so different, but the mission plunged directly into his subconscious. Nolan, a visionary filmmaker, can sometimes be too busy conjuring visions to build a character.

Time is Nolan’s real protagonist, anyway. Its loss was the agony of “Interstellar.” A ticking clock, on three different temporal tracks, measured “Dunkirk.” In “Tenet,” it moves in circles: backward and forward like waves in the ocean. It’s a distinctive characteristic of the movies, and it’s one you can feel Nolan investigating and experimenting with. It’s easy to imagine “Tenet” was born in an editing suite, while a shot was rewound and epiphany struck.

Time has grown strangely elastic during the pandemic (as have movie release schedules). Today, yesterday and tomorrow blur together. So it’s some comfort that even still, Nolan’s clock keeps ticking.

“Tenet,” a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language. Running time: 151 minutes. Three stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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‘tenet’: film review.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan sends star John David Washington moving back and forth in every dimension in sci-fi thriller 'Tenet,' costarring Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki.

By Leslie Felperin

Leslie Felperin

Contributing Film Critic

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Tenet is surely the most eagerly anticipated film to be released theatrically since the coronavirus pandemic began. That’s only partly because, in some places, it will be the only film to be released theatrically since the virus arrived.

As befits a blockbuster about nothing less than a few people trying to save the world from “something worse” than Armageddon, there is a lot riding on Tenet succeeding with its own set of missions. Mission one: get released in the first place so it can start recouping what must have been a massive production budget. Next mission: save theaters and exhibition chains on the brink of bankruptcy, and all the workers that depend on them. In fact, while it’s at it, the film may need to save the very future of venue-based cinema, those hallowed gathering places for “collective human engagement,” to quote its writer-director Christopher Nolan ’s Washington Post opinion piece from the spring.

Release date: Aug 24, 2020

That’s a megaton of pressure for one sci-fi action film with a not-yet-A-list lead actor on the poster ( John David Washington from BlacKkKlansman, dashing but a little dull).

Even some of us critics here in the U.K., among the first to see the film, are feeling the heat. There will be viewers scrutinizing every tweet, review and opinion aggregator as they weigh whether to leave their quarantine bubbles to see it when it opens August 26 in select, less virally-loaded territories.

By sheer coincidence, the press screenings in London took place during the same week as the Democratic National Convention in the U.S., where nearly every speaker urged American citizens to vote like the future of democracy is hanging in the balance. (Because it is.) With all that future to worry about, both political and cinematic, it’s enough to drive an expat to, well, Xanax.

Like Xanax, Tenet ’s title is a palindrome, spelled the same way backward and forward. That’s fitting for a story about technology that can “invert” people and things, making them capable of going back in time. And like Xanax, Tenet makes you feel floaty, mesmerized and, to an extent, soothed by its spectacle — but also so cloudy in the head that the only option is to relax and let it blow your mind around like a balloon, buffeted by seaside breezes and hot air.

The idea is that this inversion tech was/will be invented by people in the future, but the material — bolts, gears, broken watches, assorted time-travel-controlling MacGuffins — keeps washing up in the present, the “detritus of a coming war.” The protagonist (Washington), a C.I.A. operative recruited to help the shadowy Tenet organization that’s trying to stop the aforementioned worse-than-Armageddon event, learns from lab-coated expert Barbara (Clémence Poésy) that an inverted bullet isn’t fired, for example, it’s caught in the gun. Likewise, an inverted car seems to drive solely in reverse, and a person who has gone through one of the “time stiles” that invert things appears to be moving, talking, even breathing backwards. That makes the hand-to-hand fight sequences especially snappy and unsettling to watch, filmed in claustrophobically tight shots that look like a cross between capoeira, boxing and avant-garde modern dance.

At one point, the protagonist — who, in an irritatingly meta screenwriting conceit, is literally called “the protagonist” in the end credits and is never named otherwise throughout the film — discusses the classic paradox of time travel with his colleague, Neil ( Robert Pattinson ). The protagonist asks, for example: If you went back in time and killed your grandfather before you were born, would you instantly disappear? There is no answer, Neil replies unhelpfully, because it’s a paradox. Or, as he circuitously declares later about another matter, “Whatever happened, happened.”

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Tenet First Reviews: A Beautiful, Spectacular Head-Scratcher

Critics say christopher nolan's 007-meets- minority report sci-fi thriller is tricky to decipher but full of mind-blowing action..

TAGGED AS: Sci-Fi , science fiction

One of the most anticipated movies of 2020, and one of the few tentpole releases still opening this year, Christoper Nolan’s Tenet is… Christopher Nolan’s Tenet . That is to say, based on the mostly-positive first reviews of the sci-fi spy thriller, you know what you’re getting into, but also you have no idea. The movie, which stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, appears to be another difficult one to describe, plot-wise, in part because of spoilers, but it’s also celebrated for its action and mind-blowing effects, even if you don’t care about any of the characters. And while some critics suggest the film needs to be seen on the big screen, we encourage you to check here for the latest information on how movie theaters are implementing new safety regulations in light of COVID-19.

With that said, here’s what critics are saying about Tenet :

How does it compare to the rest of Nolan’s filmography ?

It’s one of his most daring sci-fi narratives yet, and the results are truly phenomenal. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Tenet exceeds our already sky-high expectations… It is undeniably the most audacious film of his career – which is saying something. – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

Tenet is as intricately and exquisitely designed as Nolan’s earlier work. It boasts some of the most spectacular, memorable set-pieces of his career. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Tenet is not Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece, but it is another thrilling entry into his canon. – Matt Purslow, IGN

Tenet is the first time I felt he gets too carried away with his own concept. – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

So what is it about, anyway ?

What’s narratively most interesting about it is strictly off-limits in any pre-screening discussion. – Guy Lodge, Variety

We’re not even sure we could spoil this one if we tried. – Simon Miraudo, Student Edge

The palindromic title has some narrative correlation — albeit in an exhausting, rather joyless way. – Mike McCahill, IndieWire

Can we expect another mind-bending delight?

If Nolan’s Inception baked your noodle, prepare for a whole new level of bewilderment. – Andy Lea, Daily Star

Tenet will have you saying “Wow,” but also “Huh?,” “Wha …?” and “WTF??!!!” – Radheyan Simonpillai, NOW Toronto

Tenet is not in itself that difficult to understand: It’s more convoluted than it is complex, wider than it is deep, and there’s more linearity to its form than you might guess. – Guy Lodge, Variety

The fun with Tenet lies not in trying to decipher the whats or the whys but in simply admiring the how. – Adam Woodward, Little White Lies

I watched the movie twice for this review, and still feel very confused about what is supposed to be going on and why. – Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter

Is it more about the visuals?

Tenet frequently delivers mind-blowing moments that are unlike anything you’ve seen (or even thought about) before. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

Tenet is best approached as an experience to be felt rather than comprehensively understood. Sit back, relax and prepare to have your mind blown. – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

An absolute treat as a Movie Event… Tenet ’s deployment of stupefying practical special effects is pure wizardry. – Shannon Conellan, Mashable

Nolan’s commitment to shooting practically achieves an effect akin to first seeing the T-Rex stomp onscreen in Jurassic Park – it’s a film that shows you the impossible in a way that’s indistinguishable from reality. – Jordan Farley, Total Film

Take away the time-bending gimmick, and Tenet is a series of timidly generic set pieces: heists, car chases, bomb disposals, more heists… but gosh, does he blow stuff up good. – Jessica Kiang, New York Times

How is the action ?

The action exceeds anything Nolan has ever done before. – Radheyan Simonpillai, NOW Toronto

The sheer meticulousness of Nolan’s grand-canvas action aesthetic is enthralling, as if to compensate for the stray loose threads and teasing paradoxes of his screenplay — or perhaps simply to underline that they don’t matter all that much. – Guy Lodge, Variety

If Nolan has out-Nolaned himself, it’s in the action set-pieces which, despite being of head-scrambling technical intricacy, are sharper than Occam’s razor and carried off with astonishing economy. – Adam Woodward, Little White Lies

Big, bombastic and does everything with the most epic scale possible. It’s a lot like being punched in the face by Cinema™, in the best and worst ways. – Tom Beasley, Flickering Myth

Are the stakes compelling ?

It’s the rare action film where the characters don’t just say the world will end if they fail in their mission – you feel it, too. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Tenet ’s stakes are too high, perhaps, to really have any emotional impact. – Rosie Fletcher, Den of Geek

What is the movie reminiscent of ?

Tenet revisits the terrain of 2000’s Memento with more money… yet plot-wise, Tenet has more in common with Minority Report . – Mike McCahill, IndieWire

Tenet can feel like a $200 million remake of Primer , with a fiendishly brilliant but confounding narrative that practically demands one or two rewatches to fully appreciate the big picture. – Jordan Farley, Total Film

It may echo the cleverness of Rian Johnson’s Looper and Shane Carruth’s Primer in its dizzying disregard for linear chronology, but the plotting is muddled rather than complex. – Nicholas Barber, The Wrap

It’s reminiscent of Steven Knight’s Serenity …influences range from La Jetée to From Russia With Love . – Radheyan Simonpillai, NOW Toronto

But what does it really feel like ?

Nolan has made his own Bond film here, borrowing everything he likes about it, binning everything he doesn’t, then Nolaning it all up. – Alex Godfrey, Empire Magazine

The fanciest James Bond romp you ever did see, complete with dizzy global location-hopping, car chases that slip and loop like spaghetti, and bespoke tailoring you actually want to reach into the screen and stroke. – Guy Lodge, Variety

This is absolutely Nolan delivering his James Bond movie, only Bond never had to deal with inverted bullets. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

How is the cast ?

David Washington is rock solid in the lead role… Robert Pattinson brings his A-game. – Adam Woodward, Little White Lies

Robert Pattinson puts in a truly electrifying turn. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

Only Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh made quite an impression in their respective roles. – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

Branagh is unexpectedly fearsome. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

But do we care about their characters enough ?

Though leads John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki bring a level of solid integrity to their characters while wrapped up in flawless costumes, we’re left without any idea of who they actually are. – Shannon Conellan, Mashable

Tenet suggests Nolan no longer has any interest in human beings beyond assets on a poster or dots on a diagram. – Simon Miraudo, Student Edge

Tenet is by no means a movie about race. But Washington does appear to lean into what his race brings to the role. – Radheyan Simonpillai, NOW Toronto

What are the movie’s biggest issues ?

Tenet ’s coldness is what keeps it just short of greatness… the viewer’s investment is purely intellectual. – Laura Potier, Starburst

[It] feels strangely hollow and coldly detached. So detached to the point that Nolan’s otherwise great acting ensemble fails to connect emotionally. – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

It’s hard to work out what’s happening. It’s harder still to care. – Donald Clarke, Irish Times

For a film which prides itself on its innovative outlook, its portrayal of gender roles can feel surprisingly old-fashioned. – Linda Marric, The Jewish Chronicle

(Photo by )

Do we need to see it in a theater (if we can) ?

This is certainly the biggest bang for your buck of the year so far. See it on the biggest screen you can with the very best sound system. – Rosie Fletcher, Den of Geek

Viewed solely from its technical point-of-view… This is a must-see on the biggest screen possible. – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

It’s best experienced in a huge, dark room. – Matt Purslow, IGN

Demands to be seen in a cinema, and on the biggest possible screen… But Tenet will later thrive in home viewing formats, giving viewers the chance to pause and go back over tricky passages. – Jonathan Romney, Los Angeles Times

[Note: Information on movie theater safety precautions can be found here .]

Tenet will debut in several global markets on August 26-28 and open in limited theaters in the U.S. on September 3 before expanding wider around the world.

Tenet (2020) 69%

Thumbnail image by Warner Bros. Pictures

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Warner Bros.

Summary Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist (John David Washington) journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel. Inversion.

Directed By : Christopher Nolan

Written By : Christopher Nolan

Where to Watch

John David Washington

Protagonist.

Robert Pattinson

Elizabeth Debicki

Juhan Ulfsak

Jefferson Hall

Well-dressed man, ivo uukkivi, uniformed official.

Andrew Howard

Rich ceraulo ko, swat, target, jonathan camp.

Wes Chatham

Sander rebane, ukrainian swat.

Martin Donovan

Clémence Poésy

Josh Stewart

Dimple Kapadia

Denzil Smith

Jeremy theobald.

Michael Caine

Shipley's representative, laurie shepherd, critic reviews.

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‘Tenet’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Knockout Arrives Right on Time

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

You could argue that Tenet, the brain-teasing new blockbuster-to-be from agent provocateur Christopher Nolan , doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going. Actually it’s doing both — and the director-screenwriter is challenging us to try and keep up. It’s as if an African-American James Bond, in the person of the sharply bespoke-suited spymaster played by John David Washington, found himself among the mindhunters of Nolan’s 2010 Inception. He’s a filmmaker who has been screwing around with our ideas about time since his 2001 breakthrough Memento — even his 2017 war epic Dunkirk asked us see the same event from interlocking, rewinding-and-fast–forwarding perspectives. In his latest, a sci-fi thriller whose action globe-trots across three continents and seven countries, Nolan’s tick-tock obsession hits a fever pitch.

