Denzel's son starring in new Christopher Nolan movie Tenet

Tenet secures Blu-ray, DVD, and digital home release this December

Christopher Nolan's time-tripping thriller can be viewed from the safety of your home in time for the holidays.
By Nick Romano
November 05, 2020 at 03:48 PM EST




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Warner Bros. has finally revealed home-release plans for Christopher Nolan's Tenet, the time-tripping thriller and one of the first major studio films to hit theaters during the pandemic.
Starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki, Tenet will be available via 4K, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital platforms staring this Dec. 15. Pre-orders will be available starting Nov. 10.
According to Warner Bros., the Blu-Ray (priced at $35.99) and 4K combo pack ($44.95) will come with an hourlong behind-the-scenes look at the making of Tenet as told by the cast and crew. DVD copies are priced at $28.98 each.
In-door theaters in the U.S. that had been shut down since the first lockdown ordinances came down in March began the first phase of reopening by the end of August. Twentieth Century Studios' The New Mutants arrived on the big screen on Aug. 28, followed shortly by Tenet on Sept. 3 in the U.S., sans openings in New York and Los Angeles. (The film had previously screened in other territories, including Canada, by Aug. 27.) Nolan was adamant about keeping the film's theatrical release plan intact, and Tenet soon became one of the most closely monitored films in Hollywood as other studios tried to figure out new release plans.

Tenet follows a secret agent (Washington) tasked with stopping a Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from inciting World War III, which he and his ally Neil (Pattinson) does by traveling through and inverting time.
Since its theatrical premiere, Tenet has grossed $350 million to date, a feat Nolan seemed happy with in speaking to its box-office performance.
"Warner Bros. released Tenet, and I’m thrilled that it has made almost $350 million," the director said. "But I am worried that the studios are drawing the wrong conclusions from our release — that rather than looking at where the film has worked well and how that can provide them with much needed revenue, they’re looking at where it hasn’t lived up to pre-COVID expectations and will start using that as an excuse to make exhibition take all the losses from the pandemic instead of getting in the game and adapting — or rebuilding our business, in other words."
 
Damn this shit been out, why can't I find a bluray 1080p copy yet shit

Nolan was firm on his "no digital release" line for the past few months....

He insisted that the only / best way to view the movie was in theaters.

Now that the studio has convinced him that $350 mil is a decent return given this "experimental" experience. there will finally be a DVD/ blu ray release, so expect to see 1080P and 4K leaks a few days / maybe a week before those releases ie first week of December
 
A Beat-by-Beat Explanation of What Happens in Tenet
By Nate Jones@kn8

Turns out the plot of Christopher Nolan’s new movie is also a mystery to people who have seen it. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.
The plot of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has been one of 2020’s most intriguing mysteries. But with the film making its belated arrival on U.S. shores this week, it’s one that has gone unresolved: Turns out the plot of Tenet is also a mystery to people who have seen Tenet. Thanks to frenetic cinematography, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it editing, and a reliance on verbal exposition that’s marred by the movie’s muffled sound mix, even those who like the film have to admit they have no idea what’s going on half the time. So as a helpful reference for viewers looking to make sense of what they just saw (plus people who don’t feel comfortable braving a multiplex just yet but are still curious), I’ve created this beat-by-beat explanation of exactly what happens in Tenet. This is not an easy task if you’ve seen the film just once, and I’m grateful to all the theorists over at Reddit for their diagrams and summaries.

(Note: Because this movie does silly stuff like call its main character “the Protagonist,” I’ll be avoiding character names altogether.)

Before we begin, there are two things that don’t get explained until later in the film but are worth covering up top. The first is that this whole movie takes place in a world where the future has declared war on the present because it’s upset about climate change. To do so, it uses a technology called “inversion,” by which objects and people can travel backward in the flow of time by reversing their entropy. This means that time-travel in this movie works according to a “closed-loop” theory — i.e., everything that has happened in the past has already happened. Think Primer, or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban if you’re nasty.

