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For transparency’s sake, it feels important to state that this film was screened for limited press in Chicago with extreme precautions that simply won’t be in place for most ticket buyers at least for weeks, including 1% capacity of a huge, sanitized theater first thing in the morning. The intent of this review is not to encourage or discourage anyone from attending a theatrical screening at this specific time. It is an analysis of the work itself for posterity. 

No one could possibly mistake “Tenet” as being by anyone but Christopher Nolan . First, it has the kind of budget that only Nolan could get for an original screenplay. There’s so much money in every bursting frame of this opulent film that a scene in which gold bars are literally dumped on a runway feels almost like a self-referential wink. Second, it contains one of those time-twisting narratives that have defined the Nolan brand, one that blends robust action sequences with high-concept stories that viewers have to legitimately strain to follow. Finally, at times, it even seems to echo previous Nolan projects like an album of remastered greatest hits. There are war action scenes that recall “ Dunkirk ,” an espionage narrative that feels like “ Inception ,” and even a whole lot of people talking through masks a la Bane in “ The Dark Knight Rises .” It is 100% 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.

[Note: Spoilers will be incredibly light but if you want to go in completely unvarnished as many Nolan fans do, you’ve been warned.]

“Tenet” wastes no time, dropping viewers into an attack on a symphony performance in Kiev and barely allowing anyone to get oriented. One of the agents sent in to retrieve a high-profile asset during the assault is a man known only as The Protagonist ( John David Washington , proving more than capable of carrying a blockbuster film with his charismatic performance). Our hero is captured by the enemy, tortured, and takes a cyanide capsule, as he was ordered to do in training. He survives, and his allegiance to the system and his orders leads to a promotion of sorts, a top-secret assignment that involves a new technology that has the potential to literally rewrite human history.

The Protagonist is taken to a remote facility and introduced to the concept of inverted objects. We look at an object and it is traveling forward through time along with us. That’s obvious from elementary school science class. But what if an object could go in the other direction through history instead? Apparently, objects have been doing exactly this, and the Powers That Be need to control it because if a bullet could be sent back through time, what happens if a nuclear weapon takes the same trip?

Teaming up with a mysterious partner named Neil (a charming Robert Pattinson ), our hero tracks inverted objects to a villainous Russian arms dealer named Andrei ( Kenneth Branagh ). To get closer to this mega-wealthy madman, The Protagonist uses Andrei’s wife Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki ), who loathes her abusive husband but is being blackmailed into staying with him via threats that she will lose her son if she doesn’t do exactly what he says. On a very basic level, “Tenet” is about the extremes of unmonitored power. When one becomes so rich and powerful that they can literally shape world events, why not try to shape world history too? Sound a little familiar? Andrei is very much cut from the same cloth as classic Bond villains, complete with unchecked opulence, Russian accent and snarling line delivery. Blend Nolan’s obsession with time-twisting high concepts and his love of classic action construction and you have some idea what “Tenet” feels like.

However, there’s never been a Bond movie so stuffed with expository dialogue. “Tenet” spends roughly two hours of its 150-minute run time explaining what is happening, why it is happening, and what might happen next. And yet even with that it’s still incredibly difficult to follow because Nolan goes so far down his own rabbit hole of time travel that one almost needs to take notes to keep up (and I still think it arguably wouldn’t all add up if they could). Scene after scene of Washington, Pattinson, Branagh, and Debicki trying to convey the plot becomes exhausting, and it's Nolan's biggest mistake. It would have been better to just leave more unsaid, and jump chaotically into the film's mood and visuals instead of so often returning to over-analyzing a plot most people still won’t be able to follow. At times, it feels like a film crafted for YouTube explainer video culture. (There’s already one online that purports to deconstruct the ending and the movie isn’t even out in most of the world.) Early in the film, the scientist who explains inversion says, "Don't try to understand, feel it," and I wished Nolan had listened to her more. 

For some of his fans, this narrative assault is exactly what they’re looking for, but I prefer emotional registers in my Nolan that he seems only casually interested in here. The stakes don’t feel as high as “Dunkirk,” the maze construction isn’t as thrilling as “Inception,” and even the characters don’t feel as easy to invest in as “ Interstellar .” Almost as if he knows his puzzle box is ice cold, Nolan adds the subplot about Kat losing her son, but it’s so underdeveloped that I don’t think her kid even has a line. 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 cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema. The movie never sags in terms of technical elements and even performance. Everyone is committed to Nolan's runaway speed. Van Hoytema's work is vibrant, Jennifer Lame's editing is tight, and the performances are all good to great. In particular, Pattinson really shines in a playful register that he's not often allowed to use.