Tenet — yes, the title is indeed a palindrome — is the first big-budget studio movie (it’s production budget tops $200 million) to open in actual theaters, including IMAX, in the Covid-wraped year of 2020. (Having already opened abroad, it arrives in the U.S. on September 3rd.) If anything can put movie junkies back in their multiplex seats — masked, of course, and safely distanced — this groundbreaker is the one to do it. The first visual knockout Nolan puts before us takes place at an opera house in Kiev, where a packed audience (remember those?) awaits the show. Meanwhile, secret agents donning eerily timely PPE are gassing the crowd through venue’s air vents, so they can make off with an asset. The white-knuckle tension of the scene is raised to the upper reaches of suspense by the vibrant, vertiginous camerawork of Hoyte van Hoytema, who’s no stranger to this type of spectacle; he put in his Bond-movie time back in 2015 with Spectre.

Everything that can go wrong does, as one of the attackers, played by Washington, is unmasked as a CIA infiltrator. “We live in a twilight world,” he announces before he’s tied to railway tracks to meet his fate. Thanks to our man’s ingenuity and his facility with spy code, he escapes. Who, exactly, is this paragon who remains unnamed during the film’s pulse-pounding two-and-a-half hours? “I am the Protagonist,” he says, in a line that will leave you either meta-baffled or laughing out loud. It’s a Nolan thing. Those who find this filmmaker, born in London to a British father and an American mother, too chilly and cerebral aren’t paying attention. Listen, if you want dumb and deadly, try Michael Bay.

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Nolan’s mischievous streak gives Tenet a rich vein of humor that covers the bumps in the plot — and one of those bumps involves physics. You might need to brush up on your science to get a handle on the speculative process of inversion, in which an object or a person can have their entropy reversed, thus moving backwards in space while others move forward. This isn’t Bill and Ted climbing into a phone booth to hang with Mozart and Jimi Hendrix, it’s the future issuing a warning to the present. A scientist, played by Clémence Poésy as the Q to Washington’s 007, tells him understanding is overrated. “Feel it,” she suggests. Easy for her to say. “Trust the man behind the curtain” would be better advice, since the director stuffs his movie with the “detritus of the coming war” and plenty else to unpack after multiple viewings.

In a (mostly) spoiler-free outline: The film’s title refers to a shadowy organization meant to save the world from “something worse” than Armageddon. The Protagonist teams up with Neil (a slyly funny Robert Pattinson ) to get to Russian oligarch Andrei Sator — the rare Tenet character with a first and last name — who’s entertainingly hammed into existence by Kenneth Branagh as a Trump/Putin hybrid of unleashed megalomania. Our hero takes his lumps to find and stop this demi-god, which allows star-in-the-making Washington ( Black KkKlansman, Ballers ) to strut his stuff in high style. (Dig those suits!) A former football running back, the actor brings a natural athletic grace to the stunts and hand-to-hand combat that forge a visceral bond between his character and the audience. The film itself becomes a series of dazzling distractions as the Protagonist zigs and zags toward his goal.

But what distractions! The Protagonist’s early fist fight in a corridor (shades of Inception ) is action choreography at its muscular best, backwards and forwards. He and Neil don’t just visit Mumbai to get info on Sator from the mysterious, heavily-guarded Priya (Hindu acting legend Dimple Kapadia); they bungie up the side of her high-rise hidout. Cheers to stunt coordinator George Cottle and Nolan’s insistence on avoiding green screens and CGI whenever possible in order to bring an urgent reality to inventive feats of imagination. From a double catamaran race off the Amalfi coast and the ultimate in freeway car chases to a 747 crashing (and uncrashing) into an airport hangar, the visuals in Tenet are spectacular in every sense of the word.

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On the personal front, the movie pivots on the relationship between the Protagonist and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), the wife of the abusive, controlling Sator, who fails to realize the sexual pyrotechnics between these two exist only in his diseased mind. Her husband’s hold on Kat is their young son, and he’s offered to free Kat from her personal living hell if she gives custody of the child to him. The fact that Kat once momentarily considered the opportunity only deepens and humanizes the character. The elegant, swan-like Debicki, so fine in Widows and the TV miniseries The Night Manager, refuses let her Hitchcock-blonde get-ups play the role for her. Kat’s haunted eyes tell a resonant story about the arduous work required to take the high ground. The same goes for spy-in-shining-armor counterpart and the titular organization’s once and future soldiers.

If virtue was easy it wouldn’t be compelling or real. It’s that theme that pervades Tenet — and most of Nolan’s work — as the forces of time, memory and morality bedevil characters. (Including Bruce Wayne in Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, which imagined a batman who struggles to remain a crusader even without a cape.) The filmmaker has often been accused of inuldging in glib nilhilism, and the figures on this particular checkboard may lack backstories and the luxury of full development. But their struggle to connect to their better angels remains urgently relatable. Set to the throb of a galvanizing score by Ludwig Göransson, Tenet sweeps you away on waves of pure, ravishing cinema. At its core, however, is the question of if anyone can save a world out of balance. Nolan has tasked himself with saving the idea of movies as an in-person, in-theater experience where viewers gather before the biggest screen possible in a union of hearts and minds. There’s a killer plague betting against him. It’s your call.

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Tenet is visually dazzling, but plagued by a case of the WTFs: Review

Nicholas Fonseca watches ''Days of Our Lives'' religiously and thinks washing dishes by hand is the cheapest form of therapy on earth.

Somewhere in the bowels of a Kiev opera house packed with an audience about to be unwittingly gassed and blown to smithereens, a man snarls a phrase that gets repeated throughout the course of Tenet : “We live in a twilight world.”

It might just be the motto for these weary times, not to mention the moviegoing experience itself , which is counting on Christopher Nolan’s mysterious new film to revive the cinema in the midst of a pandemic that threatens to kill it off, once and for all. Tenet was always going to arrive on a surge of expectation and excitement, Nolan having long ago entered the pantheon of brand-name directors who can draw people out of their homes and into the theater. After several delays, that process has started, gingerly, as the film releases in some smaller U.S. markets and a handful of countries around the world.

The plot centers on a mission handed down to The Protagonist ( John David Washington ), a secret agent tasked with hunting down Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whose shady dealings form the crux of the film’s premise: the Protagonist, aided by Robert Pattinson’s elegant English spy Neil, must travel through and invert time to stop Sator, who is effectively working to start World War III — and initiate Armageddon.

It’s a mission stuffed to the gills with detours and distractions, a run of thrilling and accomplished set pieces that bolster Nolan’s months-long argument in favor of audiences seeing Tenet on a big screen: A clever tarmac heist elicits pangs for the days of airplane flights (remember those?). A freeway car chase wickedly toys with velocity and motion. The Protagonist goes mano a mano in a hallway fight that evokes Inception ’s fabled corridor sequence by way of its head-spinning choreography. And an extended spectacle finds him attempting to right past wrongs by entering a dimension where fire feels like ice; the wind is at his back as he runs; gravity is reversed.

Yes, this stuff is cool. It is also massively complex, presented with a straight face via a script that nevertheless winks at The Protagonist’s — and our — utter confusion as Tenet 's byzantine plot unfolds. “Try and keep up,” someone says at one point. “Don’t try to understand it,” says another. Which one is it? Tenet cuts both ways, welcoming us into Nolan’s time-bending world of wonder while also practically daring us to come out the other end without a headache.

Because as much as Tenet succeeds at being visually and technologically dazzling, it is more often than not almost unbearably draining. Like most Nolan movies, it refuses to come up for air; even as the camera glides smoothly across the cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast or the spare Nysted Wind Farm in Denmark, there’s a stressful tinge to the proceedings — and not just because ticking spots like these off your overseas vacation bucket list feels like it may now never happen.

In the past, Nolan has worked audience anxiety to great advantage with films like his 2001 breakthrough Memento or the 2017 war masterwork Dunkirk — precisely owing to the fact those films had running-out-the-clock baked into their DNA. Tenet , on the other hand, tries to run out so many at once that it risks audience disengagement. Even its least propulsive segments are jam-packed with a wearying amount of exposition, reams of hints and clues delivered by the likes of Nolan mainstay Michael Caine, Clémence Poésy, and Hindi cinema legend Dimple Kapadia. (In one monologue, Kapadia discusses algorithms, rehashes the Manhattan Project, and explains the grandfather paradox — making her character feel more like a university lecturer than the moneyed wife of a Mumbai-based arms dealer.)

The most effective messenger is Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki ( Widows, The Great Gatsby ). Ice pick-sharp, she swans and seethes as Sator’s estranged and emotionally abused wife Kat. For Nolan, long accused of “fridging” his female characters, Kat is a step in the right direction, though she still gets bullied and banged around; Debicki elevates the role with her steely performance.

The enormously likable Washington again proves he can create chemistry with any co-star; particularly with Pattinson, you see the promise of a future buddy-comedy that doesn’t have to be dragged down by the weight of so much Lofty Ambition. The Protagonist is more thinly written than an actor of his talent deserves, but as the audience’s proxy, he at least strikes the right notes: dizzy, determined to understand, and plagued by a case of the WTFs.

There is a gambit in Tenet that can’t help evoking The Matrix , which continues to loom large over this corner of the cinematic universe two decades after its release. When The Protagonist first becomes initiated into the mechanics of what Sator is trying to exploit — technology that can invert an object’s entropy and ultimately time itself — Nolan introduces the colors red and blue to indicate which direction the minutes are moving: forward or backward. Tenet is red pill versus blue pill all over again — but it is hard to locate a larger philosophical story or message to back it up . B-

Tenet releases in theaters in select U.S. cities on Sept. 3.

Tenet (2020)

User Reviews
Great direction. That's a given: Nolan knows how to put the camera to best use and knows how to keep you hooked most of the time;
Effective soundtrack. It's not by any chance memorable, but it nonetheless contributes a lot to the movie's overall atmosphere;
Dark cinematography. Again, very effective and in line with the movie' "serious" tone;
A couple of great action sequences. And the "backwards special effects" are really a treat to behold.
Mediocre dialogues and screenplay. I mean, a lot of times the dialogues are either cringeworthy or purely explanatory (and the bad guy has the worst lines of them all). On top of that, the screenplay tries the best to conceal its simple narrative, but can't quite manage to convince you that it's phenomenal and brilliant, or that in the end it's isn't just a matter of a banal spy story. And - by the way - the overall theme is too close to blatant fatalism for me to like.
Cardboard characters. Every single one of them is a total "spy movie" cliché: from the "Protagonist" to the ridiculous villain. They're completely underdeveloped and so there's no chance that the viewers can indentify with them.
Unconvincing main actor. Of course he's isn't on par with his father Denzel - but that's obvious. The problem is that he also isn't on par neither with Pattison nor especially with Branagh. Really a bad casting choice over here.
Lack of pathos. You're not gonna feel any empathy towards the characters ('cause, as I said, they're not actually characters: they are puppets, cardboard puppets with no interesting personalities). Nolan himself doesn't seem to care about that, lost as he is in his "entropy gimmick".

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UNREDACTED: ‘Tenet’ Is Classic Nolan—Pristine, Demanding, and Convoluted

If you can manage to understand what the characters of ‘Tenet’ are saying, only then can you begin to attempt to figure out what they mean

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This review was filed from Toronto, where the writer attended a socially distanced press screening; Tenet opens in wide release in Canada on August 26, and on September 3 in some cities in the United States.

“It’s like they’re competing to see who’s the least understandable,” quips Steve Coogan during The Trip to Italy about the cast members of The Dark Knight Rises before launching into a muffled impersonation of Tom Hardy as Bane. His fellow impressionist Rob Brydon follows by flawlessly mocking Christian Bale’s gravelly Batman voice before defending it with a bit of comic book logic: It’s meant, he says, to preserve the Caped Crusader’s “cloak of anonymity.”

Of all the metaphysical mysteries in Tenet , the question of which middle-school elocution teacher once traumatized its director, Christopher Nolan, looms larger than the rest. What links Nolan’s latest film to The Dark Knight Rises , beyond its massive physical scale, laboriously choreographed action, and gazillion-dollar studio sheen, is the sheer inaudibility of its dialogue, whether delivered through masks, over walkie talkies, or in the middle of shoot-outs. Ironically enough, one line delivered through a mask, over a walkie talkie, and in the middle of a shoot-out comes through perfectly: Robert Pattinson shouting desperately, “It’s not clear!” This is the funniest line in the movie. It’s also the closest thing that Nolan’s work has to a motto these days.

“Don’t try to understand it, just feel it,” advises a scientist early on in Tenet , a piece of advice that feels like a mission statement. Of all the turn-of-the-millennium indie featherweights who’ve become tentpole-movie titans, Nolan is the most prone to daredevil leaps of faith in his own showmanship, as well as his audience’s cognitive abilities. He hinges his epics on impossibly complex premises—teleportation; subconscious espionage; spelunking through black holes—and offers as compensation the kind of check-your-brains-at-the-door spectacle associated with less cerebral moviemakers.

By successfully leveraging these two imperatives against one another, Nolan has become a brand-name filmmaker—albeit one whose po-faced professionalism skirts self-parody. His movies are handsome and formal. They have the energy of a guy who not only insists on directing in a suit and tie but also on wearing a suit to the 2002 MTV Movie Awards , and whose kids call him Reynolds Woodcock when he’s being mean . It’s easy to make fun of Nolan, but no matter how tricked-up or gimmicky his movies can be, they’re always recognizably personal in their way. In lieu of a cloak of anonymity, he wears his ambitions and themes on his sleeve. It goes without saying those sleeves are perfectly tailored; as Jessica Kiang has already observed in The New York Times , if Tenet is about anything of consequence, it’s the beauty of an uncreased suit.

