In any other year, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet would be guaranteed to end up as a massive box office success, but as we’re all more than aware, 2020 hasn’t exactly been normal. There were hopes that the globe-trotting blockbuster would ride to the rescue and save the theatrical industry from the brink of disaster, but the reopening plans have been moving a lot slower than initially anticipated.
Tenet might be screening in theaters, but not on the scale that Nolan would have imagined for another star-studded adventure, and quite how the movie manages to turn a profit is anyone’s guess at this point given that the budget came in at a colossal $225 million and there’s literally no way it’ll be able to recoup that much in the current climate, with reports claiming that it has to earn close to a billion dollars just to stay out of the red.
Reviews have been kind, if not as overwhelmingly enthusiastic as we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker behind The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk, with Tenet currently holding an 81% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 69 on Metacritic. The general consensus seems to be that Nolan has delivered the goods from a visual and technical standpoint, but once again finds himself lacking when it comes to interesting characters or memorable dialogue.
One person who has high praise for Tenet though is Michael Caine, but make of that what you will when you consider that it marks his eighth consecutive collaboration with Nolan since they first worked together on Batman Begins.
Chris Nolan has done it again.
Tenet is the best action film ever.— Michael Caine (@themichaelcaine) August 27, 2020
Tenet might be a spectacular action-packed epic with a unique narrative twist, but will it be remembered as the greatest entry in the genre’s history? Unlikely, and if people do start making such bold claims, then Die Hard will probably need to have a word.