Okay, so: John David Washington is a CIA agent looking for a MacGuffin during a false-flag terror attack at the Kiev Opera. In the chaos, his life is saved by a mysterious figure in black, who kills a henchman with a bullet that travels backward. But Washington’s cover is blown, and he’s captured by the baddies. He takes a cyanide pill to avoid giving up his secrets.
Except the suicide pill is actually a test! Washington wakes up on a boat, where his boss explains that his new mission is to join something called Tenet, which we know is the name of the movie but he doesn’t. Then the CIA puts Washington inside a windmill. The reason he has to live in a windmill is to get his present self out of the way so his future self can operate freely during this part of the timeline, but they don’t explain this in the moment so it seems like they just want him to get really good at pull-ups.
After getting his lats nice and strong, Washington leaves the windmill and meets Clémence Poésy from Harry Potter, who is tasked with delivering some equally magical exposition. The bullet Washington encountered at the opera is just one of many “inverted” objects that scientists have discovered traveling backward through time. People going forward in time can interact with them, but it’s weird: To pick an inverted object up, you have to imagine yourself dropping it. “Don’t think it, feel it,” Poésy says. This is the movie’s mission statement.
Washington traces the inverted bullets to an arms dealer in Mumbai. To get a meeting, he needs a sidekick. Enter Robert Pattinson in a performance modeled on the late Christopher Hitchens. (That’s not a joke. Or if it is, not one by me.) Pattinson knows Washington’s favorite drink, even though it wasn’t listed on his Hinge profile. Anyway, they bungee jump into the arms dealer’s lair, where they learn three surprising facts: One, the dealer, played by Bollywood actress Dimple Kapadia, is a woman! Two, she knows about Tenet. And three, she sold the bullets to the movie’s villain, Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh, who is acting as the future’s representative in its war on the present. She explains that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh communicates with the future by leaving messages for “posterity.”
Because this is a Christopher Nolan movie, there’s a scene in which our hero has afternoon tea with Michael Caine. Caine explains that the way to get to Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh is through his wife, Sad Elizabeth Debicki, who is being blackmailed by her husband over a fake painting she sold him. Caine gives Washington another fake painting so they can have a meet-cute. It works, and Sad Elizabeth Debicki gives Washington her entire life story, including telling him about a nice yacht trip in Vietnam that ended when Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh told her she could leave him as long as she didn’t mind never seeing her son again. After she refused, she says, she saw a mysterious woman jump off the boat and envied her husband’s supposed mistress for her freedom.
Then John David Washington beats some guys up with a cheese grater.
As part of a quid pro quo with Sad Elizabeth Debicki, Washington and Pattinson decide to steal the forged painting. It’s located in a free port (a real thing where rich people can secure their valuables without paying taxes on them) at the Oslo airport. They pose as fancy men while their friend, played by Himesh Patel, the hot dude from Yesterday, crashes a cargo plane into the airport. But before they can get the painting, two masked guys — one moving forward, one moving backward — appear from a mysterious portal in Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s vault. If you’ve been paying close attention to everyone’s height, the identity of these guys should be pretty clear, but we’ll get to that. Anyway, Washington is about to kill his guy, until Pattinson stops him. The mysterious masked men get away, and anyway, there’s no painting in the vault. How did Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh know they were coming?
It’s all very confusing, but luckily they go back to Mumbai and Dimple Kapadia explains it for them: The device in the vault was an invention from the future called a Turnstile, which allows people to invert themselves and travel backward in time. Thus, the two people in the vault were actually one person, flowing backward and forward out of the moment that he entered the device. Trippy! Also, Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh was the one behind the terror attack at the opera, and he’s still on the hunt for the MacGuffin.
Luckily, Nolan gives us a break from the complicated science stuff in the form of a 15-minute Mediterranean interlude, in which Tenet gets to dress up in Talented Mr. Ripley drag — boating trips, cashmere polos, expensive gowns, how divine. Washington gets in good with Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh, first by dropping a reference to the opera, then by saving his life after Sad Elizabeth Debicki throws him off a catamaran, and finally by offering to help him steal the MacGuffin, which is apparently plutonium. We also learn Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s backstory: He grew up at an abandoned Soviet nuclear facility, where he discovered a cache of gold and a message from the future. (Washington witnesses him receive a shipment of inverted gold bars, which is how the future has been paying him to do evil stuff in the present.) All of this takes place on a yacht, where the engine noise makes most of the dialogue unintelligible, but the sound mix is clear enough for us to hear Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh growl like a tiger and tell Sad Elizabeth Debicki, “If I can’t have you, no one can.”
Now things start to get really hard to follow, so bear with me. Washington and Pattinson successfully pull off a highway heist in Tallinn, only to discover that the MacGuffin is not plutonium at all but something timey-wimey. Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh and his henchmen show up and there’s a car chase. They’re all wearing oxygen masks and traveling backward through time! Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh threatens to shoot Sad Elizabeth Debicki unless Washington gives him the case containing the MacGuffin, which he does. At the same time, an inverted silver car uncrashes and joins the chase. (You will recall it as the big showstopping moment from the trailer.) Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh tries to kill Sad Elizabeth Debicki in a car crash, but Washington saves her. They’re both captured by Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s henchmen. Pattinson says he’s going to call in “the cavalry.”
Washington wakes up in a warehouse next to another Turnstile, where Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh uses a walkie-talkie to translate his backward speech into regular English, like he’s John Lennon during the recording of Revolver. He says the MacGuffin wasn’t in the case and asks Washington where it is. Washington refuses to tell him, and so Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh reverse-shoots Sad Elizabeth Debicki with an inverted bullet. (We’ve been told inverted bullets are very dangerous to forward-time people, as if regular bullets were not.) Washington lies and says he hid the MacGuffin in the glove compartment of his car. Just then, a forward-time version of Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh enters the room, but before he can do more Evil Russian stuff, he’s chased into the Turnstile by a squadron of troops led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh walks backward into the Turnstile too. (When you enter a Turnstile going forward, it looks like two people get sucked into it; when you enter one going backward, it looks like two people are coming out of it.)
Aaron Taylor-Johnson reveals that he and his troops are “posterity” — soldiers from the future working for the Tenet organization. Washington wonders how Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh seems to know everything that’s going to happen, and he accuses Pattinson of being a mole. Taylor-Johnson explains that, nope, the baddies are actually sending half their henchmen forward in time and half backward, executing a “temporal pincer movement.” Weird! Anyway, Washington has the bright idea of following Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh through the Turnstile; that way, he can get the MacGuffin and Sad Elizabeth Debicki won’t die, because her body will be inverted, thus making it just a normal bullet wound to the stomach, no big deal. The troops give him a crash course in Inversion 101: You’ve got to wear an oxygen mask because your reversed lungs can’t breathe normal air, and whatever you do, don’t physically touch your past self. Also, every heat transfer works the opposite of the way it normally would. It’s just physics, okay?
