Tenet Reviews

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 implausibility – but supercharged with steroidal energy and imagination.

It’s breathtaking to watch the director work on such a grand scale, but the humans within his film do sometimes get lost. For all Nolan’s metaphysical mastery, there’s an undeniable coldness to his twilight world.

Very very and I mean very underrated Nolan movie. I think in like 5 years timeo people will look back on this movie and like it more and change their opinion

The most underrated Christopher Nolan movie. It is sure confusing but a few rewatches is needed to understand this great movie

It’s slam-bang action adventure that pretty much answers the question, “What if Christopher Nolan made a James Bond film?”

It’s basically espionage adventure, but with a science fiction backbone: Nolan ups the ante on “Mission: Impossible” by making the impossibility not just physical but quantum physical. And he goes about it expertly, bullishly and with giddily perverse intent to bewilder.

There’s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven’t felt in his previous work. The stakes, presumably, couldn’t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie, I don’t understand why I was meant to care. As an intellectual exercise, Tenet is very interesting, if not entirely successful. As a movie, I’m not so sure.

This is a bad film by a good filmmaker. It has the veneer of substantiality, but it’s unsubstantial. It is the product of sincere conviction and artistic confidence, but both were misguided. Every filmmaker needs to take the occasional chance, as Christopher Nolan did with “Tenet.” Not all chances pay off.

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.

Excellent. Tenet delivers and dosent stop giving, its engaging and action packed with plenty of tense moments and brilliant music.

There’s a lot to talk about with Tenet. On one hand, the visuals and action sequences are top notch and entertaining. The concept is unique and the performances and score were solid. On the other hand, the story and characters left me feeling mixed on this film as a whole. The story is all over the place and convoluted, which left me confused while watching and many of the characters felt underdeveloped. Maybe a rewatch could bring my score up but overall, while there is certainly a lot to like about Tenet, there’s also a lot that will likely leave some viewers feeling disappointed with the film

Another mind-bending original from Christopher Nolan, though at this point I'm beginning to wonder if he's grown too clever for his own good. In Tenet, we follow a befuddled special ops agent straight through the looking glass, into a shadowy world of nebulous time travel devices and unseen future acts of warfare. It's a heady trip, a deep dive into several cerebral sci-fi concepts and their influence upon the real world, and for that reason it demands our undivided attention for the full hundred-fifty minutes. No spacing out here, even during the big action sets, or you'll drown in deep waters. That level of insistence can feel grueling and sometimes frustrating, especially when so many essential conversations are spoken in low voices, with a variety of accents, while ominous music thunders and overwhelms the dialogue. Where Inception was keen to give us a brief verbal overview and then make with the show-and-tell, Tenet laboriously explains most of its theoretical plot-knots. The wild payoffs are still worth the effort, particularly during the hectic, breathlessly inventive final act, but we've got to earn them. I'm not sure if that speaks to the filmmaker's lack of confidence in efficiently demonstrating the rules before toying with them, or his mistrust in the audience to put those pieces together by themselves. Either way, it's a mildly concerning turn and the indulgent wordiness hurts the story's flow. For every jaw-dropping "whoah" moment (and there are quite a few), we'll sit through two lingering expository sequences in a swanky office, luxurious hotel suite or private yacht deck. I suspect these may be less grating after multiple viewings, but at first blush, they're excessive and off-putting. A challenging collage of lofty ideas and wild mental gymnastics that's often very cool, but also too complex for an immediately satisfying explanation.

So much potential! Probably too much potential, actually. The plot is much too full of over-thought nonsense, but the action is interesting to watch. Overall, this is a high-budget, low-quality film. The sound mix is truly terrible, and the lead actor has almost no charisma. The final ten minutes of the movie introduce a much more interesting movie that could have happened, but didn't.

I watched this movie to cool off my head while programming. I'm glad Nolan doesn't work in the software industry.

Academy Awards, USA

• 1 Win & 2 Nominations

Online Film & Television Association

• 1 Win & 9 Nominations