“What’s happened, happened” – Tenet and Film’s Lost Year

If you’ve never been in South Carolina in the dog days of summer, let me offer some friendly advice: stay the hell inside. That “inside”, of course, assumes some heavy duty AC and a cold glass of your refreshment of choice. Trips outside that last for more than ten minutes could be mistaken for treks across the surface of Venus, so unless you planned a nice day at the breezy beach you’re going to want to have a route meticulously planned and a quick escape route to the nearest air conditioned-area. Be sure to mark all the palmetto trees for a much-needed shady respite on your journey, too. Throw in a chilled water bottle and you might feel like you’re back on Earth again, at least for the couple minutes before you chug it all.

So how did I find myself cramped in a car with the windows down on a hot August night, stationary for hours and blatantly ignoring all my own advice? Well, the answer lies with this wonderful year we have all experienced together: 2020. In this year, one that gave us an unprecedented array of uses for the word “unprecedented”, beads of sweat are a fair price to pay for a bit of normalcy. Normal in this case meant seeing the new Christopher Nolan movie, Tenet, a mind-bending and mind-numbing slideshow of amazing practical effects and kooky dialogue. Any other year, this would be the movie of the summer. Here was one of cinema’s biggest names finally realizing a passion project he’d been working on for over a decade, one that would put butts in seats in all of the most expensive IMAX theatres across the country. Nolan’s trademark cerebral action is the very thing theaters are built for: I still remember seeing Inception for the first time back in middle school, loving every minute of the bombast and bursting to hash out theories as soon as the lights came on. Every summer brings with it the usual crowd-pleasing blockbusters, but a Nolan movie is a uniquely exciting event - expensive, glossy Hollywood action with rich plots that beg for analysis. But 2020 had different plans.

I’m sitting in the driver's seat. My mom is next to me, while my dad is doing his best to find a good angle in the back that doesn’t require a superhuman crane of the neck. The sun has set, but it’s still in the 90s, with humidity firmly in the “paste” range. We’re in a small gravel parking lot behind a taco joint, the clinking of outdoor dining margaritas providing distant ambiance. It is the renaissance of the drive-in movie, but more out of Covid necessity than 1950s nostalgia. I see the bearded guy who collected our tickets fidgeting with the weathered projector in the middle of the lot, sending the image in and out of focus with the previews set to start. The independent Terrace Theater across the road is running things: like so many theaters across the country, it shuttered its doors in the early days of the pandemic, when phrases like “social distancing” and “pod” weren’t quite rolling off the tongue. Its doors had since reopened at limited capacity, but I found it hard to imagine a better spot for germs than a movie theater; keeping it outside seemed like a good compromise, and the cars filing into the lot seemed to agree. I tune the radio to the designated station - staticky, but I think I hear it? I scroll back and forth a bit. Yep, I guess that’s the best we’re gonna get. It’s not my first choice for a movie venue. 

I miss the cushy leather recliners of the AMC Boston Common, the Coke dispensers with the hundred flavors combinations (who wants lemon flavored Coke?) that always end up flat and watery, even the sticky floors and awkward shuffling to your seat. I miss when AMC didn’t have to send me messages about its cleaning protocol, when a theater was 25% capacity only because you caught the early matinee. The ugly 80s rugs and the retro movie posters, the ludicrously overpriced concessions. The explosions ringing my ears during 1917. The yelps of fright during Midsommar, the nervous laughter during Uncut Gems. I even miss that guy who snored so loud during Knives Out that there was almost a full-blown audience mutiny. The movie theater, the world’s darkest and loudest cathedral, had kicked its congregation outside. Tenet’s gospel would be delivered on my AM radio, in the South Carolina heat.

Tenet starts fast, and never lets up, sinking you into a world of nonlinear time and vague MacGuffins that would make Marcellus Wallace blush. An utterly absurd amount has happened before the film hits the 10 minute mark: first, cue the impeccably tense and propulsive Ludwig Göransson soundtrack. With music blaring, we meet our riot gear-donning protagonist, aptly named “The Protagonist”, storming into a crowded opera house in some sort of undercover operation. A bioweapon knocks the crowd unconscious, he gets shot at by some random mercenaries, gets saved by another random guy and snatches some important object, goes to save said random guy and then gets captured by more random mercs and stuffed into a van. A moment later, The Protagonist is getting tortured on railroad tracks that bring to mind Inception and “waiting for a train”, where he is sure to meet his end as the mercs try to beat info out of him - but no! He has swallows a cyanide pill to commit suicide - title credits roll. What?

Oh yeah, he’s not dead. The Protagonist awakes in a hospital bed, and within seconds a random man we haven’t met yet is spewing exposition about “world war three” and “nuclear holocaust”. The Protagonist is played by a game John David Washington, who plays the role with the proper mix of badassery and sly self-awareness of a bonkers script. He is shuffled off from this bedside chat to an immediate display of the movie’s big hook - inverted entropy. He learns how to “unshoot” a bullet by reversing time, and plays around with the bullet on a table by “catching” it back into his hand. I had no clue what the hell was going on during my first watch, so it was somewhat comforting to hear the scientist offer The Protagonist the following advice: “don’t try to understand it - feel it”.