So Washington steps through the Turnstile and starts going backward in time. He steps into a car outside the warehouse … which is the same silver car that was in the chase earlier! (That an inverted person driving a car makes the car itself inverted is one of those things you just have to go with.) He replays the previous car chase in reverse, but this time we see something we didn’t in the first go-round: the MacGuffin leaping out of the silver car and into forward-Washington’s hands — which means that, in forward-time, he threw it to his inverted self in the silver car. The silver car then crashes, in the same crash we saw happen in reverse earlier, and while Inverted Washington is trying to escape, Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh drops a lighter and sets the car aflame.
Except because Washington is inverted, the heat transfer actually works in reverse, and instead of being burned, he only gets hypothermia! He wakes up in an air-locked container ship, where Pattinson, Sad Wounded Elizabeth Debicki, and some of the troops are all traveling in reverse a week back in time to the Oslo airport so they’ll be able to use the Turnstile there to get themselves going forward again. They talk about time travel and the grandfather paradox — if they’re trying to stop the future from killing them in the past, doesn’t the fact that they still exist mean they succeeded? They resolve not to think about it too much.
(Sidebar: We also learn that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s team has the MacGuffin, but we never see how they got it, a fact that has caused no small end of confusion among the Tenet fan base. In a forward-moving timeline, the last place we saw it was inside the silver car by the warehouse as Washington and his friends inverted; the most likely bet is that the bad guys who were moving forward in the temporal pincer movement, or an Uninverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh himself, picked it up from there.)
Now back to Oslo, and you can probably guess where this is going. The only time our heroes can sneak into Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s vault is the time they crashed the plane into the airport, which means that once Washington gets into the vault, he comes face-to-face with his past self, and we get the same fight we saw before, only in reverse. Luckily, since future Washington is wearing a full-on gimp suit, there’s no physical touching. (We also get a clearer view of why it looked as if reverse Washington was shooting his gun at forward Washington: He was actually trying to empty the clip so his past self couldn’t use it against him.) Washington gets into the Turnstile, after which he fights the past Pattinson, who figures out that he’s the future Washington but keeps the secret from past Washington because it would have been too much of a mindfreak. Inverted Pattinson and Inverted Sad Wounded Elizabeth Debicki go back through the Turnstile too, so now all our heroes are moving forward again. We’re on to the grand finale. Everyone gets to pass Go and collect $200 and is healed to full health.
Taking a page from J.K. Rowling’s book, Nolan decides to give us one last exposition dump before the climax. Washington catches up with Dimple Kapadia again, and this time she tells him the MacGuffin is actually one of nine MacGuffins that stack up to form something called the Algorithm, which has the power to invert half the planet, thus ending existence as we know it. (They stack vertically; call it a “shish ke-bomb.”) The scientist who made the Algorithm regretted her creation so much that she killed herself, but, before she died, she sent each part of the Algorithm back in time, hiding them around the globe. And before you can say “Gee, that sounds like a Horcrux,” it turns out that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh has assembled all nine pices of the Algorithm and is about to set them off. But where … and when?
Sad Healing Elizabeth Debicki decides she wants in on this exposition business too. She reveals that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh is suffering from terminal cancer and is going back in time to find a happy memory to end his life in. What’s more, he’s got an Evil Fitbit that will trigger the Algorithm to go off at the moment of his death. (If he can’t be alive, no one can.) They realize his happiest memory is the yacht trip to Vietnam, which just so happened to be taking place at the exact same time as the opera attack and an unexplained explosion at the abandoned Soviet nuclear facility he grew up in. By Jove, that’s it!
Then it’s on to the climax, which takes place in two locations simultaneously. Before they get going, Washington gives Sad Healing Elizabeth Debicki a cell phone and tells her if she ever feels unsafe to leave a message “for posterity” stating her time and place. Then they split up. With the help of the hot guy from Yesterday, Sad Healed Elizabeth Debicki will sneak aboard the yacht and pretend to be her past self, stalling the version of Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh who arrives there from the future before he can kill himself. Meanwhile, Washington, Pattinson, and the Tenet army will attack the abandoned Soviet nuclear facility and try to disassemble the Algorithm. They form two groups: Washington and Taylor-Johnson are the red team, which does the assault going forward in time; Pattinson is on the blue team, which does it going backward. The teams then brief each other in their own temporal pincer movement.
This battle scene resembles the ending of Inception in that it’s a lot of guys running around shooting things and is filmed so chaotically that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s happening. The good news is, while there’s a lot going on, not much of it is actually that important. What you need to know is this: Washington and Taylor-Johnson are supposed to split off from the rest of the red team, go underground to where the Algorithm is, and nab it before it can be triggered with a bomb. Pattinson is supposed to be inverted with the rest of the blue team, but he decides to go rogue and uninverts, then reinverts himself multiple times during the battle.
Moving forward in time, the climax goes as follows: In Vietnam, Future Sad Elizabeth Debicki arrives on the yacht just after Past Sad Elizabeth Debicki has departed with her son and Past Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh has flown off in a helicopter. (Presumably to monitor the opera attack.) She encounters Future Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh and successfully convinces him that she’s her past self.
In Russia, the red and blue teams create their diversion. Traveling backward through the battle, inverted Pattinson sees the baddies setting up a trip wire at the entrance to the tunnel leading to the Algorithm. He uninverts himself and tries to warn Washington and Taylor-Johnson. They don’t hear him and set off the trip wire, which buries their path out. They keep going, but their path is blocked by a locked gate. On the other side is a henchman, the Algorithm, the bomb, and a blue-team corpse.
In Vietnam, Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh calls up Washington on a walkie-talkie and gives his version of Thanos’s “I am inevitable” monologue.
In Russia, as the bomb ticks toward zero and the henchman is about to shoot Washington, the corpse on the floor springs to life, blocks the bullet, opens the gate, then runs away in reverse. Washington beats up the henchman.
In Vietnam, Sad Elizabeth Debicki reveals the truth: She’s not Past Sad Elizabeth Debicki; she’s Future Sad Elizabeth Debicki, and like the Bens, she’s got the scars to prove it. She shoots Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh. But has she killed him too early?
In Russia, Washington and Taylor-Johnson get ahold of the Algorithm as the bomb is about to go off. Above them, Pattinson pulls them and the Algorithm out of the tunnel before the explosion, thanks to a chain that was there the whole time? It all happens very quickly, but who cares — the world has been saved!
In Vietnam, Sad Elizabeth Debicki is now Happy Elizabeth Debicki. She jumps off the yacht in triumph; her past self sees her and admires her freedom.
In Russia, Washington, Pattinson, and Taylor-Johnson separate the Algorithm into three parts and plan to split up. Taylor-Johnson suggests they each bury their part, then kill themselves to avoid giving up the locations. Pattinson gives his part to Washington and reveals that, from his perspective, they’ve actually known each other for years: Future Washington recruited past Pattinson into the Tenet organization. (Whether this happened in the timeline before or after the events of the film is unclear; many theories have sprung up on this subject.) Pattinson heads back to the Turnstile, and Washington sees that his backpack is the same as the corpse’s. Pattinson’s inverted self will run back into the tunnel, close the gate and then take the bullet. It’s also the same backpack that was seen on the mystery man in the opera house, which means there’s yet another version of Pattinson floating around the timeline saving Washington’s life there, too.
Some time later, Happy Elizabeth Debicki is dropping her son off at school when she gets a premonition of danger and calls the cell phone. She was correct — Dimple Kapadia is about to shoot her to tie up the “loose ends.” Having received the message, future Washington travels to that exact time and place and shoots Kapadia first, revealing that he’s the mastermind behind the entire operation.
And that’s Tenet! Any questions?
 
