Tenet returning to the big screen
With nearly a $1 billion in ticket sales and 13 nominations at next month's Academy Awards, Christopher Nolan has had a stellar year with Oppenheimer.
But despite all the accolades for the historical biopic, the acclaimed filmmaker is still thinking about Tenet — his head-scratching spy thriller that was released into theatres at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020. With many cinemas closed, most moviegoers didn't see it on the big screen.
Nolan gets an opportunity for a do-over as Tenet has returned to cinemas for a one-week engagement. It's a chance for audiences to try and unravel its puzzling story all over again or experience for the very first time.
“The thing with Tenet is, I think of all the films I have made, it's the one that's very much about the experience of watching films,” Nolan recently told The Associated Press. “It's about watching spy movies in a way. It tries to build on that experience and take it to this very magnified, slightly crazy place. A lot of that is about sound and music and this huge image.”
In Tenet, John David Washington (Blackkklansman) plays the Protagonist, a government agent who is recruited into a shadowy spy world to stop a Third World War. The film is a high-concept espionage thriller that leans heavily into science fiction, with time-inversion — a process by which a person or object can move backward in time — at its heart. Shot in 70mm Imax, Nolan's globe-trotting mystery also featured Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki, with Kenneth Branagh as the film's scene-stealing villain.
“You're not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It's not all comprehensible ... the point is it's an ambiguity,” Nolan told Stephen Colbert when the late-night host asked him about people not understanding his movies.
Multiple Reddit pages are devoted to the many fan theories debating the film's story with many adherents arguing Tenet was a sequel to Nolan's Inception (his 2010 action thriller that follows a group of thieves who pull off a dream heist).
Nolan never had a chance to enjoy Tenet with an audience so its re-release will serve as a unique opportunity for the filmmaker to see how audiences react to its many twists when they get a chance to watch the way it was intended.
“More than any film I've made, Tenet was designed to have this very theatrical, Imax, larger than life identity.” Nolan told The Associated Press.
In a recent Tiktok with @guywithamoviecamera, Nolan discussed the physics behind Tenet, emphasizing that the film is not “about time travel in the conventional sense.”
“It is about the direction of time,” he said. “There's nothing in the laws of physics that says you couldn't look at time in a different direction.”
Tenet was supposed to welcome moviegoers back to the cinema. But a surge in COVID cases kept many auditoriums shut. When we chatted with Washington he predicted that the experience of seeing the film in a theatre with strangers would “be a great reminder of why we need the cinema and why we need movies.”