Whoops, did you get here by mistake? Click here to go back to the safety of the redacted review.

As far as the people wearing those well-ironed suits, Tenet boasts a roster of performers at the top of their game. The list includes John David Washington as a special-ops-trained protagonist referred to, cheekily and often, as “Protagonist;” Elizabeth Debicki as the emotionally corroded trophy wife of the vicious foreign arms dealer whom Protagonist must first haggle with and then battle; and Pattinson, whose performance as an elegantly attired off-the-grid fixer who gets off on staging superficially chaotic yet precisely engineered sleight-of-hand antics marks him as a doppelgänger for his director—just like Leonardo DiCaprio was in Inception , the Nolan film that Tenet most resembles at a glance.

In Inception , the high concept of a virtuoso freelance dreamweaver mind-fucking corporate titans for the highest bidder served as a workable abstract metaphor for the director’s own attempt to get into viewers’ heads; it traced a link between subconscious and cinematic realms that gave the film a heady, theoretical texture even when it was just suave lads having zero-gravity fistfights. Tenet isn’t so much dreamy as doomy, arraying its well-dressed heroes against an exterior threat. In its wonderful opening set piece, an opera house full of sleeping-gassed civilians dozes obliviously while armed mercenaries blast bullets all around, a hint that this time around there’s nothing to see with eyes wide shut; to follow along, you’ve got to stay alert.

Protagonist’s own rude awakening in the aftermath of the opera house raid—the first of several superlatively sutured shoot-outs courtesy of editor Jennifer Lame—serves as Tenet ’s through-the-looking-glass moment. After learning that the cyanide pill he’d swallowed under torture by enemy agents was a dud designed to test his loyalty, our hero is given some cryptic exposition (via the always welcome Martin Donovan) about the key role he’s been scouted for by parties unknown looking to avert an apocalyptic scenario. The danger, he’s told, has to do with something called “inverted time,” a phenomenon which is explained on several occasions over the course of the film, to varying degrees of basic coherence by actors subject to variously effective levels of sound mixing.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Tenet ’s title and original release date are of course both palindromes, and this is the guy who pioneered his own private be-kind-rewind aesthetic in Memento (still brilliant after all these years, by the way). What’s harder to talk around, though, are the myriad ways that Nolan develops his setup, both in terms of storytelling choices and the visualization of temporal disruption.

As it turns out—and this is not a spoiler, but an opinion— Tenet ’s most vivid and imaginative images are almost all small-scale. A shell casing levitating above a laboratory table evokes both the spinning top of Inception and the acrobatic bullet trajectories of The Matrix but in a disarmingly drab, realist style; a glimpse of a cracked rearview mirror attached to an otherwise pristine luxury car strikes a note of off-kilter foreboding, a shivery anticipation for something that’s already happened. Not that it’s not impressive to watch large vehicles crash into—and through—gigantic and supremely flammable structures, but as is often the case when Nolan works on a gargantuan scale, the pumped-up dimensions of the action paradoxically diminish its impact. We end up wondering how Nolan did something (or how much it must have cost) rather than caring about what’s happening, or to whom. It’s one thing to burden your hero with the symbolic moniker of “Protagonist;” it’s another to purposefully cultivate an atmosphere of chilly detachment that makes it hard to relate to an actor as attractive and charismatic as Washington as anything but a piece on a chessboard.

To continue with this analogy, truly great thrillers have a checkmate moment, and Tenet does not. If anything, the fun is frontloaded, peaking in terms of recognizably Nolanesque pleasure during Washington’s first-act exposition-dump lunch meeting with none other than Michael Caine—the ruling authority of the Nolan-verse, and as always, an old pro—and extending through his early flirtations with Debicki’s Kat, who’s granted more depth, agency, and humor than her director’s previous heroines until the moment that she isn’t. It’s disappointing that a movie with the wit to more or less open with its handsome, alpha-male lead tied silent-movie-style to some railroad tracks can’t think of anything more to do with such a nervy, resourceful actress than reduce her to a semiconscious damsel in distress. (Though, maybe it’s not surprising coming from a filmmaker with a Dead Wife problem .)

It doesn’t help that whenever she’s not with Washington, Debicki is acting opposite one of the all-time scenery chewers in Kenneth Branagh, whose borscht-coated Ukrainian accent is an example of Nolan letting his pet stars go off leash. (Branagh returned the indulgence by saying in interviews that Tenet had “reinvented the wheel,” a compliment which at least qualifies Nolan for a promotion at Hudsucker Industries.)

Hot-tempered, impossibly wealthy, and armed with a Chernobyl-sized chip on his shoulder, Branagh’s Sator is essentially a Bond villain, and perhaps the most sympathetic way to frame Tenet is as Nolan’s stab at a 007 entry—filtered, naturally, through an inescapable fixation on structural gamesmanship that wouldn’t fit in Bond’s linear universe. One of Tenet ’s most unfortunate flaws is that instead of leaning into its strengths as a glossy, globe-trotting thriller, it’s also determined to say something about fate and free will. And so its characters say lots of things about fate and free will, at which point viewers with limited tolerance for philosophical pontificating—especially when there are other things Nolan could double down on, like having John David Washington calmly shave a henchman’s face with a cheese grater—may find themselves grateful for the faulty sound mixing. At his best, as in his coauthored screenplays (with brother Jonathan) for Memento and The Prestige , Nolan can conjure up stylized, noir-ish situations and one-liners; when he’s off his game, the lousiness of the dialogue can overpower even his most striking imagery.

Speaking of which, Tenet ’s running visual motif of oxygen masks has a potency in the surrounding COVID context that can’t be denied, even if it’s more a matter of coincidence than genuine prescience. (Either that or this screenplay that’s at least partially about the possibility of parties communicating across giant swaths of time was actually written at some point in the future.) The repeated head-on shots of Washington shivering or spasming behind a clear plastic breathing apparatus have a clammy intensity that can’t help but overwhelm whatever else is going on, and there are other weirdly loaded, anxious images—including an unmistakable and strangely ambivalent allusion to 9/11—that work in purely visceral, graphic terms. The same goes for the film’s barely submerged thesis, tied less to theories of time travel than realpolitik, that planet-threatening conflict is its own sort of circular, recursive inevitability—a simple, devastating idea bristling around the edges of Tenet ’s convoluted plotline. In Inception , the sight of rival factions clashing in a snowy void was something straight out of a first-person shooter video game. In Tenet , the same configuration is calibrated not for excitement, but fatigue and even tragedy, an evocation of an eternal struggle where the difficulty of discerning the combatants or their motivations is arguably part of the point.

Toward the end of Tenet , I found myself thinking of the great French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée , in which a survivor of nuclear holocaust is projected back to a moment before zero hour in an attempt to find some retrospective source of salvation. Instead, he finds romance with a woman who suspects but does not fully understand his plight as a man out of time. Assembled entirely out of still photographs and containing no spoken dialogue in addition to its poetic voice-over narration, La Jetée is a masterpiece in miniature, but its influence has been huge, leaving a mark on everything from The Terminator to 12 Monkeys to Tenet , which contains a moment of homage that only serves to enlarge the earlier work’s greatness by comparison. At the end of La Jetée, Marker succeeds in collapsing and converging parallel timelines with the sudden, startling clarity of death itself—an existential checkmate move if there ever was one. At the end of Tenet , the suggestion is that the game continues, only the rules and the stakes never really come into focus. Trying to understand a movie is one thing, but trying to feel it is another. It’s still hard to say whether Tenet is really worth the effort.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Screen Rant

Tenet review: christopher nolan's bold & exciting spy thriller.

Tenet is a fascinating and exciting sci-fi thriller bolstered by Nolan's grand vision for action and strong performances from the cast.

Christopher Nolan has long been established as one of Hollywood's premier blockbuster directors, making a name for himself as someone with a knack for delivering ambitious, visually stunning tentpoles that demand to be seen on the biggest of screens. His newest offering, Tenet , was poised to be the latest in a growing line of captivating blockbusters, but its release was disrupted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. After premiering only in theaters back in the fall, Tenet is now coming to various home media platforms, allowing more people to finally see what Nolan's next movie is all about. Tenet is a fascinating and exciting sci-fi thriller bolstered by Nolan's grand vision for action and strong performances from the cast.

In Tenet , John David Washington stars as a character known only as the Protagonist, a CIA agent who's recruited by the Tenet organization to investigate a potentially apocalyptic scenario. The Protagonist is made aware of a concept called time inversion, in which objects or people are able to move backwards through time. He is tasked with unraveling the mystery of the Algorithm, a weapon from the future sent back to wipe out the past. Teaming up with operative Neil (Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist's mission sees him cross paths with Russian billionaire Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) as he tries to save the world.

Related: Tenet Ending Explained: All Questions Answered

Nolan demonstrates why he's one of the industry's best craftsmen on Tenet , staging a number of epic set pieces that rank among the finest of his career. From its opening moments, Tenet announces itself as an action-packed thrill-ride, with Nolan's practical filmmaking techniques and Ludwig Göransson's pulsing score immersing audiences in the film. Characteristically, Nolan makes terrific use of the IMAX format to complement Tenet's action sequences, painting on a fittingly large canvas to further draw viewers in. While there will always be a debate concerning Tenet's original release, it's evident why Nolan was adamant the film play in theaters. Still, even on home TV screens, Tenet feels very cinematic, making it the ideal movie for those with home theater systems. Complaints about the sound mixing are warranted, but Tenet otherwise boasts tremendous technical merits - including Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography and Nathan Crawley's production design.

Tenet's script sees Nolan once again play with bold and imaginative ideas to elevate the simpler story at the film's core. Similar to how Inception blended a heist movie with its dream concept, Tenet makes its story of preventing armageddon standout with time inversion. There's refreshingly little hand-holding when it comes to this premise, as Nolan trusts the audience to keep up with the exposition he delivers throughout the film. The time inversion makes Tenet more complex than a standard espionage thriller, but the story is still clear enough to follow - and repeat viewings are definitely warranted to watch how it all comes together and explore its ideas. In addition to the genre aspects, Nolan injects an emotional through-line in Tenet , as the Protagonist looks to help Sator's wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) escape an abusive marriage. This subplot may not resonate as strongly as Cobb's family in Inception or Cooper and Murph's dynamic in Interstellar , but it's still a strong hook that lets viewers become more invested in the story. Debicki's performance as Kat is a big reason why, with the actress channeling her character's pain to make her a sympathetic figure.

Elsewhere in the cast, Washington is cool and confident as the Protagonist, carrying the film and demonstrating his leading man chops. He makes for a convincing action hero, doing his own stunts in what is a physically demanding role. Tenet is another illustration that Washington is one of the brightest stars working today. In his return to high-profile tentpole fare, Pattinson is very good as Neil, turning in a playful and nuanced performance. He has several great interactions with Washington, as the two make for a dynamic duo to guide audiences through Tenet's plot. The film has a largely serious tone, but both actors are still given moments of levity to make their turns well-rounded. Branagh is a truly despicable villain that is easy for viewers to hate. His character doesn't have as much depth to him as others, but his performance is still very effective for what the film needs and he gets some chilling scenes.

Tenet is bound to have a complicated legacy due to the controversy surrounding its initial release and the fallout from its box office performance, but the film itself is another great example of why Nolan is one of the best helmsmen in the industry. Tenet was one of 2020's most anticipated movies for a reason, and now that it's readily (and safely) available, it's poised to fill a void of major releases just in time for the holidays. Fans of Nolan's previous work, those who enjoy heady sci-fi, and general audiences curious to see what the director has in store will get something out of it. Tenet is a film worth watching, discussing, and watching again.

More: Watch the Tenet Trailer

Tenet is now available on Blu-ray and Digital.

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'Tenet' Review: A Collection of Christopher Nolan's Greatest Hits and Greatest Failures

"Are you watching closely?"

Few lines manage to explain the film you're watching more clearly than the one Clémence Poésy 's character says in an early scene from Tenet , Christopher Nolan 's highly anticipated time-inverting blockbuster. "Don't try to understand it," she tells the film's protagonist. "Feel it." It's almost as if Nolan himself wants to assure the audience that trying to crack the plot of his latest film will be nothing but a waste of time, and it's the best advice this review can give prospective viewers of the film (whenever and however you choose to see it). If you stop to think about what you're seeing, you're doing it wrong.

It's not that Tenet is difficult to understand in and of itself. Like Inception , the film is more convoluted than it is complex, building layers upon layers of exposition and grand set pieces to hide a very simple concept. And like Inception or The Prestige or Memento , Nolan is expecting the audience to want to experience Tenet multiple times in order to get the full picture of what he's trying to accomplish, even if that concept may not be as deep or impressive as you'd hoped.

Make no mistake, Tenet is as ambitious and spectacular as the best of Nolan's films, and in many ways it feels like a collection of his greatest tricks — incredible set pieces full of awe-inspiring practical effects, an elegant storytelling maze full of grand ideas, but also detached and cold characters, horrible treatment of female characters, and a lack of playfulness.