A Beat-by-Beat Explanation of What Happens in Tenet
By Nate Jones@kn8

Turns out the plot of Christopher Nolan’s new movie is also a mystery to people who have seen it. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.
The plot of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet has been one of 2020’s most intriguing mysteries. But with the film making its belated arrival on U.S. shores this week, it’s one that has gone unresolved: Turns out the plot of Tenet is also a mystery to people who have seen Tenet. Thanks to frenetic cinematography, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it editing, and a reliance on verbal exposition that’s marred by the movie’s muffled sound mix, even those who like the film have to admit they have no idea what’s going on half the time. So as a helpful reference for viewers looking to make sense of what they just saw (plus people who don’t feel comfortable braving a multiplex just yet but are still curious), I’ve created this beat-by-beat explanation of exactly what happens in Tenet. This is not an easy task if you’ve seen the film just once, and I’m grateful to all the theorists over at Reddit for their diagrams and summaries.

(Note: Because this movie does silly stuff like call its main character “the Protagonist,” I’ll be avoiding character names altogether.)

Before we begin, there are two things that don’t get explained until later in the film but are worth covering up top. The first is that this whole movie takes place in a world where the future has declared war on the present because it’s upset about climate change. To do so, it uses a technology called “inversion,” by which objects and people can travel backward in the flow of time by reversing their entropy. This means that time-travel in this movie works according to a “closed-loop” theory — i.e., everything that has happened in the past has already happened. Think Primer, or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban if you’re nasty.

