Himesh Patel Calls Christopher Nolan’s TENET an Underrated Sci-Fi Masterpiece Ahead of THE ODYSSEY

As excitement continues to build for The Odyssey, one of the film's cast members is looking back at another Christopher Nolan movie that he believes deserves a lot more appreciation.

Himesh Patel, who plays Eurylochus in The Odyssey, previously worked with Nolan on Tenet, where he portrayed Mahir. While appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Patel reflected on the filmmaker's ambitious 2020 sci-fi thriller and explained why he believes it doesn't get the credit it deserves.

"Dare I say, I think Tenet is one of his underrated movies," Patel shared. "What I get with Chris is, he doesn't stop with the ambition. He just wants to keep pushing it and keep pushing it, and what's the next thing? What's the next thing we can do to to elevate the cinematic experience to put a marker down in cinematic history, you know?

"I remember the first time I watched Tenet and I didn't know how they were going to achieve all of the inversion and all that sort of stuff. It still does something to me when I watch clips from it, or if it comes up, and I just go, it does something weird to my brain when I'm watching it, more than any sort of CGI will ever do... He seems to understand some sort of alchemy,"

It's hard to argue with that. Tenet remains one of Nolan's most challenging films, asking audiences to wrap their heads around inversion, time manipulation, and action sequences that still feel unlike anything else in modern blockbuster filmmaking.

I’m actually a big fan of Tenet! I thought it was one hell of an inventive and unique movie that delivered a wild story and some great practical effects and visual spectacle.

Patel's comments also highlight something that has defined Nolan's career. Every new project seems determined to push filmmaking into unexplored territory. From Memento and Inception to Interstellar, Oppenheimer, and now The Odyssey, Nolan keeps chasing ideas that few other directors would even attempt.

If the early reactions are anything to go by, The Odyssey may continue that trend. The mythological epic has already generated a lot of excitement, with some who have seen early footage suggesting it could rank among Nolan's greatest achievements.

One of the film's stars, Matt Damon, recently shared how meaningful the experience was for him. "It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working.

“And I know that that’s going away," Damon said of the film. "I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this."

Whether The Odyssey becomes Nolan's next cinematic milestone remains to be seen, but if Patel's comments remind more people to revisit Tenet, that's a win for fans of ambitious science fiction. It's still one of the director's most fascinating films, and maybe history will be a little kinder to it as the years go on.

The Odyssey sails into theaters on July 17.