Chris Nolan's Movies Ranked Worst To Best
9. Tenet
So many hopes were put on Tenet. Before anything else, Warner Brothers have insisted on releasing the film to theatres only, in the midst of a pandemic. Therefore, to see the film, an audience member must mask up and brave the cinema. That said, audiences are in fact doing this, and Tenet is performing well at the box office.
The problem is that, with the best will in the world, it is one of Nolan's weaker films. The marketing campaign sold us a film that would call back to Inception and become a mind-bender, but in all honesty it is something of a mess.
John David Washington is excellent as The Protagonist, while Robert Pattinson gives a very strong supporting performance. The film's weaker plotline involves an abusive, controlling relationship between Kenneth Brannagh's thuggish Sator (whose name derives from the Sator square which originated the film's title) and Elizabeth Debicki's Kat, in a storyline that is at best sluggish, at worst dull.
Tenet should have been better. There are visually spectacular moments - the plane scene for one, with the final siege being another, but these do not make up for the frankly odd editing choices that punctuate the film along the way. There is too much reliance on assuming the audience will just go with it.
There is an excellent story in there somewhere, but for that, we may have to wait for the director's cut.