With Tenet , Nolan has concocted a very elaborate and expensive toy, but rather than letting the audience play with it, he keeps it at arm's length and just tells you that you should admire his creation, without giving you time to figure out why you should.

The simplest way to explain the plot without giving anything away is that John David Washington plays a character literally credited "Protagonist," a CIA operative who is tasked with finding the source of a new weapon that will be the cause of a third World War that will end all life on Earth. Armed with incredibly little information, he embarks on a globetrotting mission with a bunch of NPCs to stop the end of the world and rescue a princess from the big bad Russian.

Like Inception , Nolan is once again taking cues from the espionage genre. Instead of a heist film, he is now giving us the James Bond movie of his dreams, complete with shadowy organizations, car chases, weapons dealers, Russian oligarchs and world-ending stakes. It is when leaning into these influences that Tenet truly shines , becoming the biggest and fanciest Bond movie we all wanted for the summer blockbuster season.

The ace up the film's sleeve is, unsurprisingly, is its "time inversion" concept, and Tenet 's cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema , together with the visual and special effects teams led by Andrew Jackson and Scott R. Fisher , respectively, help craft some astonishing set-pieces. No matter how many interviews ( including Collider's own !) you read about the lack of computer-rendered effects in Tenet , nothing can really prepare you for the pure, breathtaking spectacle of the film.

For the smaller, intimate fight scenes, the camera stays claustrophobically close to its subjects as they contort and recoil in a hand-to-hand fight where the assailant is moving backwards through time while the other moves forward. There's also a high-speed moving-heist involving fire trucks, armored vehicles and tow trucks moving at high speeds, and a giant battle sequence with two armies fighting in different directions in time. Through it all, T enet plays both as an incredibly convoluted math exercise and a fantastic display of showmanship. This is all accompanied by the frenetic and energizing electronic strings of Ludwig Göransson 's original score, which at times sounds like a clock running backwards, a clever riff on Hans Zimmer 's time-themed scores for Inception and Dunkirk .

The problem comes when the action stops and the film starts explaining how it all works, giving the audience clunky lines of exposition through cold and detached readings — as if the actors were nothing but soulless animatronics at a theme park. It doesn't help that a big part of the dialogue is mumbled and drowned by the metallic sound design and loud score, or that key exposition scenes are shot with a rotating camera that disorients the viewer. It's as if Nolan was so preoccupied with showing you that he did his homework for the "time inversion" (Nobel Prize-theoretical physicist Kip Thorne is a consultant on the film) that he forgets to show why you should care about the rest.

If Tenet feels like a collection of Nolan's greatest cinematic tricks and hits, it is also a collection of his worst impulses, especially when it comes to muted and overly serious acting and his treatment of female characters. Though Nolan puts John David Washington's athleticism to great use in the action sequences, he mutes the natural charisma that makes Washington a great actor. Elizabeth Debicki gets the short end of the stick as Nolan moves beyond killing his male characters' wives to having his only main female character be nothing more than a damsel in distress. Debicki sells the pain of her character's torment at the hands of her abusive husband, Andrei Sator ( Kenneth Branagh ), but she is devoid of any agency or personality beyond being a mother to a child we barely see in the film. She becomes inexplicably important to the Protagonist's heroic journey, but it's hard to see why due to their lack of chemistry.

Thankfully, you have to give it up for Robert Pattinson , who manages to break free and become the only source of personality and charisma in the film. Pattinson also has terrific chemistry with Washington, acting as his confident wingman and the source for the few moments of levity in the film, all while exuding enough confidence and swagger to put forth yet another strong case for his casting as Bruce Wayne. Likewise, you can see Branagh break free from his restrained acting directions and burst out in pits of rage worthy of his Shakespearean background.

For all of Tenet 's stunning set-pieces, the film never manages to escape the lines spoken by Clémence Poésy's character. "You're not here for what, you're here for how," her character says, menacingly making sure that the audience will follow along silently and complacently, absorbing all the information without trying to understand it for themselves. In a way, The Prestige is the key to understanding not only Tenet , but Nolan himself. He assumes that Michael Caine 's speech in The Prestige about not wanting to find the secret because all you want is to be fooled, is true for his audience. Those who want a bit more than face-value are left behind, unimpressed.

The worst thing that can be said about Tenet is that, in Nolan's quest to save the cinematic experience, he has made a movie that will thrive in home viewing, where the viewer can rewind the scenes to better understand the tricky plot, or adjust the volume or use closed captions to hear the obfuscated dialogue. Alas, Tenet is 100% Christopher Nolan — for better and worse.

Tenet will be released internationally on August 26th and will open in select U.S. cities on September 3rd.

[Editor's note: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we strongly encourage individuals to check with the recommendations of public health officials and CDC safety guidelines before seeing a movie in a theater. ]

Australia edition
International edition
Europe edition

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Elizabeth Debicki, left, and John David Washington in a scene from “Tenet.” Warner Bros. will release Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” internationally first on Aug. 26, with a U.S. release in select cities to follow over Labor Day weekend. Warner Bros. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

Tenet review: Christopher Nolan's thriller is a palindromic dud

If the long-awaited sci-fi from the Inception director restarts the summer of cinema it will go down as his finest hour. But Tenet is far from his finest work

N o wonder Christopher Nolan thinks Tenet can save cinema. That’s a doddle compared to the challenge faced in his film, which, we’re frequently reminded, is a proper whopper. Prevent world war three? Bigger. Avoid armageddon? Worse. To spell it out would be a spoiler, but think 9/11 times a hundred , to quote Team America: World Police, a film Tenet faintly resembles. The fate of a few multiplexes is small fry.

Lucky, really, because Tenet is not a movie it’s worth the nervous braving a trip to the big screen to see, no matter how safe it is. I’m not even sure that, in five years’ time, it’d be worth staying up to catch on telly. To say so is sad, perhaps heretical. But for audiences to abandon their living rooms in the long term, the first carrot had better not leave a bad taste.

Our protagonist, the Protagonist (John David Washington), is an agent for an international undercover organisation who’s promoted during a new cold war (“ice cold”). “That test you passed,” a flunky tells him, “not everybody does.” We’re never told exactly what the test was, but the implication is clear: this is not a man who’d have trouble recognising an elephant .

Then follows the first of many scenes in which a supporting actor who may or may not have a background in nuclear physics blinks through 500 hours of exposition about how the future is attacking us with bullets that go backwards. First up is Clémence Poésy, who talks about inverted weapons and the detritus of coming wars so listlessly you want to giggle. Next, Michael Caine, who says: “I presume you’re familiar with the Soviet-era closed cities,” over steak and chips.

Less lucky are Dimple Kapadia’s epigrammatic arms dealer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, stuck with reams of militarese detailing “temporal pincer movements”. As for Robert Pattinson’s raffish wingman, brilliant and dapper and apparently based on Christopher Hitchens? Pattinson is never less than watchable. And his affectations can be a welcome distraction. But he still just seems like some bloke who’s got drunk in Banana Republic’s scarf department.

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Robert Pattinson, left, and John David Washington in a scene from “Tenet.” Warner Bros. says it is delaying the release of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller “Tenet” until Aug. 12. (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

All these encounters eventually lead to Andrei Sator, a Russian oligarch whose Blofeld stylings Kenneth Branagh eagerly embraces. “Just tell me if you have slept with my wife” is his opening gambit, quickly followed by “How would you like to die?” (a rhetorical enquiry; Sator only does one sort of murder, which sounds time-consuming and involves testicles).

But Branagh’s ham spoils as the promising camp of his first scenes flattens into bog-standard rottery. The more we learn of our antagonist’s plans for humanity the harder it is to care whether he pulls them off.

Some of this is weariness: for all Tenet’s technical ambition, the plot is rote and the furnishings tired. Eastern European heavies lumber about with pliers and meat-cleavers. Clocks literally tick. Synths groan deeply on the soundtrack. No one shoots anyone without elaborately speechifying first. Extreme lengths (remote catamaran) must be pursued to ensure confidential conversations. The luxe locations titillate for a bit, but there’s something tonally off about the aspirational, How to Spend It aesthetic (Sator’s Italian villa, in particular, really overdoes the busts).

Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh in Tenet.

Washington doesn’t help. A naturally charismatic performer, he’s weirdly muted and muzzled here (as a sidenote, Tenet will surely go down in history as a film shot during peak-beard). The spark he’s supposed to have with Sator’s estranged wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debecki) isn’t there, which makes for a motivation problem. Kat does at least have some agency, unlike Nolan’s previous litany of saintly dead spouses, but her drive is primarily about safeguarding her relationship with a young son we barely see and, when we do, seems less than winning.

Tenet’s real engine is its action sequences, in particular one involving a cargo plane and another multi-car chase. They’re good; they have to be. As the eagle-eyed have pointed out, Tenet is a palindrome, which means it’s possible you’ll see some of the same scenes twice. Yet, for all the nifty bits of reverse chronology, there’s little that lingers in the imagination in the same way as Inception or even Interstellar’s showcase bendy business.

You exit the cinema a little less energised than you were going in. There’s something grating about a film which insists on detailing its pseudo-science while also conceding you probably won’t have followed a thing. We’re clobbered with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what’s happened has happened.

The world is more than ready for a fabulous blockbuster, especially one that happens to feature face masks and chat about going back in time to avoid catastrophe. It’s a real shame Tenet isn’t it.

First look review
Christopher Nolan
Robert Pattinson
Science fiction and fantasy films
Kenneth Branagh

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Tenet Review

17 Jul 2020

The blams come thick and fast. Tenet , in fact, might be Christopher Nolan ’s blammiest film yet. BLAM! A terrifying thing just happened. BLAM! A shocking moment of revelation. BLAM! Here’s a speedboat. (There really is a massive blam accompanying an otherwise ordinary shot of two people on a speedboat.) It’s not even Hans Zimmer this time — here the great Ludwig Göransson ( Black Panther , The Mandalorian ) is on scoring duties, making it all his own (you will nod your head intensely) but without ever scrimping on the blams. Because if a Christopher Nolan film doesn’t sound like the end of the world, then something’s wrong. And this one really is about the end of the world.

We’re told early on — defiantly and resolutely — that this is not a film about time-travel. There are a handful of instances in Tenet where one character lays things out to another, each time telling them it’s okay if they don’t quite get it. “Don’t try to understand it,” says Clémence Poésy’s Laura, Tenet ’s Q to John David Washington ’s James Bond, as she introduces him to backward bullets (they go back in time… don’t try to understand it) and gives him a brief primer. It’s not time-travel, she tells him, it’s “technology that can reverse an object’s entropy”. In other words, Christopher Nolan wants you to know that this is not Back To The Future . This is serious business. This is about the prevention of World War III. “Nuclear holocaust?” asks Washington’s protagonist. No, she says — this is worse.

This scene, Nolan setting out his stall, is scored sumptuously, romantically — it’s one big swoon, and it speaks volumes. Despite a complex relationship serving as the film’s broken heart (courtesy of Kenneth Branagh ’s arms-dealing oligarch Andrei and his estranged and abused wife Kat, played by Elizabeth Debicki ), Nolan’s great love affair, of course, is with time itself. From Memento ’s muddied, memory-straining recollections to Dunkirk ’s triple-pronged timeline and Interstellar ’s generational rifts, he can’t get enough of the stuff, and Tenet is awash in it. It’s not a plot device — it’s the thing itself, something to be explored, investigated, played with, twisted, bent.

Nolan has made his own Bond film here, borrowing everything he likes about it, binning everything he doesn’t, then Nolaning it all up.

And yet: this is an action film. It opens with a brutal, prolonged siege at the Kiev Opera House, in which people fight for their lives and lose, in which all hell breaks loose, and in which Göransson and Nolan’s sound designers intend to deafen you. You have Washington and Robert Pattinson bungee-jumping up and into a building (and that’s without any of the time-bending). You have a lean and mean kitchen fight in which a cheese grater is deployed (and not for cheese). You have a 747 being blown up, you have a thrilling car chase (which does feature some time-bending), and extended set-pieces in which your eyes will see things they haven’t quite seen before. For the most part, there are no Hollywood hysterics; it is big — often very big — but not bombastic.

Tenet is Bond without the baggage. Filmed in Italy, Estonia, India, Norway, the UK and the US, it’s a globetrotting espionage extravaganza that does everything 007 does but without having to lean into the heritage, or indeed the clichés. Just as with Indiana Jones, for which George Lucas persuaded Bond fan Steven Spielberg they could create their own hero instead of piggybacking on someone else’s, Nolan has made his own Bond film here, borrowing everything he likes about it, binning everything he doesn’t, then Nolaning it all up (ie: mucking about with the fabric of time). And while Washington — never not magnetic, every second of this film – isn’t a suave playboy in the slightest, he has the swagger — and the odd wisecrack. “Easy,” he says in response to some light manhandling from one of Andrei’s security goons. “Where I’m from, you buy me dinner first.” In the same sequence, Andrei — a big bad if ever there was one — asks him: “How would you like to die?” Elsewhere we meet an arms dealer who casually swigs his whiskey while he has a gun to his head. This is absolutely the same playground that 007 runs around in, with the same toys. It just feeds it all through a physics machine.