The decision to release “Tenet” in theaters instead of VOD was controversial for many reasons, but there’s no denying that "Tenet" was conceived by Nolan to be an experience that shouldn’t be paused and needs to be projected with a speaker system turned up to 11 (even if that would have still been true if Warner Bros. had delayed the film until it was safer to see it). I almost got the sense that playing "Tenet" at a lower volume or even pausing it at home to take a break might reveal its flaws. Nolan doesn't want you to be able to to dissect it or be distracted by your phone while you watch it. The irony is that he doesn't want you to be able to rewind it. "Tenet" is a movie about momentum, reflected both in its narrative and its aesthetic, and more cracks would show without it. 

Viewer response to “Tenet” will come down to how much one engages with that momentum. I expect a surprising number of people will open the door and jump out of this moving race car (look, another palindrome!) before it crosses the finish line, exhausted by a story that doesn’t make sense even as it’s trying to explain itself to you. Others will embrace the filmmaking's energy, which starts with intensity and doesn’t let up much at all. The word I kept thinking of was one I used earlier in this review: “aggressive”—that may sound like high praise to Nolan fans looking for something other than a lazy, predictable blockbuster and harsh criticism to those who aren’t looking to be left weary by a self-serious sci-fi epic. In the spirit of a film about objects moving opposite ways in time in the same space, maybe both groups are right.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Tenet (2020)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language.

150 minutes

John David Washington as The Protagonist

Robert Pattinson as Neil

Elizabeth Debicki as Kat

Kenneth Branagh as Andrei Sator

Michael Caine as Sir Michael Crosby

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ives

Dimple Kapadia as Priya

Himesh Patel as Mahir

Clémence Poésy as Laura

Andrew Howard as Stephen

Yuri Kolokolnikov as Quinton

• Christopher Nolan

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame
• Ludwig Göransson

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‘Tenet’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Time-Bending Take on James Bond

John David Washington stars as an unnamed, uncreased C.I.A. agent in a spectacle full of scenes running backward and forward.

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‘Tenet’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates an action scene from “tenet.”.

This is Christopher Nolan. I’m the director and writer of Tenet. Early in the film, the protagonist played by John David Washington and Neil played by Robert Pattinson, they travel to Mumbai. And they’re tasked with breaking into something that’s fairly unique to Mumbai, these high rise houses. So it’s like a mansion that rather than being wide on the ground, it’s vertical in the air. These aerials are some of the first aerials that any film company has been allowed to shoot in Mumbai ever. And it was a lot of coordination with the government to allow that to happen. But it’s a spectacular city and it was something I was very keen to get into the texture of the film. The hardware used to do this stunt — obviously stuff we’ve made up — these winches and so forth. It’s an arborist catapult — putting the line over the rail there. And we spent a lot of time talking to the stunt guys about how they could do this, and they came up with the way of having John David and Rob — as you see here — actually launch into the air. There’s a cut there — very invisible — by Jen Lame — my great editor — to the stunt guys who then were launched the entire way up the building for real. No CG. And here we see John David Washington showing his physical prowess as the protagonist, and Rob with the slightly more loose character of Neil. A little less disciplined but similarly skilled. We’re getting our first glimpse there of Dimple Kapadia — a great Bollywood actress — who has lent her talents to the film. Denzil Smith is a co-star there, he’s also well known in India. We shot in a real house. The family who allowed us to shoot there were incredibly welcoming. A lot of this stuff would normally be done — you do the interiors in a set, so forth. We tried to do it all right there overlooking the ocean — in Mumbai. This is the setup really for the character. We want to show his ruthless side, we want to show his skill. But what John David is able to bring to this is a sort of generosity of spirit, it’s a very warm presence. So not just pure sort of cynicism. “My friend, guns are never conducive to a productive negotiation.” “I’m not the man they send to negotiate or the man they send to make deals. But I am the man people talk to.” It was such fun to come and be a part of the Mumbai film industry for a few days. I mean — we were able to work with the most amazing local crew there. “To say anything about a client would violate the tenet he lives by.” And at the end here, we have the reveal of Dimple Kapadia — who plays Priya. It was a delight working with her, and getting to work in Mumbai on this film. “Sanjay, make a drink for our guest, please.”

