Countries with strong leaders and national health policies rooted in science — that is, most places other than The United States of America — got the reward of having their film critics watch Tenet, the latest mind-scrambling sci fi epic from Christopher Nolan. Reviews went live on Friday afternoon.
A new Nolan film is always an event, but considering that this will be the first substantial studio release to play in theaters since the coronavirus pandemic started, there are more eyes on it than usual.
The trailer never gave away too much. John David Washington is a good guy agent of some sort trying to save the world from a looming evil. (Armageddon? No, something worse!) Robert Pattinson is his scarf-wearing sidekick, Elizabeth Debicki is seen getting into a car in one shot and being in a car in another, plus there’s Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh, boats, the Mediterranean coast, bullets that go backward, flaming planes, bungee cords, you name it. It’s got something to do with time travel or time-reversal and it sure looks cool. Here’s one more look at the trailer before we start talking about reactions.
Guy Lodge, reviewing for Variety from London, wrote enthusiastically about the “big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable” film that “will provide succor to audiences long-starved for escapist spectacle on this beefy, made-for-IMAX scale.”
He also made swift comparisons to one of Nolan’s more acclaimed films, saying “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.” He added, in describing some of the action set pieces, that the car chases “slip and loop like spaghetti.”
Jessica Kiang, reporting from London for The New York Times, offered a more mixed reaction. Noting that the film was “gorgeously shot across multiple global locations,” she said it is “undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess.”
She employed the term “intellectacle” to describe Nolan’s oeuvre, which includes three Batman movies as well as Interstellar, The Prestige, Memento, and the aforementioned Inception. An “intellectacle,” Kiang says, “combines popcorn-dropping visual ingenuity with all the sedate satisfactions of a medium-grade Sudoku.”