For the most part, that’s welcome. “Try to keep up,” one character says in regards to the mechanics of it all. “Does your head hurt?” another asks later. Somebody is told they need to stop thinking in linear terms. No doubt some big brains will be fine with all of this — and will be able to follow the plot — but for the rest of us, Tenet is often a baffling, bewildering ride. Does it matter? Kind of. It’s hard to completely invest in things that go completely over your head. The broad strokes are there, and it’s consistently compelling, but it’s a little taxing. No doubt it all makes sense on Nolan’s hard drive, but it’s difficult to emotionally engage with it all.

If that’s even what the film wants us to do. These are great actors — Washington, Pattinson, Branagh and Debicki are all immensely watchable — but only towards the end, as things begin to pay off, do you really get the chills here and there. For the most part, everybody’s on a mission, doing their job, the film barely stopping to breathe, certainly not to take any sentimental detours. And nobody involved looms larger than Nolan himself. This is a film engineered for dissection and deconstruction. Just as Inception was, this is an M.C. Escher painting, but folded, origami-like, and with holes poked into it for its own denizens to fall through. It may not be Back To The Future , but regardless, it has its cake, eats it, then goes back in time and eats it again. It may not be a hokey time-travel film, but that doesn’t mean Nolan can’t get his rocks off playing around with paradoxes.

And ultimately, for all of that, Tenet once again proves Nolan’s undying commitment to big-screen thrills and spills. There’s a lot riding on this film, to resurrect cinema, to wrench people away from their televisions, facemasks and all. It may well do the trick: if you’re after a big old explosive Nolan braingasm, that is exactly what you’re going to get, shot on old-fashioned film too (as the end credits proudly state). By the time it’s done, you might not know what the hell’s gone on, but it is exciting nevertheless. It is ferociously entertaining.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Nolan's violent, elaborate epic is best for deep thinkers.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

You are the main character of your own story, and

The Protagonist acts with empathy. Neil uses his s

Most characters are White men, but the lead is pla

Lots of action and violence; little blood. Guns an

A female character wears a bikini. Mild flirtation

Infrequent strong language includes "bitch," "s--t

Social drinking (wine). In a meeting, the drink is

Positive Messages

You are the main character of your own story, and you're capable of more than you know. Themes of teamwork, integrity, courage, curiosity, and perseverance.

Positive Role Models

The Protagonist acts with empathy. Neil uses his skills and teamwork to solve problems. Kat shows courage, prioritizing the common good over loyalty to her husband.

Diverse Representations

Most characters are White men, but the lead is played by John David Washington, who's Black. He demonstrates courage and integrity and doesn't fall into any stereotypes. Women have less to do: The lead female character is abused by her husband, and though she gets some agency near the end of the film, others, like supporting character Priya, have no impact on the plot.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Lots of action and violence; little blood. Guns and shooting, battle scenes, beatings, domestic abuse and threats, car chases, crashes, and fires. The threat of torture is explained in graphic terms. A character dies by suicide. Characters are arms dealers, and nuclear weapons are a part of the story.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A female character wears a bikini. Mild flirtation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent strong language includes "bitch," "s--t," and one use of "f--king." Characters also say "damn," "hell," "goddamn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Social drinking (wine). In a meeting, the drink is vodka. A character takes a dangerous pill.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Tenet is a spy action movie directed by Christopher Nolan . John David Washington stars as an international secret agent who must save the world from World War III. There's a lot of action and fighting throughout the film. It's mostly bloodless, but there are guns, shootings, explosions, crashes, and beatings. Domestic abuse and child custody are big parts of the storyline. The main message is about being the hero of your own story, and characters demonstrate teamwork, perseverance, courage, curiosity, integrity, and empathy. The Protagonist (Washington) acts with empathy, Neil ( Robert Pattinson ) uses his skills and teamwork to solve problems, and Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki ) shows courage in the face of an abusive husband. Strong language is infrequent, so when it comes, it's noticeable: Expect to hear "f--king bitch," "s--t," "damn," "hell" etc. Characters drink socially (wine, vodka), and a character dies by suicide. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (27)
Kids say (68)

Based on 27 parent reviews

Most Confusing Movie I Have Ever Seen, But In a Cool Way

Nolan's genius at it's best. excellent watch., what's the story.

In TENET, a CIA operative known as The Protagonist ( John David Washington ) is given a secret mission to prevent World War III. As he moves deep into the world of international espionage and arms dealers, he investigates how a Russian oligarch ( Kenneth Branagh ) came into possession of a time-based weapon of the future. Robert Pattinson , Elizabeth Debicki , Michael Caine , and Clémence Poésy co-star.

Is It Any Good?

Cinematic master of time manipulation Christopher Nolan has created the Rubik's Cube of time travel movies. Many time travel fans love to study and analyze the genre's fictional rules, and Tenet might become a template to compare others against. Nolan dips into physics and quantum theory -- and he doesn't spend time explaining anything clearly. And although the production values are excellent overall, with great world building and viscerally exciting special effects and design, it doesn't help that audio involving key details is muffled by gas masks, spoken through walkie-talkies, etc.

While much of the movie is a whirlwind of "what?," the ending suggests that much of the complexity isn't as relevant to the overall point. You can enjoy it at the level of your choosing: If you want to crunch around in the minutiae, there's ample material, but if you want to jump to the takeaway, then it plays much more like a James Bond movie with a lot of complicated dialogue. It definitely sets up the possibility of a sequel, and it seems like the amount of details dumped on audience members are meant to entice viewers to rewatch it again and again.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how the violence in Tenet compares to what they've seen in other action movies. Does the fact that it's not especially bloody or gory affect your reaction? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

Nolan has received criticism for using his female characters to propel a man's story forward. Do you think he overcomes that critique here? Or is Tenet more of the same?

Which of the characters are role models ? Why? How do they demonstrate courage , curiosity , integrity, perseverance, and teamwork ? Why are those important character strengths ?

What are the rules of time travel in Tenet and other movies? How does that compare to what scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein suggest could be possible? Why do you think filmmakers -- and audiences -- enjoy this genre?

Movie Details

In theaters : September 3, 2020
On DVD or streaming : December 15, 2020
Cast : John David Washington , Robert Pattinson , Elizabeth Debicki
Director : Christopher Nolan
Inclusion Information : Black actors, Female actors
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : Adventures , Great Boy Role Models
Character Strengths : Courage , Curiosity , Integrity , Perseverance , Teamwork
Run time : 150 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : violence and intense action
Award : Academy Award
Last updated : June 29, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Tenet (United Kingdom/United States, 2020)

Christopher Nolan loves playing with time and the fabric of reality. A majority of his non-Batman films have featured mind-bending excursions through the fourth and fifth dimensions and Tenet is no exception. In fact, despite downplaying the sci-fi elements during the first half, this may be the most challenging of Nolan’s films to date when it comes to wrapping one’s mind around the concepts forming the narrative’s foundation: backwards-moving entropy, non-linear thinking, temporal paradoxes. The movie borrows bits and pieces from three of Nolan’s previous efforts ( Memento , Inception , and Interstellar ) while also at times recalling the likes of Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (a.k.a. Live Die Repeat ) and James Cameron’s Terminator . The film contains some of Nolan’s most ambitious action sequences to-date but one wonders whether the plot density – a not inconsiderable obstacle for some who prefer not to devote their undivided attention for 2 ½ hours – might prove to be problematic.

Tenet offers a glimpse of what a James Bond movie might look like with Nolan at the helm (with an able assist from cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, in his third collaboration with the director, and who was behind the camera for Spectre ). Although the concept of “backwards entropy” (in which items move contrary to the natural progression of things, like a bullet “unfiring”) is introduced fairly early in the proceedings, it doesn’t begin to influence the narrative’s trajectory until roughly the halfway point. Up until then, Tenet feels like either a 007 excursion or an installment of the Mission: Impossible movie series. However, once Nolan has lulled audiences into the false sense of security that they’re watching a somewhat traditional action/thriller, he pulls the carpet out from under them. For those who aren’t paying close attention, it may be possible to follow things on the highest level: good guys fight to stop the bad guy from destroying the world. The more fully you comprehend things, especially as they relate to the time travel elements, the richer the tapestry appears. The problem is that it will likely require multiple viewings to fully appreciate the details and the sound mixing (which emphasizes ambient noise and Ludwig Goransson’s occasionally overbearing score) can make the exposition-laden dialogue difficult to decipher. The movie is in English but there were times when I wish it was subtitled.

Tenet doesn’t feature a lot of star power. Like Dunkirk , it relies on visual prowess and solid performances by under-the-radar/character actors. Washington is very good and shows multi-octave range, but many won’t recognize him. Post- Twilight , Robert Pattinson has kept a relatively low-profile while honing his craft and rebuilding his reputation. Tenet is in some ways his re-emergence party (a prelude to an even bigger role – one that Nolan is intimately familiar with). And, although Elizabeth Debicki’s profile is on the rise, she’s still just starting up the steep portion of her ascent. This marks the first collaboration of each of these three with the director, but Nolan has brought back a couple “old friends.” Kenneth Branagh (whom he has long admired) gets more screen time than in Dunkirk and, although Michael Caine appears in only one scene, this is the seventh time his face has been seen in a Nolan production.

Tenet contains a number of top-notch action sequences, any of which could rival the centerpiece moments from a Bond or Mission: Impossible film. The two most impressive involve a runaway jet airliner and a heist facilitated by a convoy of large vehicles. Late in the proceedings, a convoluted conflict involves a strike team that is manipulating time (while their digital clock counts up from zero). A lot of directors understand how to mix a testosterone-and-adrenaline cocktail, but Nolan adds a third ingredient, intelligence, to his recipe.

Although Tenet doesn’t represent Nolan at his best (for me, that would be Memento , Interstellar , or The Dark Knight ), it’s among the director’s most ambitious efforts and is a match for his most narratively complicated screenplays. Whether or not it’s the best way to re-open theaters after a nearly six-month hiatus remains to be seen. (Has too much pressure been placed on its shoulders?) However, under ordinary circumstances, it would have been among a select group of “must see” releases during the summer of 2020. As things have turned out, it may be the only one.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the people who never stopped loving tenet.

People who love “ Tenet ” tend to have a story about the first time they saw it, so let’s start with mine. I didn’t catch Christopher Nolan ’s 2020 film in theaters — I live in Los Angeles, where there were tight COVID restrictions — so it wasn’t until the movie became available for purchase digitally months later that I finally was able to check out my most-anticipated movie of that year. I’ve been a fan of Nolan’s for a while — ever since I’d been dazzled by his sophomore feature “ Memento ” — and I was especially curious to see what he’d done after “ Dunkirk ,” the best film of 2017.

But by the time I got to “Tenet,” I’d heard the negative buzz — how it was a disappointment, a needlessly complicated and convoluted pseudo-spy-thriller that involved time travel. Reviewers are often rapturous about a new Nolan film, but that hadn’t been the case here — the word was that the Oscar-nominated director, arguably the most prestigious of modern blockbuster filmmakers, had laid an egg. So rather than being excited, I was mostly wary, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. When I finally sat down to watch “Tenet,” I got a bunch of both — some incredible action sequences but also a storyline that was nearly impossible to follow. Practically avant-garde in its narrative structure, the movie was ambitious but also muddled, leaving me admiring the attempt but forced to admit it wasn’t one of his strongest efforts. Oh well, even the greats don’t always deliver the goods.

But then something happened: “Tenet” stayed with me. I hadn’t loved it, but I’d liked it, intrigued by the pieces that didn’t quite fit and curious to put them together in my mind. Perhaps there was more to the film than I had realized. There was obviously an intelligence at work — maybe I needed to apply my own to fully understand what Nolan had achieved.

We live in a culture in which you don’t have to wait long for movies to go from being labeled a dud to being hailed as a masterpiece. “Jennifer’s Body” was savaged by critics and died at the box office — it’s now a cult classic. “ A Simple Favor ” underperformed — now, there’s talk of a sequel because of the rabid fan base that sprung up around the film. “ Babylon ” was one of 2022’s biggest commercial bombs, so why does it have sellout screenings when it shows up at revival theaters? If a movie you adore was pilloried when it came out, just give it a moment — the internet will resurrect it soon enough.

But “Tenet” is a special case. Again, released during the height of COVID when most new movies of any discernible quality were being delayed, the film received mixed reviews by Nolan’s standards and made “only” about $365 million worldwide. (It reportedly cost north of $200 million, meaning that, because theaters usually collect about half of a film’s grosses, this was his first movie in forever that didn’t turn a profit.) And yet, on Friday, “Tenet” returns to theaters , available in 70mm and IMAX, serving as 2024’s first major event release (a week before "Dune: Part Two" steals most of those screens).

This is exciting news for exhibitors, who haven’t had much to be cheery about so far this glum box-office season. But it’s especially thrilling for the people who were onboard with “Tenet” from the very start. Critics and general audiences may have been chilly to the film — check around online, and you’ll see plenty of everyday moviegoers who thought “Tenet” was boring or confusing — but there’s also been a dedicated fanbase that has been preaching the gospel of this movie for years. On YouTube, on Twitter, on Reddit, on TikTok, they have delivered impassioned testimonials, reaching out to like-minded souls while also hoping to convert those who haven’t yet seen the light. For them, this weekend is validation and a victory lap. Each of them has their own story about how they first saw “Tenet.”