By Jessica Kiang

LONDON — Maybe it is our collective enslavement to the superhero-industrial complex, but right now the movie world is looking for a savior. If it turns out to be Christopher Nolan , it wouldn’t be the first time: Films of his, like “Inception,” “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk,” have, in years past, “saved” summers, reputations, studios. His “Dark Knight” trilogy sure saved the Warner Bros.-DC partnership — in fact possibly he saved that a bit too hard, with franchise filmmakers ever since toiling in his shadow. Can Nolan save cinema from the coronavirus, its deadliest foe yet? Perhaps, if Covid-19 can be tripped up by the grandfather paradox or has a hitherto undiscovered weakness for sharp tailoring.

The hotly anticipated “ Tenet ,” opening Aug. 26 in some international territories and Sept. 3 in the United States, is reassuringly massive in every way — except thematically. Ideally presented in 70-millimeter Imax, Nolan’s preferred, towering aspect ratio, arrayed with the telegenic faces of a cast of incipient superstars, gorgeously shot across multiple global locations and pivoting on an elastic, time-bending conceit (more on that later/earlier), the film is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess. This would hardly be a criticism of any other blockbuster. But Nolan is, by several exploding football fields, the foremost auteur of the “intellectacle,” which combines popcorn-dropping visual ingenuity with all the sedate satisfactions of a medium-grade Sudoku. Within the context of this self-created brand of brainiac entertainment, “Tenet” meets all expectations, except the expectation that it will exceed them. Forgive the circularity of this argument: it’s a side effect of watching the defiantly circular “Tenet.”

With unforeseen irony, the film, which will be largely be shown in limited-capacity theaters, begins in a packed auditorium. It is an opera house in Kyiv and it is being held up. One of the attackers, superbly played by John David Washington, reveals himself to be a C.I.A. agent who has infiltrated the operation to rescue an asset, when a curious thing happens. A bullet, fired by an unknown ally, reverses out of a nearby seat, the wood around the bullet hole desplintering. Scarcely has the agent time to wonder, palindromically, “Huh?” when he is distracted by having to save hundreds of civilians from certain death.

We are a scant few minutes into the film’s 2½-hour run time and it has already delivered: the sequence ends with interior and exterior shots of an explosion, which the editor Jennifer Lame transforms with as perfect an action cut as ever there was. In that microsecond, we’re reminded of something the last few months have conspired to make us forget: cinematic scale. “Tenet” operates on a physiological level, in the stomach-pit rumbles of Ludwig Goransson ’s score, and the dilated-pupil responses to Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which delivers the same magnificence whether observing a narratively superfluous catamaran race, or the nap and weave of Jeffrey Kurland’s immaculately creaseless costumes. Seriously, the most mind-boggling aspect of “Tenet” might be the ironing budget.

Washington’s unnamed character is quickly inducted into the mysteries of “inversion,” a process by which an object — or a person — can have its entropy reversed, making it appear, to those of us moving lamely forward through time, as if it is spooling backward. His new inversion-related mission leads him first to a fixer, Neil (a delightful Robert Pattinson), useful for both his action chops and his master’s in physics, then to a Mumbai arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia), whose fortress apartment can only be accessed by bungee jump, and thence to the villainous Ukrainian squillionaire Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who can only be accessed via his wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), a miserable, imperiled art dealer who loathes him.

For once, spoiler sensitivity might be the reviewer’s luckiest break, absolving me of even attempting an explanation of a plot so contorted it’s best not to worry about it. Even the scientist played by Clémence Poésy, here exclusively to deliver exposition, eventually cops out. “Don’t try to understand it, feel it” is the best advice anyone offers. Suffice to say, the time-inversion idea is most impressive not in the film’s grander architecture, which, as widely surmised, loosely resembles a palindrome, but in single scenes in which some elements run forward while others reverse. Similar to “Inception,” which created an entire dream-world mythology only to have its revolving-hallway tussle become its most iconic sequence, in “Tenet,” time inversion poses a civilization-annihilating threat, but the killer scene is, again, a corridor fight. We see it twice, and each time, after your brain clicks to one of the combatants fighting forward in time while the other goes backward, the sheer how-did-they-do-that ingenuity is dazzling.

“Tenet” dazzles the senses, but it does not move the heart — a criticism common to all of Nolan’s original films. And other widely recognized Nolan blind spots are also in evidence: it’s depressing that as fine an actress as Debicki should be saddled with such a cipher role, given a son in lieu of a character and made responsible for the story’s only bad decisions. Everyone else performs to perfection, especially Washington’s history-less protagonist who proves that not all superheroes wear capes. Some wear the hell out of suits so dapper that one of the film’s biggest laughs comes when Nolan talisman Michael Caine glances at Washington, looking better, in his dark-blue ensemble, than possibly any human man has ever looked, and sneers Britishly, “Brooks Brothers is not going to cut it.”

