Well, now we get to quite a cinematic event. After the stock he’s built up over the past decade and a half, Nolan was already one of Hollywood’s most cherished filmmakers – and someone honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in his home country of England!

Little did any of us know, though, that his latest film would basically become the only major release of 2020 and the one the theater business’s future seems to ride on! Technically Wonder Woman 1984 is still supposed to come out Christmas Day, but is anyone still holding their breath for that? That’s already been postponed repeatedly due to the pandemic.

Are we dreaming?

So was Tenet, but at least it finally came out. Its business has certainly been underwhelming domestically, what with the two largest markets in the country, New York and LA, still not allowing theaters to open. Strong overseas performance has helped offset the loss somewhat, but not enough so that other studios haven’t been postponing all their big releases to 2021…if they are simply postponing them instead of sending them straight to streaming.

Some analysts have raised concerns about whether the theater business can ever recover, given we now have many Generation Z adults who have preferred to watch content on their phones as long as they can remember.

Come on kids, you’re killing me!

As a member of the generation before them, millennials, I really really hope that movie theaters never become a thing of the past even as our population gets younger. Even though I do watch short videos on my phone, I vastly prefer a nice home theater for even a TV show – and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING can compare to that giant screen and state-of-the-art sound system at an AMC for a movie.

Please don’t go out of business, please don’t go out of business…

I’m SO LUCKY that Orange County, where I grew up and have been spending most of my time during the pandemic, was moved last month from “Widespread” to “Substantial” in terms of the COVID risk. That may seem like a small victory, but it’s huge in that movie theaters are open here (albeit with diminished capacity)!

Six months. Probably the longest I’ve gone in my whole life (by far the longest I’ve gone in my adult life) without attending a movie in a theater. When the theaters reopened here and I could watch Tenet, I felt a level of excitement and anticipation I haven’t felt since we got a state-of-the-art Pentium when I was 16. Long story short, my idiot family completely ruined that moment ( 👿   👿   👿  ) but nobody was going to ruin this.

I was SO GIDDY the entire film. Was the giddiness because I was watching a movie in a theater, or because of the movie’s quality though?

More the first. Still, terrific movie! Terrific!

Nolan’s back to making utterly stimulating and challenging intellectual fare after the flat and disappointing Dunkirk. What’s so consistently amazing about him is his ability to make us question everything we know.

Memento challenged our very notion of memory, The Prestige challenged our very notion of magic, The Dark Knight challenged our very notion of morality, Inception challenged our very notion of dreams, Interstellar challenged our very notion of space, and now Tenet challenges our very notion of time!

Our protagonist (John David Washington) gets recruited to become a “tenet”, which entails accomplishing missions that take advantage of time being able to work backwards. The work in question involves a painting, futuristic weapons, a vulnerable woman, and her rich husband played by Kenneth Branagh, but what’s really fascinating is trying to figure out what Washington’s character and his mentor (Robert Pattinson*) are doing when there are different versions of them moving backwards and forwards at different times – and at the same time. The movie does mention there are parallel universes, but it still twists your mind into knots a magnitude more than any previous time travel movie has even done. Like with Memento AND The Prestige AND Inception AND Interstellar, Tenet makes you want to watch it 1000 times just so you can have the joy of figuring everything out – if such a thing is possible.

I will probably be watching it several more times on the big screen itself, given there will probably be no other big releases this year and thus theaters will keep milking Tenet for all it’s worth!

Well, maybe in a small way that makes up for its not getting the huge crowds it would have sans pandemic. I’ve talked about the way the theater business model has changed over the decades due to technology. That leads to things such as 2012’s Flight getting its box office permanently ruined due to Hurricane Sandy its opening weekend, as the following weekend people already moved onto the new new release, Skyfall.

Sorry Big D, this screenshot became prophetic!

Tenet has now become the rare modern big-budget movie that gets a chance to have legs and BUILD an audience. I hope it finds what it deserves!

Bottom Line: Awesome.

Up Next: Analysis of the man, the myth, the legend, the auteur.

*Ha. I guess Pattinson will have soon been in a Nolan movie, and a Batman movie, but not at the same time.