The longer you have to wait to watch something, and the more it’s hyped up, the higher the expectations.

With Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, a series of delays due to COVID-19, and a concerted effort to keep certain details under wraps, has resulted in those expectations taking on the sort of proportions that are very tough to live up to.

Variety went as far as to dub the movie entertainment’s “holy grail – an unknown, unattainable object of intrigue, its enigmatic allure intensifying as it moved further and further away on the blighted release schedule”.

Before we get to the reviews (a rather mixed bag), here is the synopsis from the final trailer, which was released last week:

John David Washington is the new Protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s original sci-fi action spectacle “Tenet.”

Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.

Not time travel. Inversion.

To tick the boxes, that final trailer:

Let’s start with the best of the bunch, and a glowing five-star review from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who says the film “will leave you ripping off your face mask for air, even as you wonder what it was all about”.

Not sure that’s a good idea, with a pesky pandemic and all, but on we go:

Tenet is a gigantically confusing, gigantically entertaining and gigantically gigantic metaphysical action thriller.

…there are such amazing moments in it – symmetrically recurring fist-fight scenes, revisited from different viewpoints, in which the combatants are apparently governed by different time-flows: one forward, one backward. It shouldn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. What it makes is amazing cinema. Wow.

Peter and fellow Guardian reviewer Catherine Shoard clearly don’t read from the same hymn sheet, because she gave Tenet two stars, and called it “a palindromic dud”.

Vulture was a little less ruthless, saying the film was “mostly entertaining but undeniably baffling”, but stuck the knife in when saying Tenet is “a locked puzzle box with nothing inside”.

All in all, it sounds like a film that is going to require intense concentration to make sense of in any way. I’m just not sure I have it in me, but more power to you if you’re up to the task.

Where theatres are open, the film is due for release on September 3.

[sources:variety&guardian&vulture]