Washington is basically James Bond, forward and backward, a kind of 00700, right down to the occasional wry one-liner. And if it takes megastar charisma to be able to memorably inhabit so vaporous a role, he is also blessed to be playing off an equally unflappable Pattinson — their chemistry, rather than the sexless semi-flirtation between Washington’s hero and Debicki’s damsel, gives the film whatever romance it has.

But it’s not just lack of heart that holds “Tenet” back. Nolan imagines impossible technologies but won’t explore their deeper implications. This is frustrating because in Branagh’s Sator — the film’s most multifaceted character even if all the facets are malevolent — Nolan gets so close. Sator’s motivation in bringing the future to war with the past has chilling ramifications, and maybe it’s the nihilism of these pandemic-era, post-Thanos-snap times, but it sets up an unsatisfied desire to watch the worst-case scenario unfold. Instead, at the moment of maximum potential chaos, Nolan retreats to the relative safety of spy movie convention.

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. Perhaps “Tenet” can even provide a nostalgic glimpse of who we were, just months ago on the other side of our own weird experiment in time. At one point, Sator’s yacht is moored off the Amalfi Coast near Pompeii — a city petrified at the height of its decadence by a volcanic explosion it could not see coming. So seems “Tenet,” the kind of hugely expensive, blissfully empty spectacle it is difficult to imagine getting made in the near-to-medium future, now a fascinating artifact of a lovably clueless civilization unaware of the disaster lurking around the corner.

Seek it out, if only to marvel at the entertainingly inane glory of what we once had and are in danger of never having again. Well, that and the suits.

Tenet Rated PG-13 for forward and reversed violence, mild headaches, desirable men's wear. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Opening Aug. 26 in select theaters around the world. Opening Sept. 3 in the United States.

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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

‘Tenet’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Grandly Entertaining, Time-Slipping Spectacle Is a Futuristic Throwback

The structural complications of Nolan's storytelling are nifty enough, but it's the muscular gusto of his filmmaking that inspires wonder.

By Guy Lodge

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“ Tenet ” was already shaping up as the year’s premier event movie before a certain global pandemic turned it into something closer to a holy grail: an unknown, unattainable object of intrigue, its enigmatic allure intensifying as it moved further and further away on the blighted release schedule. That’s an absurd way to regard any film, but amid the business-minded panic and frustration of its chronic postponement, one wonders if director Christopher Nolan was secretly at least a little amused by the heightened mystique around it all. A blockbuster artist who tends to cocoon his works in ceremonial secrecy at the best of times, he has wound up releasing his 11th feature into an aptly disordered environment. A concrete cornucopia of global chaos and threat, in which humanity’s survival depends on the minor matter of reshaping time and space, “Tenet” looks well suited to an anxious age.

But it’s also just a movie: a big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable one that will provide succor to audiences long-starved for escapist spectacle on this beefy, made-for-Imax scale. (Opening on Aug. 26 in international markets, it will make its way to the U.S. on Sept. 3.) It’s not, however, a film with much of consequence to say about the real world it’s finally entering, or indeed the elaborately rearranged, eve-of-destruction world it has devised on screen. That’s not a mark against it. It’s just that “Tenet,” for the better part of 2020, came to seem practically an abstract object, as fans pored over the palindromic implications of its title, and assembled the few, opaque scraps of publicity we were fed into a puzzle not of the film’s own making.

Popular on Variety

That the film turns out to be more straightforward — however ornately presented — than our wildest speculation about it is quite disarming. Like “Inception,” which used the essential language of the heist film as an organizing structure for Nolan’s peculiar fixations of chronology and consciousness, “Tenet” tricks out the spy thriller with expanded science-fiction parameters to return to those pet themes.

Again, his musings are rooted more in physics than philosophy or psychology, with the film’s grabby hook — that you can change the world not by traveling through time, but inverting it — explored in terms of how it practically works, not how it makes anyone feel. If this tendency leads Nolan’s critics to label him a chilly filmmaker, there’s the barest hint of knowing silliness to “Tenet” that warms it up. It plays best when it stops showing us its work and morphs into 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.

