According to Rotten Tomatoes, this is Christopher Nolan’s worst film

Since his breakthrough with his second feature Memento in 2001, Christopher Nolan has become one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially popular directors on the planet. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards (winning Best Picture and Best Director in 2024 for Oppenheimer), and currently ranks seventh on the list highest grossing directors of all time (excluding inflation). Career-wise, you can’t do it much better than Nolan: he started with two indies, dipped into studio waters before tackling a major franchise with Batman Begins , didn’t stick with said franchise, and now himself is a brand in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. With his track record, he can make almost any movie the studio wants.

Now that he’s about to embark on feature number 13 (an untitled film starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Zendaya), you’d think we could look back on his 26-year career and find at least one film that which caused a confusion of criticism and condemnation of the audience. Until this moment in their filmography Spielberg drew criticism from “1941” and “Hook,” while Lucas took flak for producing “Howard the Duck.” All of these films have received Rotten Tomatoes ratings from critics (although users give “Hook” a favorable 76%).

So what is Nolan? Does he have a stench in his work?

According to Rotten TomatoesNolan’s most underrated feature is 2020’s Tenet, a sci-fi action epic that was his biggest box office disappointment to date – but with an asterisk given it was released during the Covid pandemic. But at 70% fresh from critics and 76% from RT users, it’s a far cry from the insults heaped on movies like Hook and Howard the Duck (or even Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace ). . ).

If you look through the negative reviews about Tenet, you won’t find many pans. Virtually everyone has to admit that Nolan’s gravity-defying and time-defying compositions are stunning, while his sense of scale remains unmatched among his peers. According to skeptics, this time the sometimes cool Nolan failed to fully engage the emotions of the audience. The characters of John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicka, and Robert Pattinson all too often feel like chess pieces moving unwisely across the board. AA Dowd of the AV Club compared the experience of viewing “Tenet” to solving a Rubik’s cube, which “only reveals the complexity of the structure.”

While I agree that Tenet is by far the most emotionally cold film in Nolan’s filmography to date, I believe this is by design. I actually love that it’s diamond-cut and so multi-faceted that you have to watch it a second time to fully understand how everything fits together. No matter how you feel about the movie (/Chris Evangelista of the film found it disappointing), if this is what counts as a misfire for Nolan, it will likely be in extremely high demand for years to come.