UPDATED: Check out the final trailer for TENET above!
It's the moment you've all been waiting for, folks! The first reviews for Christopher Nolan's TENET have arrived, and some of what you're about to read may shock and surprise you. The long-anticipated summer blockbuster screened in London this week ahead of next Wednesday's European rollout, making fans in the U.K. the first to experience Nolan's latest offering of cinematic pageantry.
Obviously, TENET has traveled a hard road to releasing, after being hit by numerous delays on account of the coronavirus pandemic. During that time, Nolan's latest sci-fi brain-buster has been framed by fans and media alike as something of a white knight who'll eventually arrive to save the summer box office. Well, maybe not save it entirely, but surely the film will land a few critical hits for theater owners and Warner Bros. executives alike, right? Honestly? I'm not so sure after reading some of these reviews. Let's dive into what some reviewers and outlets are saying and then you can decide for yourself if TENET sounds like it's the film that'll put you back at the theater.
Leslie Felprein of The Hollywood Reporter:
"Altogether, it makes for a chilly, cerebral film — easy to admire, especially since it's so rich in audacity and originality, but almost impossible to love, lacking as it is in a certain humanity."
Micke McCahill of IndieWire:
"Tenet is big and ambitious, but Christopher Nolan is more caught up in his own machinations than ever before. The film is too terse to have any fun with its premise," McCahill then added, "What’s really there to untangle, beyond loops of string and a whole lot of smoke rings? Anyone ready to obsess over a doodad on a backpack as they did over the spinning top of “Inception” can cling to the illusion of Nolan as the movie messiah. On this evidence, though, he’s become a very trying, ungenerous, ever-so-slightly dull boy."
Guy Lodge of Variety:
"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. “Tenet” is no holy grail, but for all its stern, solemn posing, it’s dizzy, expensive, bang-up entertainment of both the old and new school."
Jordan Farley of Gamesradar:
"Perhaps buoyed by the confidence that audiences will follow wherever he leads them, Nolan’s intimidatingly dense script obstinately avoids handholding, asking audiences to take a leap of faith to a greater extent than ever before." Farley also writes, "Tenet is a practically perfect (re)introduction to the big screen. Whether audiences are ready – where safe – to return to cinemas en masse is another question entirely."
Nicholas Barber for BBC:
"Again, you have to hand it to Nolan. To use the old expression, he puts the money on the screen, delivering the kind of noisy, extravagant and fundamentally ridiculous pulp fiction which reminds you why you go to the cinema. But it collapses under the weight of all the plot strands and concepts stuffed into it. You don’t get the impression, which you usually get from his films, that every element is precisely where it should be. Some parts of it go on too long, others not long enough. It’s a treat to see a really big film again, but a smaller one might have been better."
Christina Shroud of The Guardian:
"You exit the cinema a little less energized 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 follow a thing. We're clobbered with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what's happened has happened."
Jessica Kiang of The New York Times:
"Indeed, take away the time-bending gimmick, and “Tenet" is a series of timidly generic set pieces: heists, car chases, bomb disposals, more heists. But then, the lie of Nolan’s career has been that he makes the traditionally teenage-boy-aimed blockbuster smarter and more adult, when what he really does is ennoble the teenage boy fixations many of us adults still cherish, creating vast, sizzling conceptual landscapes in which all anyone really does is crack safes and blow stuff up.
But gosh, does he blow stuff up good. And that’s not nothing, right now, when it is probably scale and explosions and complex stunts, rather than Deep Meaning, that will be what gets corona-shy moviegoers to brave the multiplex."
Woof! These reactions to TENET are not what I'd expected. That said, I suppose that a mixed bag is to be expected, especially with many folks having a myriad of expectations for the film. Actually, just so I don't come under fire in the comments section, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you all that I'm simply reposting what other reviewers have said, and that if this article errs on the negative, that's just the way the dice have landed, so far. As a counter-balance to all this, I did see some reviewers praising Ludwig Göransson's bold and intense score, which at one point uses the sound of Nolan's heavy breathing to help achieve its sense of atmosphere. I'd also read that despite a few cases of motion sickness, TENET is a carnival of sights, especially when shown in a massive IMAX format.
It's worth noting that only a handful of people have had the pleasure of seeing TENET and that more reviews are on the way, including our own.
TENET, starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kenneth Branagh, Clémence Poésy, and Michael Caine, will release internationally on Wednesday, August 26th. Be sure to keep an eye out for more reviews as the TENET train continues full steam ahead.