As for what it’s actually about, “Tenet” places any reviewer in a familiar bind with Nolan: What’s narratively most interesting about it is strictly off-limits in any pre-screening discussion. A pounding introductory set-piece plunges us into a packed Kiev opera house as it falls prey to a terrorist heist, infiltrated in turn by an unnamed CIA agent ( John David Washington ) to retrieve some manner of asset. Nolan’s script is evasive and sketchy on details at first, which may lead you to think this immersively choreographed scene is just a bit of formal flexing before the story begins in earnest. (The first sound we hear in the film, after all, is that of an orchestra tuning up, before composer Ludwig Göransson — more than ably filling in for Nolan standby Hans Zimmer — thunders in with his own thrilling percussive clatter.)

Yet this apparent prologue is also rife with clues and cues for later reference, as befits a film in which present, past and future aren’t always neatly sequential, but sometimes as swiftly cut through as three lanes on a fast-moving highway. Following the Kiev operation, Washington’s stoically imposing character — only ever identified as the Protagonist — is promptly released from the CIA and into a shadowy, less identifiable international espionage organization. Allied with flip, knowing English handler Neil ( Robert Pattinson ), about whom we learn little but his cool knack for working an upturned blazer collar, he’s set on a mission that is variously described as preventing World War III and saving the world altogether — such generically high-stakes objectives that you can’t help wondering if Nolan is taking us, and indeed his bemused Protagonist, for a ride.

Either way, the quest shuttles us on a trail of elaborately planted MacGuffins from India to Estonia, from the Bay of Naples to the notorious “closed cities” of Russia. (In these, Nathan Crowley’s production design wittily plays off the retro-futurism of their Brutalist architecture to reflect the film’s own overlaid timelines.) A sinister whisper network of international arms dealers emerges, with one of them, Priya (the wonderful Dimple Kapadia, in the film’s wiliest performance) serving principally to coax the Protagonist through the corridors of Nolan’s storytelling. But the ultimate target is Sator (Kenneth Branagh, wielding another ripe cod-Russian accent), a bottomlessly evil oligarch who may or may not hold the world in his clammy hands — often raised in anger to his estranged but trapped wife Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki ), a brittle art auctioneer for whom the script permits its Protagonist the bare minimum of feeling.

Written this way, the setup sounds like standard-issue Ian Fleming stuff. The trick, of course, lies in that misty, sexy concept of time inversion, which is better seen on the screen than explained on the page — though Nolan, as is his wont as a screenwriter, doesn’t skimp on slightly stodgy, film-pausing explanations either. Like “Inception,” it’s a film where well-informed characters often ask questions (“Do you know what a freeport is?” “You’re familiar with the Manhattan Project?”) to which they immediately supply a detailed answer. As much verbiage as Nolan devotes to unpicking his jazziest ideas, the excitement is all in their cinematic illustration: The film’s eerie images of bullets hurtling backwards through inverted air (the detritus of a coming war, we’re told) are more striking than the neat theory behind their trajectory.

“Don’t try to understand it, feel it,” a cryptic scientist (Clémence Poésy) counsels the Protagonist early on, and whether Nolan intends it or not, this feels like solid advice for the viewer too. “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, though it offers some elegantly executed structural figure-eights along the way. (Indie-trained editor Jennifer Lame, new to Nolan’s crew, pulls off these coups with a deft, surprising lack of fuss and flash.)

All of which is to say that precisely tracing the dense graph of the plotting in “Tenet” feels like work at the expense of its more sensory, movie-movie pleasures. Those range from the propulsive tumble of its fight sequences to the mesmerizing, carved-in-marble beauty of its stars, clothed in an infinite supply of cloud-soft, immaculately cinched suiting by costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and slicked in the oily gloss of Hoyte van Hoytema’s black-and-blue lensing.

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. Right now, as it belatedly crashes a dormant global release calendar, it seems something of a time inversion in itself.

Reviewed at BFI Imax, London, Aug. 20, 2020. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 150 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. presentation of a Syncopy production. Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan. Executive producer: Thomas Hayslip. Co-producer: Andy Thompson.
• Crew: Director, writer: Christopher Nolan. Camera: Hoyte van Hoytema. Editor: Jennifer Lame. Music: Ludwig Göransson.
• With: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Dimple Kapadia, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Himesh Patel, Clémence Poésy, Michael Caine, Martin Donovan.

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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

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

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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Tenet is here. It’s fine.

Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller looks like it was very hard to make. But it falls a little flat.

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Let’s start with the good stuff. Tenet — surely the most widely anticipated film of 2020 , for several overlapping reasons — is a slick and stylish thriller bearing Christopher Nolan’s unmistakeable thumbprints. John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki are very good in it. The movie is often exciting, and it has a couple good fights and car chases of a kind we haven’t quite seen before. It is always surprising, and it’s innovative in a way massive-budget blockbuster films rarely get to be. Tenet looks like it was very hard to make, and thus it is very impressive. Whatever else it is, you can’t say it’s not ambitious.