Ben Chinapen , 28, was living in Glasgow. An actor who had studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, he had moved to London before the pandemic hit. “I was in a terrible place in a really boring neighborhood in London,” he tells me over Zoom from Toronto. “I was like, ‘I hate this,’ so I just went back to Glasgow to my old student apartment.” His place was in the middle of the city, and so when “Tenet” came out, as a Nolan fan, he was looking forward to checking it out. But when Chinapen got to the theater, masked up, there was almost no one there. “There’s multiple reasons why someone might not go to the cinema during that time,” he says. “But I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to bomb, isn’t it?’”

Many of the film’s biggest fans loved “Tenet” from the start — Chinapen was not one of them. “I really was kind of meh about it,” he admits. “I remember being like, ‘Wow, this is inscrutable. This is on a new level of his complexity.’”

That’s certainly how reviewers felt, too. Whenever a film that did not open to thunderous ovation and gaudy grosses gets reevaluated, writers tend to oversell how unloved that film was. So let the record show that “Tenet,” in fact, got mostly favorable reviews — it’s just that it didn’t receive the sort of “best movie of the year” raves that usually accompany a Nolan film. In his three-star review for RogerEbert.com , Brian Tallerico summed up a lot of our initial feelings when he wrote , “It is 100 percent designed as an experience for people who have unpacked films like ‘The Prestige’ and ‘Memento’ late into the night, hoping to give Nolan fans more to chew on than ever before. More certainly seems to be the operating principle of ‘Tenet,’ even if the chewing can get exhausting.”

For those who don’t remember — or never could figure out what the hell was going on — this is a short plot description of “Tenet.” John David Washington plays a CIA operative, identified only as the Protagonist, who is recruited by a shadow organization calling itself Tenet. His mission is to stop a dangerous Russian baddie, named Sator ( Kenneth Branagh ), who is communicating with the future. With the help of Neil ( Robert Pattinson ) and Sator’s estranged wife Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki ), the Protagonist will try to prevent Sator from destroying the world. That seems simple enough, but the movie is far more complicated than that, dealing with entropy, inversion and temporal pincer movements. As a character advises the Protagonist — in a line that has become a totem for the film’s fans — “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

As someone who loves Nolan’s movies, Chinapen found himself sorting through his feelings after his first screening. “I was definitely disappointed,” he recalls. “I don’t know if I was ever angry, because I didn’t feel, like, crushing disappointment. But I just had this inkling of, ‘This must make sense, so I should go see it again.’ So I saw it a week or two later.” Even after the movie was no longer in theaters, he kept watching it, trying to fully comprehend the experience. “I didn’t even fully understand it until, I think it was the sixth time, when I specifically watched it with subtitles, where I was like, ‘I get it.’”

Chinapen’s journey to “getting” “Tenet” started with an image that had stayed with him — that of the Protagonist on the back of a red fire truck at the start of the film’s most inventive chase sequence. It became one of the key aspects of a 17-minute video he made in the summer of 2021, entitled “Tenet — A Misunderstood Masterpiece,” in which he shared his enthusiasm for the film and argued that it wasn’t a failure just because it had violated certain narrative rules or wasn’t emotional. (That latter criticism, by the way, really annoys “Tenet” fans. But more on that in a second.)

What prompted him to make the video, which has logged (to date) 2.2 million views, was, according to him, other viewers’ “fundamental unwillingness to understand [the movie] or engage with it in an actual productive way. Any time a filmmaker who’s done really well then makes a bold, clearly different kind of film, like, they’re not a stupid person. They didn’t just wake up one day and be like, ‘I’m going to do something dumb.’ They obviously put thought into it, so it’s like, ‘Well, trust the reputation — engage with it. Here’s a way that I’ve found to engage with it.’” But Chinapen also had another motivation: “Everything’s so toxic and terrible — the pandemic was raging — and I was like, ‘Here’s a fun little game you can play at home right now with this movie that maybe you had a bad experience with.’ It’s like you meet a person, have a really bad first impression with them, and then you hang out with them in a completely different context — you’re like, ‘Oh, I love this guy!’ You have a new friend now, and the world is better.”

Chinapen laughs self-deprecatingly as he describes his mindset. He has an easy sense of humor and a nerdy sweetness, qualities that he shares with the other four people I spoke with for this piece. As a Nolan fan, I sometimes lament a certain type of Nolan Bro that you encounter online — the sort of territorial, mansplaining bully who treats the director’s films as sacred texts, as the only example of true cinema. These jerks make the rest of us look bad — such as when they memorably complained, before “Dunkirk” came out, that Harry Styles fangirls were going to ruin the film for “real” movie lovers. Happily, I didn’t encounter any of that possessiveness in my conversations for this piece. The guys I talked to — and they’re all guys, in their 20s — love “Tenet” and Nolan in general. But they’re not weird or ugly about it.

On his Letterboxd profile , Nicholas Janzen, 28, describes himself as a “filmmaker and filmwatcher,” often taking to TikTok to riff on movie news or give reviews. In late January, he posted that his most-anticipated movie of this year would be the “Tenet” re-release, decrying how the film was “maligned” when it was initially released. The video quickly became one of his more popular recent posts.

Responding by email, Janzen tells me about his first “Tenet” viewing. “I was living in Toronto during the initial lockdown, and theaters had been closed for nearly five months at this point,” he says. “But the allure of seeing a new Christopher Nolan movie on a big screen was too enticing to pass up. So, I went masked up with legitimate fear for my health to have this viewing experience. I was blown away by the concept and the technically audacious action sequences that use time in such a unique way. It’s one of the great modern action films utterly propelled by vibes.”

If you check out the comments to Janzen’s TikTok post, it’s a fairly representative sample of the range of opinions surrounding “Tenet.” For every person who knows it’s great, there’s someone who insists it’s overrated. Such differing takes are nothing new on the internet, but “Tenet” discourse is especially passionate, neither side ceding any ground. Janzen comes across as good-natured about such debates, but to those who would point to the film’s subpar commercial performance as proof of its artistic failure, he argues, “The fact that it did make over $300 million during the height of COVID is legitimately impressive and speaks to the strength of Nolan’s brand. Had it been held [until later in the pandemic], it only could have gone higher.”

Someone who definitely helped that box-office total was Kenneth Mulwee, 26, who now resides in Los Angeles, where he’s a composer . When “Tenet” opened in 2020, he was still living at home in St. Louis, where he saw the film 15 times in the theater. He’s planning on seeing it five times during its one-week-only re-release.

Although Mulwee has seen “Tenet” more than any other film on the big screen, multiple viewings isn’t out of the ordinary for him. “Some of my friends saw ‘Tenet’ eight times. I saw ‘Oppenheimer’ 10 times in IMAX — I think some of them probably [saw it], like, five or six.” If you think that’s a lot of “Tenet” watching, Mulwee quickly points out, “I’ve seen stories online of people who tried to see it 100 times theatrically. I was like, ‘Man, I thought I was crazy.’ There’s a lot of ‘Tenet’ fanaticism.”

Unlike Chinapen’s near-empty theater, Mulwee remembers his first “Tenet” screening being packed. “Missouri was very laissez faire about [COVID restrictions],” he tells me over Zoom. “This was right during the thick of it — people were wearing masks, some weren’t. I probably wasn’t — I was like, ‘I’m young, I’m healthy. I’m just too excited for a Nolan movie. I don’t care what’s going on in the world, I’m going.’”

His first viewing, he went by himself, instantly flipping for the film. “The night after, I was with a buddy. Most of those early showings, I was with friends ‘cause I had to bring them to see it — I was so in love with the movie that any person I could get to go with me, I was getting to go with me. By the later showings, I went by myself — everyone else was like, ‘Dude, I’ve already seen it.’ But I was like, ‘I’m not done,’ so I kept going.”

What kept drawing him back to the theater? For one thing, because there weren't a lot of new, interesting movies coming out at that time, “Tenet” was, essentially, the only game in town. But also, “Every time I would see it, I would pick up on a new detail,” Mulwee says, “and it just made me love the movie so much more. Just knowing all these complex details that you absolutely will not get the first time you watch it — or first five times you watch it.”

People’s obsessive rewatching of movies is hardly a new phenomenon. Rodney Ascher ’s engrossing, thought-provoking 2012 documentary “ Room 237 ” focused on different people who each had elaborate, sometimes ridiculous theories about what Stanley Kubrick ’s “ The Shining ” is really about. But the theories weren’t what made “Room 237” fascinating — it was the meditation on why certain movies strike a deep chord with us, and why it can be dangerous to go too far down the rabbit hole coming up with bizarre interpretations of a movie’s actual intent.

Talk to “Tenet” fans and you’ll hear the occasional pet theory. But guys like Mulwee mostly seem to respond to the movie — and Nolan’s movies in general — because of the intelligence and care he puts into them. “I’m definitely a knowledge-driven person,” he tells me. “I love to just read Wikipedia articles, just find something that’s even remotely interesting to me and start learning about it. ‘Tenet’ had me reading about entropy and thermodynamics, Maxwell’s demon , all this weird stuff. ‘Oppenheimer’ had me researching nuclear physics. Any kind of concept that is brought to the table, I’m interested in.”

But what also makes “Tenet” so rewatchable is its invitation to the viewer to try to figure out precisely how time travel, or inversion, works in the film. Not unlike a puzzler such as “ Primer ,” “Tenet” inspires fans to map out labyrinthine timelines that can explain what is happening when to different characters. After multiple viewings, including one in which I watched with the subtitles on as well, I have made peace with the fact that I’m never entirely going to “get” all of “Tenet.” But once I trusted that Nolan seemed to, I was able to enjoy the movie for the fleet, bravura experience it is — for its enigmatic, meticulous, playful/mad design.

Those who find the movie willfully baffling — impenetrable for impenetrable’s sake — will be hard to convince. (In Jessica Kiang’s positive New York Times review, she observed , “The film is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess.”) But for some, like Chinapen, that denseness — and some people’s utter exasperation with it — is part of the fun.

Asked to describe a typical Tenet Head, he says, laughing, “A Tenet Head knows that everyone hates this movie, loves it unabashedly, thinks the inscrutableness is funny and gets a kick out of it and also agrees it’s genius. I think there’s a bit of irony to it as well — there’s a bit of self-aware, post-irony of just like, ‘Isn’t it funny that we love this movie, but also it’s amazing .’ We’re aware of how we sound when we say ‘Tenet’ is amazing, because we were there — we saw it for the first time and we were like, ‘What?!’ But now we're past that. It’s kind of a joke, but a really sincere joke.”

Griffin Schiller , 28, went to the greatest lengths of anyone I spoke to in order to see “Tenet.” A video creator and film critic, he lives in North Hollywood but, as he puts it, because L.A. theaters weren’t yet open due to COVID, “I was the insane person who drove, I don’t know, three-and-a-half-hours, there and back, to go see it in Vegas for a press screening.” The long drive turned out to be only part of the ordeal, though: “The worst was that screening cut out right in the middle of the big action set piece. You’ve got the inverted army, you’ve got the regular army — it’s like this massive spectacle, it’s blowing your mind, ‘Holy shit, this is incredible!’ — and then, yeah, it just cuts out, and we’re sitting there for 15 minutes. They’re trying to fix it — they try and start it back over a couple of times, then they have to move us to another theater. The fact that the movie stayed with me — that I’ve loved it as much as I did — is a testament to just how great the film is, despite all of these horrible first-viewing things going on for me.”

Because Schiller follows the industry, he is not one to assume — unlike some “Tenet” fans online, jokingly or not — that the re-release is necessarily in response to the online fervor for the film. More likely, the decision by Warner Bros. is based on certain practicalities: An IMAX re-release will get people to the theater, where audiences can see a trailer for the studio’s next big IMAX spectacle, “Dune: Part 2,” which comes out next week. And, of course, Warner Bros. presumably wants to smooth things over with Nolan, who had made several films for the studio, including “Tenet,” but was so unhappy with the company’s strategy during the pandemic to release movies in theaters and on its streaming service simultaneously that he bolted for Universal, which put out his potentially Oscar-winning “ Oppenheimer .” (In a statement in December 2020, Nolan famously declared of Warner Bros. , “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”)

This touches on another aspect of the so-called “Tenet” backlash that occurred when the film opened in 2020. At the beginning of the year, before COVID became a reality for North American audiences, Nolan’s closely-guarded action-thriller was on the top of most people’s must-see lists. But once lockdown scuttled theaters, “Tenet” was pushed back from its July release date. Undeterred, Nolan seemed determined to figure out a way to get the movie into theaters — rightly or wrongly, there was a general impression that Nolan wanted to be the one who “saved” the theatrical experience. But was that a sign of arrogance or stubbornness on his part? In the midst of a global crisis in which so many were dying, who really cared about a movie right then? I often wondered if that contributed to some people’s negative feelings about “Tenet” — they felt that the film, with its elaborately clever narrative design, just seemed entirely beside the point at a moment of such fear and sorrow.