Okay, so: John David Washington is a CIA agent looking for a MacGuffin during a false-flag terror attack at the Kiev Opera. In the chaos, his life is saved by a mysterious figure in black, who kills a henchman with a bullet that travels backward. But Washington’s cover is blown, and he’s captured by the baddies. He takes a cyanide pill to avoid giving up his secrets.
Except the suicide pill is actually a test! Washington wakes up on a boat, where his boss explains that his new mission is to join something called Tenet, which we know is the name of the movie but he doesn’t. Then the CIA puts Washington inside a windmill. The reason he has to live in a windmill is to get his present self out of the way so his future self can operate freely during this part of the timeline, but they don’t explain this in the moment so it seems like they just want him to get really good at pull-ups.
After getting his lats nice and strong, Washington leaves the windmill and meets Clémence Poésy from Harry Potter, who is tasked with delivering some equally magical exposition. The bullet Washington encountered at the opera is just one of many “inverted” objects that scientists have discovered traveling backward through time. People going forward in time can interact with them, but it’s weird: To pick an inverted object up, you have to imagine yourself dropping it. “Don’t think it, feel it,” Poésy says. This is the movie’s mission statement.
Washington traces the inverted bullets to an arms dealer in Mumbai. To get a meeting, he needs a sidekick. Enter Robert Pattinson in a performance modeled on the late Christopher Hitchens. (That’s not a joke. Or if it is, not one by me.) Pattinson knows Washington’s favorite drink, even though it wasn’t listed on his Hinge profile. Anyway, they bungee jump into the arms dealer’s lair, where they learn three surprising facts: One, the dealer, played by Bollywood actress Dimple Kapadia, is a woman! Two, she knows about Tenet. And three, she sold the bullets to the movie’s villain, Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh, who is acting as the future’s representative in its war on the present. She explains that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh communicates with the future by leaving messages for “posterity.”
Because this is a Christopher Nolan movie, there’s a scene in which our hero has afternoon tea with Michael Caine. Caine explains that the way to get to Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh is through his wife, Sad Elizabeth Debicki, who is being blackmailed by her husband over a fake painting she sold him. Caine gives Washington another fake painting so they can have a meet-cute. It works, and Sad Elizabeth Debicki gives Washington her entire life story, including telling him about a nice yacht trip in Vietnam that ended when Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh told her she could leave him as long as she didn’t mind never seeing her son again. After she refused, she says, she saw a mysterious woman jump off the boat and envied her husband’s supposed mistress for her freedom.
Then John David Washington beats some guys up with a cheese grater.
As part of a quid pro quo with Sad Elizabeth Debicki, Washington and Pattinson decide to steal the forged painting. It’s located in a free port (a real thing where rich people can secure their valuables without paying taxes on them) at the Oslo airport. They pose as fancy men while their friend, played by Himesh Patel, the hot dude from Yesterday, crashes a cargo plane into the airport. But before they can get the painting, two masked guys — one moving forward, one moving backward — appear from a mysterious portal in Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s vault. If you’ve been paying close attention to everyone’s height, the identity of these guys should be pretty clear, but we’ll get to that. Anyway, Washington is about to kill his guy, until Pattinson stops him. The mysterious masked men get away, and anyway, there’s no painting in the vault. How did Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh know they were coming?
It’s all very confusing, but luckily they go back to Mumbai and Dimple Kapadia explains it for them: The device in the vault was an invention from the future called a Turnstile, which allows people to invert themselves and travel backward in time. Thus, the two people in the vault were actually one person, flowing backward and forward out of the moment that he entered the device. Trippy! Also, Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh was the one behind the terror attack at the opera, and he’s still on the hunt for the MacGuffin.
Luckily, Nolan gives us a break from the complicated science stuff in the form of a 15-minute Mediterranean interlude, in which Tenet gets to dress up in Talented Mr. Ripley drag — boating trips, cashmere polos, expensive gowns, how divine. Washington gets in good with Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh, first by dropping a reference to the opera, then by saving his life after Sad Elizabeth Debicki throws him off a catamaran, and finally by offering to help him steal the MacGuffin, which is apparently plutonium. We also learn Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s backstory: He grew up at an abandoned Soviet nuclear facility, where he discovered a cache of gold and a message from the future. (Washington witnesses him receive a shipment of inverted gold bars, which is how the future has been paying him to do evil stuff in the present.) All of this takes place on a yacht, where the engine noise makes most of the dialogue unintelligible, but the sound mix is clear enough for us to hear Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh growl like a tiger and tell Sad Elizabeth Debicki, “If I can’t have you, no one can.”