But it’s that “whatever else it is” part that I keep tripping over. I’m not the only critic who’s noted the impossibility of really describing this movie, even to your friends in private. It’s seems spoiler-proof by design; the entire plot was posted (accurately) on Wikipedia within days of the film’s first international screenings, but I can’t say that reading it will really tell you a lot about the movie, or its secrets and twists.

That’s not a problem, however. Tenet is not really a film that is ”about” its plot. The story is more of an excuse to turn the form of the movie into a mind game, a brain tease, like one of those jangly puzzle things you can pick up at a museum gift shop to fiddle with when you’re bored. Every time you think you’ve figured it out , another bit of it pops loose, and you have to start all over again.

To what end, I am not sure. I have uniformly loved, or at least admired, every film Christopher Nolan has ever made . He is perhaps the only household-name director in Hollywood who can turn out impeccable, ambitious, original films that meet the standards of many cinephiles while also luring huge general-interest audiences. It’s a tricky feat to pull off, but he’s done it for decades now.

Still, 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.

Tenet is both highly ambitious and a little unimaginative

Here I have to mention the elephant in the room. Normally I would’ve tried to see a film like Tenet at least one more time before reviewing it, to try to pick apart some of its trickier mechanisms and determine whether they click into place or fall apart under scrutiny. But I won’t be doing that with Tenet , because I can’t.

I live in New York, where movie theaters remain closed. So to see the movie, I had to rent a car and drive out of state to attend a private screening, in which a tiny handful of people wearing masks sat in a massive and very clean theater, with no concessions and far more than 6 feet between us. It was a privilege afforded me because of my job, and one that most people won’t have. Even if I could buy a ticket to see Tenet again this weekend, closer to home, I’d still be wary, given epidemiologists’ cautions , of voluntarily spending hours in an enclosed room with people who might choose to remove their masks to eat or drink.

But since I can’t buy a ticket where I live, that choice has been made for me. I cannot make that choice for you, and I won’t. I can say that if you’re planning to wait, for whatever reason, until you can see Tenet at home, that’s perfectly fine. I saw it on an IMAX screen, but unlike with Nolan’s 2017 masterpiece Dunkirk , I don’t really feel that the shifted aspect ratio added much to the Tenet experience. In Dunkirk , the IMAX footage cranked up the movie’s emotional heft, portraying the magnitude of the challenge the soldiers faced. Shot by frequent Nolan collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema, Tenet is often very nice to look at, but there’s no real reason to see it huge. (Be warned: It is also very loud.)

The thing about movie reviews, however, is that they aren’t only (or even primarily) written for the present; they’re records for the future, to show how a movie was received in its historical context. And I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, when people may sit down to watch the movie in a theater or at home, totally detached from the context of a global pandemic. So imagine along with me — and with a measure of thematic appropriateness — that the rest of this review is for the future, when I hope with all my might that we as a society won’t be contemplating whether we’re risking our lives to go sit in a dark room and be entertained for a couple hours.

As I’ve said, I couldn’t spoil Tenet even if I wanted to. But I can briefly set it up: The story involves an agent whom the credits call “the Protagonist” (John David Washington). The Protagonist is sent on a truly brain-bending mission, for reasons he does not understand. Along the way he encounters an unhappy woman (Elizabeth Debicki) married to a cruel, fabulously wealthy oligarch (Kenneth Branagh, doing a Russian accent) who also seems to be dealing with some shadowy and devious figures. The Protagonist partners up with Neil (Robert Pattinson, excellent as always), who seems to know more about what’s happening than he lets on. Also, there is some kind of group called Tenet pulling the strings behind the scenes, and someone, somewhere, has hatched a plot to destroy humanity. The Protagonist and Neil hop around the world, climb things, jump off things, shoot guns, drink martinis in fancy places — Tenet ’s nods to the spy genre are undeniable. And, of course, things get messy, physically and metaphysically.

The apocalyptic plot point was where my disappointment started. Whenever a blockbuster declares “and all of humanity will be destroyed!” to establish its stakes, I assume it’s a crutch to get us to care about the characters. But we can only be asked to care about the end of the world so many times (while living through our own hair-raising serial apocalypses) before it loses its punch. Somehow, I expected something more ... surprising? ... from a filmmaker of Nolan’s caliber.

