Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ gets a do-over in cinemas

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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.

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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.

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This Friday, Nolan gets an opportunity for a do-over as Tenet returns 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.”

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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.

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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).

In a 2020 interview with Postmedia, Washington said the two met over lunch before he read one page of the script. “I don’t even know how you would pitch something like this,” Washington said in a Zoom call from Los Angeles. “We had a meeting. It turned out to be a get-to-know-you meeting.”

He also was quick to dismiss the idea that Tenet was a followup to Inception. “We’ve been wanting a sequel to Inception for so long, but I’m sorry to disappoint the fan theories out there. This is not a sequel to Inception. This is a whole other idea,” Washington said.

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 AP.

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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.”

“It’s encouraging to know — exciting to know — that people will get to see this the way it’s supposed to be,” he said (a statement that means so much more nearly four years after its initial release).

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Paul Dergarabedian, a senior market analyst with Comscore, tells Postmedia that a theatrical run gives Nolan fans a chance to see the movie the way it was intended. “Nolan ranks among an elite group of directors whose cinematic style is tailor-made for the biggest of big screens and must-see events at the multiplex,” he says.

After he wrapped his Dark Knight trilogy in 2012, Nolan tackled sci-fi on a big canvas (2014’s Interstellar) and Second World War heroism (2017’s Dunkirk). He never talks about future projects, but after diving into the history books with Oppenheimer, he’s likely to make another splash in the blockbuster realm.

Directing a James Bond film is something he’s always dreamed about, but Tenet left open the door for a sequel. And when we spoke to Washington he was open to returning as the Protagonist.