Now things start to get really hard to follow, so bear with me. Washington and Pattinson successfully pull off a highway heist in Tallinn, only to discover that the MacGuffin is not plutonium at all but something timey-wimey. Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh and his henchmen show up and there’s a car chase. They’re all wearing oxygen masks and traveling backward through time! Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh threatens to shoot Sad Elizabeth Debicki unless Washington gives him the case containing the MacGuffin, which he does. At the same time, an inverted silver car uncrashes and joins the chase. (You will recall it as the big showstopping moment from the trailer.) Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh tries to kill Sad Elizabeth Debicki in a car crash, but Washington saves her. They’re both captured by Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s henchmen. Pattinson says he’s going to call in “the cavalry.”
Washington wakes up in a warehouse next to another Turnstile, where Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh uses a walkie-talkie to translate his backward speech into regular English, like he’s John Lennon during the recording of Revolver. He says the MacGuffin wasn’t in the case and asks Washington where it is. Washington refuses to tell him, and so Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh reverse-shoots Sad Elizabeth Debicki with an inverted bullet. (We’ve been told inverted bullets are very dangerous to forward-time people, as if regular bullets were not.) Washington lies and says he hid the MacGuffin in the glove compartment of his car. Just then, a forward-time version of Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh enters the room, but before he can do more Evil Russian stuff, he’s chased into the Turnstile by a squadron of troops led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh walks backward into the Turnstile too. (When you enter a Turnstile going forward, it looks like two people get sucked into it; when you enter one going backward, it looks like two people are coming out of it.)
Aaron Taylor-Johnson reveals that he and his troops are “posterity” — soldiers from the future working for the Tenet organization. Washington wonders how Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh seems to know everything that’s going to happen, and he accuses Pattinson of being a mole. Taylor-Johnson explains that, nope, the baddies are actually sending half their henchmen forward in time and half backward, executing a “temporal pincer movement.” Weird! Anyway, Washington has the bright idea of following Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh through the Turnstile; that way, he can get the MacGuffin and Sad Elizabeth Debicki won’t die, because her body will be inverted, thus making it just a normal bullet wound to the stomach, no big deal. The troops give him a crash course in Inversion 101: You’ve got to wear an oxygen mask because your reversed lungs can’t breathe normal air, and whatever you do, don’t physically touch your past self. Also, every heat transfer works the opposite of the way it normally would. It’s just physics, okay?
So Washington steps through the Turnstile and starts going backward in time. He steps into a car outside the warehouse … which is the same silver car that was in the chase earlier! (That an inverted person driving a car makes the car itself inverted is one of those things you just have to go with.) He replays the previous car chase in reverse, but this time we see something we didn’t in the first go-round: the MacGuffin leaping out of the silver car and into forward-Washington’s hands — which means that, in forward-time, he threw it to his inverted self in the silver car. The silver car then crashes, in the same crash we saw happen in reverse earlier, and while Inverted Washington is trying to escape, Inverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh drops a lighter and sets the car aflame.
Except because Washington is inverted, the heat transfer actually works in reverse, and instead of being burned, he only gets hypothermia! He wakes up in an air-locked container ship, where Pattinson, Sad Wounded Elizabeth Debicki, and some of the troops are all traveling in reverse a week back in time to the Oslo airport so they’ll be able to use the Turnstile there to get themselves going forward again. They talk about time travel and the grandfather paradox — if they’re trying to stop the future from killing them in the past, doesn’t the fact that they still exist mean they succeeded? They resolve not to think about it too much.
(Sidebar: We also learn that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s team has the MacGuffin, but we never see how they got it, a fact that has caused no small end of confusion among the Tenet fan base. In a forward-moving timeline, the last place we saw it was inside the silver car by the warehouse as Washington and his friends inverted; the most likely bet is that the bad guys who were moving forward in the temporal pincer movement, or an Uninverted Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh himself, picked it up from there.)
Now back to Oslo, and you can probably guess where this is going. The only time our heroes can sneak into Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh’s vault is the time they crashed the plane into the airport, which means that once Washington gets into the vault, he comes face-to-face with his past self, and we get the same fight we saw before, only in reverse. Luckily, since future Washington is wearing a full-on gimp suit, there’s no physical touching. (We also get a clearer view of why it looked as if reverse Washington was shooting his gun at forward Washington: He was actually trying to empty the clip so his past self couldn’t use it against him.) Washington gets into the Turnstile, after which he fights the past Pattinson, who figures out that he’s the future Washington but keeps the secret from past Washington because it would have been too much of a mindfreak. Inverted Pattinson and Inverted Sad Wounded Elizabeth Debicki go back through the Turnstile too, so now all our heroes are moving forward again. We’re on to the grand finale. Everyone gets to pass Go and collect $200 and is healed to full health.