Some of the other things I found frustrating, I hesitate to reveal, because the discovery of them can be enjoyable. Tenet moves so fast that it’s only afterward you’ll start thinking, Wait, what? Possibly all the pieces hold together; possibly I was just bewildered by watching a movie on a huge screen after six months of watching movies on my laptop. But the internal logic of Tenet doesn’t quite work.

So-called “plot holes” are never a reason to dismiss a movie out of hand. Our pleasure in watching any film depends, first and foremost, on suspending our disbelief and allowing a filmmaker to play in a grand sandbox of their own devising while we watch. Sometimes things don’t hold together perfectly — a problem that time travel movies have dealt with for decades (which is a running joke, by the way, in the new Bill and Ted movie) — but we like them anyhow because of how they make us feel and think.

Perhaps my biggest issue with Tenet , then, is that while it forced me to think, it didn’t reward my efforts to figure out what was happening. In movies that are puzzle boxes, mysteries, or elaborate tricks — for instance, Nolan’s 2006 thriller The Prestige — the audience experiences a satisfying moment where the thing they’ve been watching clicks into place. Maybe the mystery isn’t solved, but suddenly the pieces slot together and you see the magnificent creation the director was crafting the whole time, in plain sight, while you were looking at other things.

I never experienced that moment with Tenet , and what’s more, I think the movie tried to inspire that moment and failed. Similarly, it also fails to give us enough reason to care about its characters, though it seems to try. You can feel the great movie Tenet could have been, which makes the striving and falling short feel worse by comparison.

Tenet continues Christopher Nolan’s explorations of his grandest themes

Still, it’s not a failure of a movie. Nolan is almost singular among well-known contemporary filmmakers in his pursuit of a few matters, and the most gratifying part of Tenet is seeing two of his obsessions rear their heads once again.

The first is the way that time itself — a thing we’re accustomed to thinking of as a fixed fact of life, ticking forward steadily — is actually much more slippery, much more tied to our lived humanity. He’s played with this idea off and on throughout his films, but the best example is probably Dunkirk , in which three timelines unfold at the same time but at different rates, mimicking the experiences of the characters for whom time is rushing by or dragging, depending on where they sit and what they anticipate or dread.

I don’t know if Nolan’s fixation on time is why he became a filmmaker or if it’s the other way around, but his job and his fascination with time are certainly linked. One of the joys of cinema is that when we watch a movie, we are watching time pass. The director can speed it up or slow it down through editing and other technical tricks, and we can have the illusion that we’ve lived through a full day when it’s been only a couple of hours (as with Sam Mendes’s 1917 , for instance). Normally we can only perceive time, not control it, but a filmmaker gets to reverse that rule and be in charge of time, if only for a while.

Time is also linked to our memories, and memory is a way to relive lost time — something Nolan has explored from very early on in his career, such as with 2000’s Memento, as well as in other films like 2010’s Inception . What and who we remember is, in a sense, the summation of who we are. Tenet poses a question: Can your identity be linked to something that can’t reside in your memory yet? It’s an intriguing possibility, even if it doesn’t quite feel like Tenet does much with it.

And this finally brings me to the grander, more interesting project of Nolan’s, which seems to be the exploration of how ostensibly sterile systems and concepts like math and science intersect with the intangible and metaphysical aspects of being a human. Memory, yes. But also things like love (see 2014’s Interstellar ) and, in Tenet ’s case, faith. In a story about time and fate, it’s no shocker that faith comes up; the question of predestination lurks around the corners of the film. But the larger question, raised by Pattinson’s character as Tenet concludes, is whether “faith” might just be faith in the mechanics of the world.

That Nolan makes more than a few nods in Tenet to the Sator square — an ancient palindrome some scholars believe was meant to be a covert sign of pagan or Christian faith, or perhaps an incantation — leads me to believe this line is meant to be more than just a snappy way to finish a film. He is continuing his probe into the heart of being human, of being alive in a universe we barely understand, and he’s using cinema to do it.

But exploring interesting ideas isn’t enough to make for a good movie — and that’s why Tenet still doesn’t work for me. It’s the first Nolan movie in a long while that I’ve left feeling disappointed. And yet there is enough good stuff buried beneath its antiseptic, perhaps overly showy technique, once you get past the clankier bits, that is worth exploring. Tenet masquerades as a puzzle box, but it reads more like another key that Nolan has stuck into the door that conceals the secret of life.

Tenet opens in select US theaters on September 3.

