The New York Times’ Jessica Kiang’s gave mixed reactions. She noted, “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.”
The Guardian critic Catherine Shoard wrote, “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.”The New York Times’ Jessica Kiang’s gave mixed reactions. She noted, “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.”
IndieWire critic Mike McCahill opined, “What kind of picture is it? Big, certainly: IMAX-scaled, and a hefty 150 minutes even after a visibly ruthless edit,”. “It’s clever, too — yes, the palindromic title has some narrative correlation — albeit in an exhausting, rather joyless way. As second comings go, ‘Tenet’ is like witnessing a Sermon on the Mount preached by a savior who speaks exclusively in dour, drawn-out riddles. Any awe is flattened by follow-up questions.”
The Wrap critic Nicholas Barber wrote, ”… there is one solid reason why ‘Tenet’ could make a profit,”. “Even if not many people pay to see it, some of those people will pay to see it again and again and again in the hope that, eventually, they will be able to work out what on earth is going on.”
https://deadline.com/2020/08/tenet-reviews-stunning-time-travel-thriller-or-a-palindromic-dud-its-a-mixed-verdict-1203019892/