“I remember people questioning whether or not he should be releasing the film in that climate,” says Schiller. “I think those are valid questions for sure, and I don’t know if there [was] really any right answer. The thing that I admired is he saw an industry that he loved dearly — theaters — really suffering. And he was like, ‘Look, if I put this movie out here and I give these theaters something to show, I give people a reason to go back to the movies — maybe other films will follow suit.’ Where he probably went wrong is there was nothing necessarily set in line with other filmmakers or other studios: ‘Look, we’re going to release ‘Tenet’ here, you guys, maybe a couple of weeks down the line release this. We’ll give the theaters something to keep them going and off of life support.’ I think his intentions were in the right place. I know a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, he just wants to release the movie because he’s got this massive ego,’ but he was trying to save something that was important to him.”

Schiller did a traditional review of “Tenet,” but as time went on, he couldn’t stop thinking about the film. “Especially in a sea of negativity, I was like, ‘Let me try and do a little bit more here,’” he recalls thinking. “It’s [a movie] that just stuck with me — I was like, ‘No, man, there’s so much more here to dive into.’”

And, so, in early 2021, he made a video essay incorporating quotes from Nolan and others, including passages from Tom Shone’s 2020 book The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries and Marvels of Christopher Nolan , to make a case for why “Tenet” should be reappraised. Specifically, he discussed how the film connects to Nolan’s childhood passion for James Bond films — a passion that Schiller shares. When I talk to Schiller over Zoom, he has a litany of 007 posters behind him, some of them in different languages.

“I’m a massive James Bond nerd,” he says with a laugh, “so I’m just picking up on stuff in this film that I felt was tailor-made for me. My dream project would be for Christopher Nolan to do a James Bond movie — ‘Tenet,’ to me, is the closest I think we’ll ever get to him doing that. [I was] really excited to see him go out there and create something original that is based on the feelings that he got when he was watching ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ when he was a kid.”

Schiller’s love of espionage thrillers and Bond flicks started when he was young, “but I become more fascinated the older that I get, just because I think it’s a genre that gets better as you get older and have a better understanding of the world and the geopolitical landscape. I grew up watching the Connery films as a kid — they’re great, who doesn’t like them? And ‘Casino Royale’ came out during a really pivotal time in my life — ‘Casino Royale’ was a big reason why I love movies as much as I do today. But, yeah, the espionage genre — I liked the characters, I liked how malleable the genre is. You can have a very serious John le Carré-type story and then you could do something like ‘Moonraker’ — they all feel like they belong in the genre.”

Most can see the Bond-like allusions in Nolan’s film, although even among “Tenet” fans, there’s debate about how worthwhile they are. Chinapen tells me, “This is something [my friend and I], who both are at the same level of obsession, actually disagree on. He [says], ‘This is [Nolan’s] James Bond movie,’ and I’m like, ‘This is not a James Bond movie.’”

Another person I spoke with, Jason Carman , 23, also doesn’t sound like he’s that big of a Bond guy. At one point as I talk to him over the phone from his work in San Francisco, he describes the Protagonist as “pretty James Bond-like, minus the corniness, in the sense that he’s basically just trying to save the world.” But unlike my other interview subjects, Carman (who loves “Tenet”) has never experienced it on the big screen. That’s why he can’t wait for the re-release.

“I’ve always wanted to see it in the theater,” he tells me, “so now I get to. I have three different viewings I’m going to. I have a personal one I’m going to, which is by myself — literally, no one else. There’s one I think that I’m co-hosting at a theater here in San Francisco, where a bunch of people I’ve worked with are seeing it — I’ve been told I’m giving the presentation after the film. Then there’s a third one, to be determined, that may be a date — we’ll see.”

If you’ve been banging the drum for “Tenet” all these years online, you may recognize Carman’s name — and know what he means by “the presentation.”

He first saw the movie when it was available on Amazon, eventually rewatching it about 10 times. “It was pretty confusing,” he says of his first viewing. “I’d say I got 70 percent of it, and then by the end of the rewatch I was like, ‘Oh, I think I get 95 percent of it.’” But Carman went viral early this year in connection to Jenn Sherman , the Peloton instructor who became famous after Nolan jokingly mentioned at the New York Film Critics Circle awards banquet, where he was being celebrated for “Oppenheimer,” that he had been doing a workout when, all of a sudden, Sherman randomly ripped on “Tenet,” saying , “That’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back.” The internet eventually tracked down Sherman , leading to some good-natured joking around on all sides . But in the midst of it all, Carman tweeted something extraordinary : “A girl I was going out with asked me to make a powerpoint explaining Tenet, I did. I’ve used it on 3 other dates since then whenever Tenet confusion comes up.” The tweet quickly started blowing up.

“There was a girl I was trying to impress,” he tells me when I ask about the origins of this presentation. “She made a joke about [‘Tenet’]: ‘Oh, well, you love it enough to where you’d make a PowerPoint for it.’ So I was like, ‘Actually, yeah, I would do that.’ A few days later, she came over and we shared wine — I pretended [to be a] drunk professor and presented this silly PowerPoint slide of the movie. The slides are quite bad — they don’t really do much explaining of the film. It’s really just a recap of the whole thing.

His original tweet went up on January 4th — there was such demand to see the PowerPoint that, a day later, he put up all 29 slides. A few days after that, he upped the ante, posting video of a first date he went on in which he showed his date, Harpriya Bagri , the printed-out slides so he could talk to her about “Tenet.” (She had seen the movie, but she didn’t know she was being recorded.) That video also went viral, with some commenters praising the wholesomeness of their good-natured back-and-forth, while others accusing Carman of mansplaining. Personally, I lean toward those in the former camp: Bagri clearly has a ball dunking on this guy — seriously, how many slides does she have to look at? — and the two of them really enjoy getting into discussing the ins and outs of “Tenet.”

“I was terrified,” he says of staging the surreptitious video shoot. “I make a lot of video and film for my job, but I’m always on the other end of the camera. I like that — I don’t really enjoy being on the front end of it, especially when it’s about me. You know that it’s going to go viral because of the context — it’s very nerve-racking.”

Carman had decided not to tell Bagri in advance so that her reaction to his nerdy presentation could be authentic, but he knew ahead of time he wasn’t going to do anything with the video unless he got her blessing. “We wanted to try to make a little piece of modern art,” he says, before stopping himself. “I know that sounds so conceited, but we wanted to try to keep it real, whether that meant naturally funny moments or naturally awkward moments. I realized that not telling her [ahead of time] would be a good way to approach that, but it was pretty nerve-racking for me, because I was like, ‘That’s sketchy.’ But [I thought], ‘I’m a good dude, if she becomes uncomfortable with it, the footage is getting deleted.’ But I just knew her from Twitter and in person, and I was like, ‘I think she’ll think it’s hilarious and great.’”

Not only was Bagri cool with it, she went back to Carman’s place with the people who’d shot the video so that they could all watch it and edit it together. “Me and my roommates and her and the two guys that helped me film it all came over and just cracked up at the full 40 minutes of uncut footage,” he says, laughing. “Twelve people just sat in a room, and we all made co-directorial decisions on what parts were funny, what parts weren’t.”

He and Bagri are friends — they’ve done joint interviews about the experience — but I was curious if the viral video helped get him dates with other women. “A third of the total comments [from] the whole experience were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy’s DMs are going to be flooded . There’s going to be so many women interested in him because it really displays nerdiness and care in a fun way that’s unique,’” Carman laughs. “I got a total of four DMs from interested women. Four. What I’ve learned is that, when women go viral, they get tons of DMs from guys. But I did go on one of those dates with someone, and it was really a fun date — a quality person and a very, very smart person. I was like, ‘Maybe that was a good quality filter for smart, nerdy, meticulous folks,’ but it didn’t work at a high-quantity level.”

Because my five interview subjects are men — and the loudest Nolan fans online also seem to be men — some may wonder if there’s something inherent in the director’s movies that lend themselves to be fixated on by guys. Sweeping statements about gender are reductive and stupid. (And I know plenty of women who adore Nolan’s movies.) But it’s tempting to think in broad stereotypes, associating men with a love of intricate riddles they can brag about solving — a brain-measuring contest, if you will — while women are less interested in intellectual (or, if you’re less charitable, self-absorbed, brooding action movies pretending to be about grand themes) cinematic exercises.

When I put this question to my subjects, they struggled to explain why more of their male friends cottoned to Nolan’s movies. (As Mulwee puts it, “I think everybody that I know that had a girlfriend that would’ve seen ‘Tenet,’ I don’t think any of them were remotely interested in it — but all the guys were like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever!’”) But if you want to use another broad, reductive gender stereotype, suggesting that men don’t like films that are emotional, these five men will surprise you — many of them talked about a personal, visceral connection they have to “Tenet.”

“I cried at least twice watching it,” Carman says. “And I don’t cry a lot.” The ending, when Neil and the Protagonist say goodbye to one another, almost brings him to tears. “But it’s really the moments where the Protagonist has just the quickest moment of ‘Oh shit, am I going to do this crazy thing? I’m about to save the world.’ It’s one thing to run into a burning building — it’s quite a thing, actually — but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to run into the burning building and not know what the fuck is going to happen. There’s something about moving into action for the benefit of someone you’re trying to save [that’s] deeply emotional to me — that just gets me.”

For Carman, that feeling connects to the work he does. He aspires to be a filmmaker, like his heroes Nolan and George Lucas . But during the work week, “I am the head of content at a satellite company called Astranis. If you’re one of the four billion people who have no internet connection — you can’t afford it — our satellites are tailor-made for you. Then on the weekends, I do a weekly web series , with an emphasis in cinematic documentary filmmaking, about people who are building other tech things, like Astranis is, to try to change the world with technology for the better.”

The idea of helping others, whether it’s the Protagonist or himself, is something that’s important to Carman. “My personal life philosophy is to do the most with my life,” he tells me. He considers himself incredibly fortunate: “Being born in a state and a country that’s financially well off, I wanted work [that would] help the rest of the world who don’t have certain things — like clean water, consistent food, a safe place to live, the internet — and bring that to reality.” But the film’s exploration of time travel has also stayed with him, changing the way he thinks about his purpose — in particular, he’s focused on one line, when Dimple Kapadia ’s arms dealer Priya says that, really, we’re all communicating with the future. (“Emails, credit cards, texts: Anything that goes into the record speaks directly to the future.”) Carman believes time travel is a reality, and we should think more about its daily implications.

“The stupid thing I just tweeted is going to be seen by my great-great-great-great grandchildren one day, in a way that normally maybe something like that never would’ve been seen,” he says. “I think more about time travel than the rest of the other big questions of fate, luck, ‘Is there a god?,’ things of this nature.”

For Chinapen, the Protagonist’s Blackness resonates, especially because it’s never commented on in “Tenet.” In Chinapen’s viral video, he delves into this aspect of the movie, commenting how refreshing it is to have a Black hero in a studio blockbuster whose race has nothing to do with who he is as a character. As an actor of color, Chinapen finds that encouraging.

“I’m half-white, half-Guyanese,” he says. “I haven’t looked into my genealogy very much, but it’s like Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese.” I found this part of his video especially illuminating, shining a light on how movie fandom can be intensely personal. But I told him that, although the Protagonist’s race is never brought up, in a sense I wondered if it is. Quite often, our hero is underestimated by the white characters he encounters — the Protagonist is told that he’s out of his depth trying to navigate this world of spycraft, leading me to wonder if their lack of respect from him was partly based on racism. Was Nolan very subtly suggesting that?

Chinapen takes a shine to that theory, in part because it connects with his own feeling of first seeing “Tenet” in Glasgow, “a city full of white people. I was watching it and feeling a disconnect and missing Toronto. One of the reasons I came back to Toronto was to be around the multiculturalism. [The Protagonist] is like, ‘Everyone seems to think I’m not getting it’ — and to be fair, he doesn’t get it, but he has the capability to get it — and then it turns out he’s smarter than all of them, because in the future he’s the boss.”

In their own way, each of my five interview subjects have helped sing the film’s praises, keeping it alive in the cultural consciousness despite not being as popular as Nolan’s blockbusters. But they don’t feel much ownership of “Tenet” and are pleased if their online contributions helped turn new people onto the film — or changed their mind about the movie. Speaking about his brief viral moment, Carman says, “A fear is that I’ve somehow maybe ruined ‘Tenet’ for people.” But all in all, his fleeting internet celebrity turned out okay. “Your coworkers and old teachers text you out of the blue — they’re like, ‘Oh my god, you’re on Twitter!’ Then everyone forgets about it, and you move on with your life and it’s wonderful. If there’s a way to be famous, it’s this.” That said, he did get a kick out of recently meeting a new coworker: “He’s like, ‘You’re the ‘Tenet’ guy! Do you want to get lunch? We can just talk about ‘Tenet.’’ We’re doing that next week — I think that’s pretty cool.”

“Tenet” will always be associated with the pandemic, part of the film’s legacy connected to COVID and Nolan’s attempts (mocked by some) to get his movie into theaters. Arguably, “Tenet” didn’t get a fair shake because of all the baggage around it at the time. But even if there hadn’t been a lockdown, Schiller believes, “The film would be divisive, just by virtue of the weirdness of it. [The movie’s plot] is a lot to grasp on an initial viewing, and when the film came out during the pandemic, people weren’t going to go back for a second viewing — and this is a film that demands repeat viewings.”