Taking a page from J.K. Rowling’s book, Nolan decides to give us one last exposition dump before the climax. Washington catches up with Dimple Kapadia again, and this time she tells him the MacGuffin is actually one of nine MacGuffins that stack up to form something called the Algorithm, which has the power to invert half the planet, thus ending existence as we know it. (They stack vertically; call it a “shish ke-bomb.”) The scientist who made the Algorithm regretted her creation so much that she killed herself, but, before she died, she sent each part of the Algorithm back in time, hiding them around the globe. And before you can say “Gee, that sounds like a Horcrux,” it turns out that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh has assembled all nine pices of the Algorithm and is about to set them off. But where … and when?
Sad Healing Elizabeth Debicki decides she wants in on this exposition business too. She reveals that Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh is suffering from terminal cancer and is going back in time to find a happy memory to end his life in. What’s more, he’s got an Evil Fitbit that will trigger the Algorithm to go off at the moment of his death. (If he can’t be alive, no one can.) They realize his happiest memory is the yacht trip to Vietnam, which just so happened to be taking place at the exact same time as the opera attack and an unexplained explosion at the abandoned Soviet nuclear facility he grew up in. By Jove, that’s it!
Then it’s on to the climax, which takes place in two locations simultaneously. Before they get going, Washington gives Sad Healing Elizabeth Debicki a cell phone and tells her if she ever feels unsafe to leave a message “for posterity” stating her time and place. Then they split up. With the help of the hot guy from Yesterday, Sad Healed Elizabeth Debicki will sneak aboard the yacht and pretend to be her past self, stalling the version of Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh who arrives there from the future before he can kill himself. Meanwhile, Washington, Pattinson, and the Tenet army will attack the abandoned Soviet nuclear facility and try to disassemble the Algorithm. They form two groups: Washington and Taylor-Johnson are the red team, which does the assault going forward in time; Pattinson is on the blue team, which does it going backward. The teams then brief each other in their own temporal pincer movement.
This battle scene resembles the ending of Inception in that it’s a lot of guys running around shooting things and is filmed so chaotically that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s happening. The good news is, while there’s a lot going on, not much of it is actually that important. What you need to know is this: Washington and Taylor-Johnson are supposed to split off from the rest of the red team, go underground to where the Algorithm is, and nab it before it can be triggered with a bomb. Pattinson is supposed to be inverted with the rest of the blue team, but he decides to go rogue and uninverts, then reinverts himself multiple times during the battle.
Moving forward in time, the climax goes as follows: In Vietnam, Future Sad Elizabeth Debicki arrives on the yacht just after Past Sad Elizabeth Debicki has departed with her son and Past Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh has flown off in a helicopter. (Presumably to monitor the opera attack.) She encounters Future Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh and successfully convinces him that she’s her past self.
In Russia, the red and blue teams create their diversion. Traveling backward through the battle, inverted Pattinson sees the baddies setting up a trip wire at the entrance to the tunnel leading to the Algorithm. He uninverts himself and tries to warn Washington and Taylor-Johnson. They don’t hear him and set off the trip wire, which buries their path out. They keep going, but their path is blocked by a locked gate. On the other side is a henchman, the Algorithm, the bomb, and a blue-team corpse.
In Vietnam, Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh calls up Washington on a walkie-talkie and gives his version of Thanos’s “I am inevitable” monologue.
In Russia, as the bomb ticks toward zero and the henchman is about to shoot Washington, the corpse on the floor springs to life, blocks the bullet, opens the gate, then runs away in reverse. Washington beats up the henchman.
In Vietnam, Sad Elizabeth Debicki reveals the truth: She’s not Past Sad Elizabeth Debicki; she’s Future Sad Elizabeth Debicki, and like the Bens, she’s got the scars to prove it. She shoots Evil Russian Kenneth Branagh. But has she killed him too early?
In Russia, Washington and Taylor-Johnson get ahold of the Algorithm as the bomb is about to go off. Above them, Pattinson pulls them and the Algorithm out of the tunnel before the explosion, thanks to a chain that was there the whole time? It all happens very quickly, but who cares — the world has been saved!
In Vietnam, Sad Elizabeth Debicki is now Happy Elizabeth Debicki. She jumps off the yacht in triumph; her past self sees her and admires her freedom.
In Russia, Washington, Pattinson, and Taylor-Johnson separate the Algorithm into three parts and plan to split up. Taylor-Johnson suggests they each bury their part, then kill themselves to avoid giving up the locations. Pattinson gives his part to Washington and reveals that, from his perspective, they’ve actually known each other for years: Future Washington recruited past Pattinson into the Tenet organization. (Whether this happened in the timeline before or after the events of the film is unclear; many theories have sprung up on this subject.) Pattinson heads back to the Turnstile, and Washington sees that his backpack is the same as the corpse’s. Pattinson’s inverted self will run back into the tunnel, close the gate and then take the bullet. It’s also the same backpack that was seen on the mystery man in the opera house, which means there’s yet another version of Pattinson floating around the timeline saving Washington’s life there, too.
Some time later, Happy Elizabeth Debicki is dropping her son off at school when she gets a premonition of danger and calls the cell phone. She was correct — Dimple Kapadia is about to shoot her to tie up the “loose ends.” Having received the message, future Washington travels to that exact time and place and shoots Kapadia first, revealing that he’s the mastermind behind the entire operation.
And that’s Tenet! Any questions?