This is perfect advice for the movie as a whole - feel it. If you try to make sense of Nolan’s physics gobbledegook, you are guaranteed to go insane. Over the course of the films two-and-a-half hours, Nolan broaches time travel, The Grandfather Paradox, nuclear annihilation, human free will, fate, global warming, the future of humanity, and anything else that could spark a 2:00 AM college dorm room existential crisis. It is the kind of movie where people say things like “Where did he go? The past!” and “reverse the entropy of the world” and you’re supposed to parse what the hell they could possibly be talking about. In a late scene, Robert Pattinson’s suave Neil asks the exasperated Protagonist if “his head hurts”. “Yes” - he and I both admit. Tenet is the culmination of Nolan’s curious mind in its most unfiltered state yet - far sloppier than Inception, less character focused than Interstellar, and certainly not as pacing perfect as The Dark Knight. It isn’t his magnum opus. It doesn’t establish the rules of its world nearly as effectively as Inception, and its twists don’t incite gasps like The Prestige. But it’s still a spectacle that only he can deliver.

The film settles in a nice groove that makes its intimidating runtime fly by - breathtaking, innovative action scene, followed by a couple minutes of exposition that you’re challenged to make sense of. Nolan hasn’t ever been the most naturalistic writer of dialogue, but he puts his actors to a true test here. To the whole casts’ credit, they keep even the most nonsensical ideas engaging, and the action is truly inspired. The movie is somewhat reminiscent of the Matrix Reloaded for me, a movie that played way over its head in terms of story but delivered some of the best action scenes of the 2000s. Unlike Reloaded though, with its now dated use of special effects, Nolan is, thankfully for all of us, completely loyal to the power of practical effects. This madman actually bought a real Boeing 747 to crash into an airport hanger, because it was more cost effective than SFX. After seeing the bombastic scene play out in Tenet, I’ll say he made the right choice. It’s no spoiler to say that the movie essentially plays out twice: once forwards, and once mostly backwards. Some of the scenes in the latter half are mind-numbing in their creativity, and watching a brutal hallway fight between two characters occur twice, once forwards in the first half and once backwards in the latter with extra plot implications, is probably his coolest idea since Inception’s gravity defying collapsing dream sequence. Buildings explode and rebuild themselves, characters have time-reversed car chases, and of course we get plenty of reversed bullets. It all can be truly exhilarating.

It’s a shame then, that I was sitting on this blisteringly hot night, looking at a low resolution screen at a weird angle and with a radio that gave us choppy reception to distort the already imperfect audio mix. Since I was in the driver’s seat, I had a crucial role: keep the AC on for as long as possible. The car turned off after about 20 minutes of idleness, radio included. So I would turn the car back on every time it would shut off - the lights would go back on, too, so I’d have to turn those off and the AC and radio back on. My sincere apologies to the car in front of us that I accidentally flashed high beams at for 15 minutes (sorry I didn’t see your waving hand earlier). As if to drive home how ridiculous this all was, towards the end of the movie huge flashes of lightning sparked in the distance, visible just above the wall where the film was projected. When the film wrapped up, my parents and I were in agreement - that was fun, but just what the hell was it?

I rewatched Tenet when it was released digitally, which felt more like a first release than the initial theatrical release did. Tenet underperformed massively at the box office - it made $360 million worldwide, but still ended up losing Warner Bros. $50-100 million, and grossed the lowest of any Nolan movie since Batman Begins. Nolan had meant for Tenet to be the bold return of summer movies in a devastating year - Covid, of course, had other ideas. With indoor theaters mostly capacity restricted anyways, it was a supremely hard sell for the general public. I figured the drive-thru would be worth it, and it was. It was certainly a uniquely 2020 experience, and as safe as it could be done. And independent theaters especially need all the help they can get in this super difficult time. But I can’t help but think of the Tenet release we could have had - packed IMAX theaters, surround sound, and the frenzied conversation among friends leaving theaters that would lead to a share of skeptics and devotees. Tenet was the last big-budget release of 2020 in theaters - other tentpole flicks like Wonder Woman 1984 and Dune were either delayed or shifted to digital release. Now, when a commercial on TV proudly declares a film is “only in theaters”, it feels like a bad joke. Warner Brothers raised an uprising among directors like Nolan and Denis Villeneuve when it announced all of its films in 2021 would receive a concurrent release in theaters (when possible) and HBO Max, its new streaming service. It was an unprecedented move, and a stark break from the usual alliance between the major theater chains, like AMC, that usually had at least a month before movies could hit streaming platforms. For AMC, Regal, and its brethren, it could be a death sentence. For Nolan, Villeneuve, and other directors, it amounted to artistic censorship. How could a movie made with the big screen in mind retreat to the small screens? The tides have been turning for years now - we’ve come a long way from Stephen Spielberg’s assertion that Netflix movies shouldn’t get Oscars consideration. We’ve had Netflix Oscar winners, and industry stalwarts like Martin Scorsese have found homes on streaming platforms. But it had always been an and proposition with theaters, not an instead. Thanks to 2020, the future of movie theaters is more in peril than ever.

I enjoyed Tenet a lot more during my second watch, even if it was on my laptop screen as I laid in my bed. I still couldn’t make sense of many of the concepts, but I caught tons of little details, especially in the action scenes, that made me admire Nolan’s scope and ambition all the more. I searched online and found detailed diagrams that (in theory) explained all the machinations of the story, and chatted with friends about my favorite moments. But I still can’t help but wonder about seeing it on the big screen, one that doesn’t sit in the pea soup of summer air. In the grand scheme of things, the loss of movie theaters is a footnote in the most consequential year of my lifetime. There are things far more important than a packed house on a Friday night. But as we all hope, I hope 2021 brings us a return for some of those simple pleasures that help us stay sane. I hope that in 2021, we can head back into the cathedral. I hope we buy some snacks, sit in the dark together in cozy seats, and experience something amazing again.