Of course, there were people who kept going back, happy to relive the Protagonist’s journey again and again. But although the pandemic is over, some of those fans can’t entirely separate the lockdown from the experience of watching “Tenet.” “I remember when and where I saw most movies for the first time,” says Janzen. “So a part of me will always associate ‘Tenet’ with the pandemic and the real-world factors that informed its release. Obviously, many people opted not to see it in its initial theatrical run, so I would hope, particularly after the phenomenon of ‘Oppenheimer,’ audiences are more willing to take the leap and its legacy can be defined more by how it continues to be appreciated over time by fans and doubters alike.”

Even today, watching “Tenet” makes Chinapen think about the COVID era. “[The characters] wear those masks, which is a really evocative image,” he says, “and that takes me back. [The film] also reflects how weird it felt at that time — it’s one of those rare moments where a piece of art happened to mean something that it completely did not intend to, but just fundamentally culturally does, which is kind of beautiful.”

Funny enough, despite seeing “Tenet” 15 times during its initial release, Mulwee has never revisited it since. “I’ve watched scenes,” he says, “but I haven’t sat down and watched the film in its entirety at home — it’s so ingrained in my head [from those] theater experiences, it has to be that. That’s why I’m really excited for this re-release, because I can relive that: ‘This is how I know “Tenet.”’ That’s going to be great.”

But it also makes Mulwee think about how much has changed in those four years — not just in terms of the pandemic but also for himself. “Life was definitely different,” he tells me. “In Missouri, stuff was shut down, but not entirely. Back then, I was 23 years old — I lived with my parents. I didn’t have bills — I had no other obligations to do anything, so I just went and saw ‘Tenet’ as many times as I could. I had nothing else to spend my money on — I had nowhere else that I could really go. ‘Tenet’ was really my comfort food during the pandemic, especially in the early woes of it.”

He wonders if those memories will come back to him when he returns to “Tenet” in the theater, even though he now lives in Los Angeles to follow his ambitions to be a composer. “I’ll probably have flashbacks of what my life was and dreaming of being in L.A.,” he says, “because that was always the goal.”

Mulwee measures the distance between now and then. “I remember exactly what seat that I always sat in at that theater [in St. Louis], and that’s going to be a completely different experience being in L.A. I think it’ll bring me back to those times which, for me, were good. The pandemic was bad as a whole, but I had a lot of fun with ‘Tenet.’”

Tim Grierson

Tim Grierson is the Senior U.S. Critic for Screen International .

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‘Abigail’ Review: Horror by Numbers

In this cheerfully unambitious vampire movie, a bloodsucker is shut up in an old mansion with some nitwit criminals. Will there will be gore? You bet.

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A girl with vampire-like teeth screams into the camera.

By Manohla Dargis

A cheerfully obvious splatterthon, the new horror movie “Abigail” follows a simple, time-tested recipe that calls for a minimal amount of ingredients. Total time: 109 minutes. Take a mysterious child, one suave fixer and six logic-challenged criminals. Place them in an extra-large pot with a few rats, creaking floorboards and ominous shadows. Stir. Simmer and continue stirring, letting the stew come to a near-boil. After an hour, crank the heat until some of the meat falls off the bone and the whole mix turns deep red. Enjoy!

That more or less sums up this movie, a horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about. It centers on the kidnapping of the title character (a fine Alisha Weir), an outwardly self-possessed 12-year-old ballerina who’s snatched one night by a half-dozen genre types. A formulaically diverse cohort of underworld bottom feeders (played by Dan Stevens, among others), these Scooby-Doo-ish chuckleheads come with divergent skills, histories and expiration dates, and are largely tasked with padding the reed-thin story and dying horribly.

The filmmakers — it was written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett — have outfitted the story with the usual particulars. Much of the movie unfolds inside a sprawling labyrinthine mansion that looks like it was imagineered by an amusement park designer who scanned some old horror movies while thumbing through picture books on the history of the European aristocracy. There are suits of armor flanking the front door, a bearskin rug on the floor, an empty coffin tucked in a corner and oddly, given the genre circumstances, some fresh garlic in an otherwise derelict kitchen.

There are some tangy bits, including Giancarlo Esposito, who enters, barks some orders and soon leaves the kidnappers alone with Abigail in the mansion while they wait for her father to pay a ransom within 24 hours. Once this narrative stopwatch begins, the crew members — who also include Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett, an amusing Kevin Durand and Angus Cloud (who died in 2023 ) — banter and pose, grimace and scream while managing to be lightly appealing and entirely disposable. At one point, the filmmakers nod at one of their influences with a shot of Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery novel “ And Then There Were None ,” about a group of people who are enigmatically offed.

“Abigail” has been described as a take on “ Dracula’s Daughter ” (1936), one of the horror films in Universal’s vault, some of which it has resurrected in some fashion. The press notes for “Abigail” name-check a few vampire titles, but “Daughter” isn’t among them, and for good reason because there’s little to link these two. That’s too bad; the earlier film is a true curiosity. It stars Gloria Holden as a countess who preys on men and women alike, and begs a doctor to help her with her “ghastly” condition. With its lesbian overtones, the movie is a vexed and tasty text — censors urged the studio to avoid suggestions of “ perverse sexual desire ” — and the countess a complex villain in a film that is very much worth a look.

Abigail Rated R for gore and more gore. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ Sets Imax 70mm Re-Release for 10th Anniversary This Fall

By Brent Lang

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Christopher Nolan’s “ Interstellar ” will be re-released in theaters in honor of the sci-fi epic’s 10th anniversary. The film, which earned an impressive $731 million globally when it debuted in 2014, stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon and is set in a dystopian future in which a group of astronauts must travel to the far reaches of space to find a new planet for humankind to colonize.

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Nolan shot “Interstellar” with a combination of 35mm anamorphic film and 65mm Imax. The picture was released in film formats, which was a herculean task at the time as many theaters had switched over to digital projectors. Nolan has continued to be a champion for film, as well as for Imax. He urged moviegoers to see the movie in 70mm Imax, which led to weeks of sold-out showings.

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COMMENTS

Tenet movie review & film summary (2020)
The kid is as much of a device as an inverted bullet. If "Tenet" can be a hard movie to engage with emotionally or even comprehend narratively, that doesn't take away from its craftsmanship on a technical level. It's an impressive film simply to experience, bombarding the viewer with bombastic sound design and gorgeous widescreen ...
Tenet
Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/29/24 Full Review David P Jesus God TENET should be on every IMAX Screen like once a week in Perpetuity. Nolan spy movie WORKS in IMAX screens only.
'Tenet' Review: Christopher Nolan's Time-Bending Take on James Bond
Tenet Rated PG-13 for forward and reversed violence, mild headaches, desirable men's wear. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Opening Aug. 26 in select theaters ...
Tenet review
But for me, Tenet is preposterous in the tradition of Boorman's Point Blank, or even Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, a deadpan jeu d'esprit, a cerebral cadenza, a deadpan flourish of crazy ...
Tenet
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 24, 2022. Jeffrey Harris 411mania. A game cast and topnotch production values are unable to improve upon a clunky script and awkward execution. Tenet fails ...
Tenet (2020)
Tenet: Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Juhan Ulfsak, Jefferson Hall, Ivo Uukkivi, Andrew Howard. Armed with only the word "Tenet," and fighting for the survival of the entire world, CIA operative, The Protagonist, journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a global mission that unfolds beyond real time.
Review: In 'Tenet,' a time-bending thriller for bended times
Nolan vs. COVID-19 is as much part of the drama of "Tenet" as anything on screen, and just as convoluted and disorienting. Seeing "Tenet" for this critic meant crossing numerous state lines and watching it at a nearly empty movie theater — a luxury of social distancing that won't be possible for most, even in reduced capacity theaters.
'Tenet' Review: Christopher Nolan Delivers a Big, Brash Entertainment
'Tenet' Review: Christopher Nolan's Grandly Entertaining, Time-Slipping Spectacle Is a Futuristic Throwback Reviewed at BFI Imax, London, Aug. 20, 2020. MPAA Rating: PG-13.
'Tenet': Film Review
The Bottom Line Easy to admire, hard to love. Release date: Aug 24, 2020. That's a megaton of pressure for one sci-fi action film with a not-yet-A-list lead actor on the poster ( John David ...
Tenet First Reviews: A Beautiful, Spectacular Head-Scratcher
Tenet is best approached as an experience to be felt rather than comprehensively understood. Sit back, relax and prepare to have your mind blown. - James Mottram, South China Morning Post. An absolute treat as a Movie Event… Tenet's deployment of stupefying practical special effects is pure wizardry. - Shannon Conellan, Mashable
Tenet
An All-Original Science-Fiction Masterpiece from Christopher Nolan, and His Most Underrated Film Yet. Tenet was ahead of its time. In my personal opinion Tenet serves as an additional brilliant film in Christopher Nolan's filmography, that unlike most of Nolan's other films, never got the place it deserves in the spotlight.Christopher Nolan presented us with yet another masterpiece, that only ...
'Tenet' Review: Christopher Nolan's Knockout Arrives Right on Time
Tenet — yes, the title is indeed a palindrome — is the first big-budget studio movie (it's production budget tops $200 million) to open in actual theaters, including IMAX, in the Covid ...
Tenet review: Christopher Nolan's trippy epic won't save Hollywood
The Protagonist is more thinly written than an actor of his talent deserves, but as the audience's proxy, he at least strikes the right notes: dizzy, determined to understand, and plagued by a ...
Tenet (2020)
9/10. If you are into movies, Tenet is your jam. ThomDerd 28 September 2020. If you want to enjoy an intriguing and interesting film which does tribute to many genres and film-making techniques, then TENET is a great choice. My IMAX experience: A bit of a headache at start but 20min later the headache gets bigger.
Review: 'Tenet' Is Classic Nolan—Pristine, Demanding, and Convoluted
This review was filed from Toronto, where the writer attended a socially distanced press screening; Tenet opens in wide release in Canada on August 26, and on September 3 in some cities in the ...
Tenet (film)
Tenet is a 2020 science fiction action thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife Emma Thomas.A co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, it stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh.The film follows a former CIA agent who is recruited into a secret ...
Tenet Review
Tenet Review Killing time. ... Following two recent ambitious movies from the filmmaker, Tenet feels a little conservative, as if Nolan's style is a franchise rather than a framework. Despite ...
Tenet review
Tenet's financial stakes couldn't be higher.Multiplexes are banking on audiences weighing up the relative risk of returning to the pictures. The worry is that if even a movie of this scale can ...
Tenet (2020) Movie Review
Tenet's script sees Nolan once again play with bold and imaginative ideas to elevate the simpler story at the film's core. Similar to how Inception blended a heist movie with its dream concept, Tenet makes its story of preventing armageddon standout with time inversion. There's refreshingly little hand-holding when it comes to this premise, as ...
Tenet Review: It's All Christopher Nolan, For Better and Worse
Read our review of Christopher Nolan's time-bending spy thriller Tenet, starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki.
Tenet review: Christopher Nolan's thriller is a palindromic dud
Tenet review: Christopher Nolan's thriller is a palindromic dud This article is more than 3 years old If the long-awaited sci-fi from the Inception director restarts the summer of cinema it will ...
Tenet Review
And ultimately, for all of that, Tenet once again proves Nolan's undying commitment to big-screen thrills and spills. There's a lot riding on this film, to resurrect cinema, to wrench people ...
Tenet Movie Review
Tenet is Nolan's most challenging work to date. The Visuals & Background Score is perfect. The Action & Chase scenes are Genius. The screenplay is tight & engaging. A complicated film concieved & executed with ease. Nolan is a mastermind! Show more. Rate movie. See all 27 parent reviews.
Dune: Part Two Director Reacts to Stilgar Memes
Dune 2 director Denis Villeneuve reacts to Javier Bardem's Stilgar becoming a major meme trend. By Kofi Outlaw - April 18, 2024 06:03 pm EDT. 0. Dune: Part Two director Denis Villeneuve had no way ...
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to Re-Release in IMAX 70MM This Fall
Tenet re-released for just a week in February, while Regal Cinemas recently announced a promotion where they'll be showing The Dark Knight, Inception, Insomnia, Dunkirk, and Interstellar for $5 ...
Tenet
Tenet (United Kingdom/United States, 2020) August 28, 2020. A movie review by James Berardinelli. Christopher Nolan loves playing with time and the fabric of reality. A majority of his non-Batman films have featured mind-bending excursions through the fourth and fifth dimensions and Tenet is no exception. In fact, despite downplaying the sci-fi ...
The People Who Never Stopped Loving Tenet
On his Letterboxd profile, Nicholas Janzen, 28, describes himself as a "filmmaker and filmwatcher," often taking to TikTok to riff on movie news or give reviews. In late January, he posted that his most-anticipated movie of this year would be the "Tenet" re-release, decrying how the film was "maligned" when it was initially released ...
'Civil War' Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again
One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie's old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who's sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her ...
'Abigail' Review: Horror by Numbers
April 18, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET. Abigail. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett. Horror, Thriller. R. 1h 49m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film ...
'Interstellar' Re-Release in Imax 70mm Set for Fall 2024
Paramount Pictures announced the re-release during its presentation to theater owners and executives at CinemaCon, the exhibition industry conference taking place this week in Las Vegas ...

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