Tenet came out during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning not everyone got a chance to see Nolan’s thrilling action film while it played in theaters.
However, this upcoming week-long engagement should give movie fans a rare opportunity to check out the movie on the biggest screens possible.
In honor of Tenet‘s re-release, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite scenes from Nolan’s film, including a reverse car chase that will leave you breathless and a climactic battle sequence between two strands of time.
Spoilers to follow; some NSFW language and action violence in the clips.
If you missed an opportunity to see Tenet in theaters back in 2020, here’s your chance to fix that.
If you didn’t get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending action epic Tenet during the height of the 2020 pandemic, Warner Bros. is re-releasing the film next month on 70mm and IMAX film.
The explosive blockbuster will play for a limited engagement starting Feb. 23 in IMAX theaters on 70mm and venues capable of showing 70mm prints.
Nolan’s film initially received a release in September 2020, but some audiences weren’t able to view the film during its first run with pandemic-related health concerns and COVID-19 restrictions closing various theaters across the country.
With Nolan’s latest film Oppenheimer up for multiple nominations at the upcoming Oscar ceremony, the Tenet re-release should serve as a fitting precursor to that major moment in the filmmaker’s career.
While Tenet is available to watch at home on Hulu and various rental services, seeing it on the biggest screen possible will always be the best format to take in the cerebral spectacle that Nolan crafted.
Update: The internet found the Peloton video. It’s brutal.
Imagine you’ve been working so hard on a project for months that all you want to do once it’s done is burn off any remaining stress by hopping on a stationary bike and getting a nice bit of exercise in.
Now imagine that, in the middle of your ride, an instructor comes on the screen to tell you how awful your work was. You’d have to feel a bit like Tim Robinson in the Brian’s Hat sketch.
That is precisely what famed director Christopher Nolan said happened to him. In the middle of a Peloton class, his instructor went off on a tangent about one of Nolan’s projects — Nolan didn’t say which one — calling it a complete waste of time while very likely unaware that Nolan was in the class.
The 53-year-old director recalled the story while accepting an award for best director for Oppenheimer from the New York Film Critics Circle. According to Variety’s Zack Sharf, Nolan was praising professional film critics when he dropped in this nugget:
Nolan summed up his appreciation for film criticism by telling a story about how he was once using his Peloton for a workout class only to have the instructor pan one of his movies. The Oscar nominee did not disclose which film it was, but clearly the Peloton instructor had no idea Nolan was in his virtual class that day.
“I was on my Peloton. I’m dying. And the instructor started talking about one of my films and said, ‘Did anyone see this? That’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back again!’” Nolan said. “When [film critic] Rex Reed takes a [expletive] on your film he doesn’t ask you to work out!”
Fair enough!
Of course, the internet couldn’t just let the fun little anecdote stand on its own. Immediately people began to wonder which film the instructor could’ve been talking about and a clear consensus emerged: Tenet.
UPDATE: We have video confirmation that the film in question was Tenet, because some intrepid sleuths found the class Nolan was in and the comments are even worse than he made them sound.
The 2020 film staring John David Washington and Robert Pattinson is still dividing audiences due to some plot holes that made the story a bit difficult to follow — though it clearly still has some passionate supporters.
Another brain-melter from Christopher Nolan is coming.
If you’re a fan of Christopher Nolan’s films that make your brain melt as you try to wrap your head around the plot and wild visual effects (see: Memento, Insomnia, Inception, The Prestige, Interstellar, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises and Dunkirk), then you’re probably as excited as I am for Tenet.
And, like me, you’re probably trying to figure out exactly what Tenet is about. We got a taste in December with a trailer of the John David Washington flick. Back then, there were some clues about “trying to prevent World War III” and that the word “tenet” will “open the right doors” for Washington’s character.
Other than that? We didn’t know much. Maybe it was about time travel or time manipulation, but that was it.
But on Thursday, the newest trailer dropped and we got some more clues. Here they are:
1. Washington and the people he’s working with might be manipulating time
There’s that line about “inversion,” in which Washington is “catching” the bullet instead of shooting it out of a gun. Is it a super power kind of thing? Something he and others have been given by the government? Hmm. But we know it’s not quite time travel.
Also I woke up and realized “tenet” is a palindrome, so it can be read backwards or forwards … kind of like looking backwards and forward through time, right??
2. They’re possibly working against someone who can “communicate with the future”
I presume that’s the Russian national Michael Caine was talking about, played by Kenneth Branagh.
— Ashwin Saravanan (@Ashwin_saravana) May 22, 2020
3. This “World War III” thing is BAD
It’s all about survival in the future and something “worse” than Armageddon. I don’t know if I buy the “World War III” concept on its face, then.
4. Maybe this has some connection to Inception??
Esquire has a good post on the subject that’s heating up the interwebs:
One tantalizing theory is that Tenet will pivot around a military experiment with the same kind of technology which (Dom) Cobb’s criminal gang would later exploit for their own ends. So, not a sequel, but a nod to the shared dream-logic of Nolan’s films.