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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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Apologies for making everything about the state of American politics these days, but the latter phrase, repeated a couple of times in the film, by sheer accident evokes Donald Trump’s indifferent shrug at 170,000 Americans dying by coronavirus that “it is what it is” — a line Michelle Obama slyly re-purposed for her convention speech earlier this week. And maybe it’s a side effect of the dreamy, bewitching spell the film casts to find echoes of it in the real world, but a similar kind of callous, fatalistic disregard for life runs through this fiction. There’s something a little bit retro, a bit alienating, about the way the protagonist, his colleagues and the bad guys blithely murder secondary characters and no one mourns, no one cares. As in the dreams in Inception , the Nolan film Tenet most closely resembles, each reverie within a nightmare is basically another movie with guns and car chases. Death not only has no dominion; it’s practically meaningless.

In the opening sequence of Tenet , beautifully executed though it is, a whole auditorium of classical-music concert goers are put at risk of being blown up by an explosive device, a fact the protagonist seems to sort of laugh off. “Only the people in the cheap seats” might get killed. Not so much sympathy there for people experiencing “collective human engagement” together.

If it seems like this review is shying away from describing the plot, that’s not just out of concern to avoid spoilers. I watched the movie twice for this review, and still feel very confused about what is supposed to be going on and why. Even more baffling than the why is the how, the fictional physics of inversion. All those outfits that make YouTube videos about movie plot holes and cinematic inconsistencies are going to implode with joy when they get a load of this.

Suffice it to say, the protagonist, Neil and their colleagues from the Tenet org — including Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a military type sporting an enormous hipster beard — are striving to collect, Pokemon -style, all the assorted chunky bits of hardware that will enable that worse-than-Armageddon event. To do this, they also need the help of Kat ( Elizabeth Debicki , Widows ), the elegant English wife of a ruthless but also deeply damaged Russian oligarch named Sator (Kenneth Branagh), not to be confused with shady Russia-born Trumpworld fixer Felix Sater.

This allows Nolan to delve into a whole realm of human experience — matrimony — that he usually shies away from, apart from the murderous imaginary wife Marion Cotillard played in Inception . Otherwise, wives in Nolan films are almost always saintly and/or dead except for in flashbacks. Here, Kat, sometimes impulsive and reckless, is almost but not entirely saintly (she is sacrificing everything for the sake of her child) and alive (although that life is at one point put in grave danger). Nevertheless, her female presence adds a color to Nolan’s palette, and Debicki has persuasive chemistry with Branagh in their joint portrait of a violent, dysfunctional love-hate relationship.

Unfortunately, it all too often feels like Kat’s function in the story is either to be endangered enough to push the plot forward or to be merely decorative, like so much of the lush, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-infamous production design by Nathan Crowley (a Nolan regular along with most of the top-credit crew). Crowley and DP Hoyte van Hoytema adhere to a stark palette of neutrals throughout, mostly the color of concrete, desert dust and rust. This is interleaved with bright but cold images of blue water and sky in the many boat-, shipping container- and aquatic-adjacent-set sequences.

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.

Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures presentation of a Syncopy production Director/screenwriter: Christopher Nolan Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Martin Donovan, Fiona Dourif, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Himesh Patel, Clemence Poesy, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan Executive producer: Thomas Hayslip Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema Editor: Jennifer Lame Production designer: Nathan Crowley Costume designer: Jeffrey Kurland Music: Ludwig Goransson Visual effects supervisor: Andrew Jackson Special effects supervisor: Scott Fisher Stunt co-ordinator: George Cottle Casting: John Papsidera

PG-13; 150 minutes

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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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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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Don't Try To Understand 'Tenet.' Just Feel It.

Glen Weldon

Lyndsey McKenna

Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington star in director Christopher Nolan's latest time-warping film, Tenet . Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington star in director Christopher Nolan's latest time-warping film, Tenet .

Director Christopher Nolan's latest film, Tenet , is a riff on spy movies — featuring globe-trotting CIA agents, Russian arms dealers and big set pieces — but with a decidedly Nolan-esque time-travel twist. Is it brilliant blockbuster filmmaking or an emotionally empty miss?

The audio was produced by Will Jarvis and edited by Jessica Reedy.

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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.

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).

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.

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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

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,…

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 (29)
• Kids say (68)

Based on 29 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

Did we miss something on diversity?

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 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.

Related content:

• Time for Tenet : Behind the scenes of Christopher Nolan's top-secret movie
• Tenet delayed again, new release date to be announced 'imminently'
• See an exclusive first look at Christopher Nolan's Tenet — his 'most ambitious' film yet

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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 (2020)

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• 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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