Brian Formo’s review published on Letterboxd:
Tenet is just set piece after set piece after set piece without setting up any characters to have a personality, a backstory, any semblance of humanity, anything to pull me through to care about any of the results of said set pieces and the movie as a whole. So cold, so lifeless, so smug in pulling the wool over the audience's eyes at the expense of generating any feeling at all other than spectacle. Inverted time, wow! Nolan does nothing to make me care and that is bad, folks. He even inverted his dead wife character-defining crux to be about the villain so there's literally nothing about the protagonist other than he's stupidly called The Protagonist.
Tenet is by far Nolan's worst movie. The idea that this would ever "save cinema" is laughable; it's a mess, a second draft, and all the interesting moments are toward the end as afterthoughts. That inverted Casablanca line was a window in the draft to create some fun character dynamics throughout. But it does not, so its inclusion is another attempt to merely wow without rooting it in anything. The result is two and a half hours of untethered narcissism, with a few cool rewind shots.
John David Washington is innocent, tho. The only worthwhile moments were dialogue about class stuffiness and Washington has the charm to navigate that and this entire mess while remaining endearing.
The you wouldn't get it Joker gif won't work here because there actually isn't much to get. You get lost, it gets explained and it's not that deep, but the journey to the explanation is contempt. Not that I need to like characters to enjoy a movie but if the movie is withholding the information of the story to keep you guessing then it needs to have characters that will pull your interest through all the questions marks Without that I really just don't understand the point.