WarnerBros
John David Washington in Tenet,
In Toronto, where I live, cinemas have been open for a few weeks. They are limited to a maximum of 50 people per screening to ensure a good distance from others. You are required to buy your ticket in advance and you must wear a mask at all times. I was skeptical about going, but when Warner Bros. announced that it released Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster Tenet in Canada I knew I had to see it.
So this past Wednesday I tied up my most beautiful canvas mask and went to my local cinema. Around the theater lobby there were nervous glances of masked faces. A few told me that they were not sure this was the best idea, but they needed a fair amount of normalcy, and this is what they turned to. “I have not seen a movie in a theater, literally since last year!” said one of them.
The wait in the lobby was full of excitement but also uncertainty, each of us looking carefully at the distance between our bodies and the nearest person. Slowly we made our turns to navigate navigation stations. The regular movie snacks were offered, but a few opted for it – I imagine because they did not want to think about removing their mask, even for a moment, to mint a handful of popcorn.
Once we were led into the theater, I sank into my chair, shrugged my shoulders, and set myself up for a real blockbuster on an actually big screen – and that was absolutely all I needed.
Let’s quickly get rid of the review here: Nolan’s 11th film is a delightful celebration of battles and twists and turns. The nameless protagonist, played by John David Washington, embarks on a mildly absurd mission to prevent a devastating war (“A nuclear holocaust?” He asks; “No, what less, ”Is told to him). It’s ambitious in scale, just like Nolan’s previous offering Interstellar en Establishment (and suffers from the same tempo problems), although it is significantly less hot than its predecessors. But as with previous Nolan films, the ambition is the sale: You do not watch a Nolan film because it gets an Oscar nod; you’re watching a Nolan movie because he’s going to have a wild performance that a few directors would. He is a risk taker in terms of concepts (“a heist … in you mind!”) And unparalleled in creating exciting spectacle. Tenet is nice for the same reason Evel Knievel is nice to see: One minute it is where are you going here and the next is it motherfucker, he pulled it off, You should see Tenet where it is safe to do so. It’s wildly fun.
You should see Tenet where it is safe to do so. It’s wildly fun.
But it is this whole business “where it is safe to do so” that is the bigger question. We could not have imagined a summer without a movie that everyone has seen since The cake came out in 1975. For 45 years, the summer blockbuster has given us something about a job, a Movie Event, a common reference point, a conversation starter. On a good year we get several. But since the pandemic took over our lives, the virus has become the only conversation.
The internet is now flooded with odes to the cinema. Variety’s lead film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote this effusive tribute to “a temple, a cave, a womb, a vast dark space which, precisely by being, imparted the magic of invisibility.” In the New Yorker, Richard Brody reminded us that creating a theater: “A movie that falls online does so with a bit of current urgency, because it will (in general) remain available … while a theatrical spending is a necessity. “
And the need for theater in modern times, at least in the Before Times, is twofold: One, you might miss the movie in the actual theater; but two, and perhaps more compelling, is that you can miss the window of conversation for a movie. In the case of blockbusters, with movies joking for position every week, people like to be part of the digital conversation that arises after a big movie drops. Marvel in particular mastered this with his Avengers universe, each of their new releases dominates the conversation. There’s a real FOMO that kicks in when you can not participate.
The classic blockbuster is obviously not without criticism. While his long-awaited death is completely exaggerated, blockbusters generally have a diversity problem, they are accused of creativity from the film industry, and accused of being less comfortable.
While I am aware of these issues, I was particularly looking forward to the 2020 blockbusters. We have seen fewer white men anchor blockbusters, but this summer had an even greater opportunity to carry out those efforts: Marvel had Black widow offered, had Disney Mulan on the scheme pressed DC Wonder Woman 1984 – nothing to say about Tenet, a $ 200 million movie starring a black man not named Will Smith! We had arrived at all of this, en a new episode of the Fast and furious film franchise, possibly the most diverse blockbuster franchise around.
But I speak here a language of the summers past, with all this hope and excitement. The pandemic extinguishes those with the rapes. The signs of trouble began to come in quickly. First, James Bond was moved from an April version to November. F9, the ninth episode in the Fast and furious franchise, was moved from Memorial Day to April 2021. Mulan was delayed months. Top Gun en A quiet place 2 was returned to next year. I knew things were bad when even Marvel, the undisputed titan of every summer, moved Black widow from a May release until November.
As the restrictions expanded, and other titles carried their release dates, there was one outlier. Tenet sticking to a release mid-July. Nolan wrote a wonderful ode to cinemas in the Washington Post. They will “need our help”, the director wrote. The story was: Tenet will be the savior of the theater. The movie was a beacon of hope – yes, the coronavirus is devastating, but Nolan will take over. His resistance also became my resistance.
Finally, Nolan blinked. Mid-July was late July, was early August, and in the US, the film will be released in early September (presumably). Even critics began to accept the idea of a summer without blockbusters. Hell, maybe it’s a good thing we do not get these great movies anyway, some wrote.
The soft future of Tenet – and by extension the soft future of movie theater – encouraging streaming services to create a play to replace that popcorn-flick theatrical feel. While Netflix Charlize Theron offered in The Old Guard, Entered Disney + our Tom Hanks Greyhound, These movies were posted as a way to keep the blockbuster alive. The move worked very well. And fine, millions of people streamed the movies. They just don’t feel like blockbusters. They feel like action movies you see at home.
Even though I have a reasonably sized television and an adult who can make popcorn at home, it soon became clear what the theater experience has to offer: no single distraction. In a theater, it’s just you and the movie. At home, my phone is only a short distance away, while my cat tends to slip on the floor of the apartment for absolutely no reason. The volume should be low enough for my daughter to sleep in, unless I like to watch the movie with headphones on a small laptop screen. In other words, outside of theater, real life happens, and it attracts you in a million small ways, so the best you can do is give 78% of your attention to a movie. That is under ideal conditions. But a cinema is an invitation to forget what is behind your immediate walls.
A cinema is an invitation to forget what is behind your immediate walls.
So I waited and waited, patiently shifting my hopes a bit, protecting them from the wind. Then came the announcement: Tenet will first have international release, followed by a dispersed US release. Here in Canada, where the response of the coronavirus is substantially healthier, cinemas began to reopen slowly in mid-July, so this was promising. And on opening day I was there.
The bad news is: The sweet suspense of the summer movie now comes with an asterisk. An uncomplicated joy has become complicated. Before you decide to watch Tenet, my wife and I had to have a serious conversation about whether we were both comfortable with the decision. We will all need to have these conversations now.
The good news, though, is that even with a mask on, Tenet kept me on the edge of my chair. Even though people were sitting far away from me, I could still see them jumping with excitement. The feeling of a theater chair, the rush of anticipation as the trailers end and the movie begins to unfold, none of that went away.
I can not tell you whether TenetThe arrival of new week in American theaters will be enough to save Hollywood from a very bad summer. In all likelihood, 2020 will fall as a year that the film industry – and, frankly, the rest of us – would like to forget. But when I left the theater, I heard a group of eight people, who arrived separately and seemed to know each other, all masked and standing apart, talking excitedly about the thrills of the film, analyzing, breathing them favorite parts. They tried to make sense of the ending. They were amazed at the premise of the great movie they just saw. It was a little different and a little the same: Somewhere in the dark, the magic of theater did its thing. ●