I thought i was just tired when I watched it.. but it wasn't making sense at parts to me and i said i would re watch it. This sums it up perfectly
 
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Christopher Nolan Rips HBO Max as "Worst Streaming Service," Denounces Warner Bros.' Plan
4:36 PM PST 12/7/2020 by Kim Masters

Illustration by Laemeur


To many insiders, WarnerMedia's blindsiding of talent and their reps with news that it would send 17 films directly to HBO Max in 2021 felt like an insult.
For many in the movie business — producers, directors, stars and their representatives — Dec. 3, 2020, is a day that will live in infamy.
“Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service,” filmmaker Christopher Nolan, whose relationship with Warners dates back to Insomnia in 2002, said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
Added Nolan: “Warner Bros. had an incredible machine for getting a filmmaker’s work out everywhere, both in theaters and in the home, and they are dismantling it as we speak. They don’t even understand what they’re losing. Their decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.”
Rachel Murray/Getty Images
Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet,' distributed by Warner Bros., grossed $359 million worldwide and $57.6 million in the U.S.

On that now-infamous morning, Ann Sarnoff — whose ungainly title is chair and CEO of WarnerMedia Studios and Networks Group — and Warner Bros. film studio chairman Toby Emmerich called the heads of the major agencies to drop a bombshell: Warners was about to smash the theatrical window, sweeping its entire 17-picture 2021 film slate onto its faltering HBO Max streaming service, debuting them on the same day they would open in whatever theaters could admit customers.
Surprisingly to some in the industry, sources say the idea was the brainchild of Warner Bros. COO Carolyn Blackwood who, looking at a relatively weak 2021 slate, saw an opportunity to avoid the humiliation of potentially bad grosses while currying favor with streamer-obsessed higher-ups.
The instant response in Hollywood was outrage and a massive girding for battle. “Warners has made a grave mistake,” says one top talent agent. “Never have this many people been this upset with one entity.” Like others, he had spent much of the day dealing with calls from stunned and angry clients. And that swooshing sound you hear? It’s the lawyers, stropping their blades as they prepare for battle: that Warners was self-dealing in shifting these movies to its own streamer, perhaps, or that the company acted in bad faith. Some talent reps say the decision affects not only profit participants but others who have worked on films as the move might affect residual payments. They expect and hope that the guilds will get involved. (The Writers Guild of America declined to comment.)
The Warners move poses big, maybe even existential questions: How do theaters survive this supposedly onetime, excused-by-the-pandemic move? Genies are hard to put back in the bottle — and no one believes Warners intended this to be temporary, anyway. What damage will be done to exhibitors by training customers that if they sit on their sofas, the biggest movies will come? And will Warners face serious backlash from important producers, filmmakers, guilds and onscreen talent? “Warners was the quintessentially talent-friendly, filmmaker-friendly studio,” says one agent. “Now Warners isn’t the first place, second place or third place you want to go.”
Many in Hollywood think WarnerMedia opted for this drastic move to play to streaming-infatuated Wall Street and redo the botched launch of HBO Max, which has netted a dismal 8.6 million "activated" subscribers so far. But one prominent agent notes that the top executives at WarnerMedia and its parent — AT&T CEO John Stankey, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar and, of course, Sarnoff — “don’t understand the movie business, and they don’t understand talent relations.”
While Kilar pays what is seen as lip service to movies, industry veterans say Warners is sacrificing the huge profit that comes from selling movies in multiple formats and on multiple platforms around the world.
Even before Warners made its play, there was grumbling among agents that Sarnoff, who has been on the job for more than a year, had yet to get acquainted with key players on the film side or make much of an impression at all. That’s why many are focusing their wrath on Emmerich. “Toby’s passion is only about managing up,” says one agent who represents major Warners talent.
By the weekend following the announcement, Emmerich was calling important filmmakers with projects set for 2022 to assure them that their movies wouldn’t be dropped on the streaming service without warning. “As if anyone would believe he had any control over the situation,” says one producer with a major Warner property. “Toby probably had a really bad weekend, not that I feel bad for him,” says one agent.
According to a source, Emmerich tried to soothe In the Heights director Jon M. Chu by pointing out that the movie was still getting a “global theatrical release.” But industry insiders say the studio is pretending that pirates won’t pounce as soon as these films are streaming on HBO Max. As soon as one does, there's an “excellent version of the movie everywhere immediately,” notes one industry veteran.
WarnerMedia’s decision to attack without warning may be understandable given the blowback that was foreseeable. But to many insiders, blindsiding talent and their reps seemed like an insult. Sources say studio president Courtenay Valenti was the only Warner exec who dared to speak up about the need to reach out to key creative partners, but she was quickly hushed.
Much of this outrage will surely be mitigated if WarnerMedia is prepared to write big checks to all the profit participants in the films that have been moved. “It’s a critical time for them, at the highest level, to make this right with the talent,” says one rep. But agents say the guidance that’s been provided so far suggests that the company isn’t planning to offer what is now called "Wonder Woman money," in honor of the rich deal the studio gave profit participants in Wonder Woman 1984 when that film was moved to HBO Max.
Warner Bros. Entertainment
Warner Bros.' 'Wonder Woman 1984' will debut on HBO Max and in theaters on Dec. 25 in the U.S.

WarnerMedia had to shovel tens of millions at Gal Godot and the other key players because the company wants a third in the series. But that sets the bar high. Sources say even Suicide Squad director James Gunn, who is platform-agnostic, was not pleased when the studio followed its shocking announcement by floating a lackluster formula for compensating him and other profit participants in the film.
At minimum, WarnerMedia has opened the door to arduous negotiations with the major agencies over compensation for multiple profit participants in 17 movies. Did the Warners numbers crunchers, in projecting the cost of premiering its entire 2021 slate on HBO Max, factor in the cost of widely anticipated legal challenges? Industry insiders believe WarnerMedia may have opened itself up to those, especially as it is selling the movies to its own streaming platform when none of the profit participants has had a chance to figure out what Apple or Netflix might have paid for the opportunity to stream their projects day-and-date. Allegations of self-dealing are almost sure to follow.
Many think Legendary will be the first to file a legal challenge. The company fired off a previous lawyer letter after Netflix offered something north of $225 million for the rights to Godzilla vs. Kong, which has seen its release date moved from March 2020 to November to May 2021. Though Legendary financed 75 percent of the movie, Warners had the power to block the sale and did. Legendary asked whether the studio would then give it a deal to stream the movie on HBO Max — and got no clear answer until its executives woke up one December morning to find that the movie was going day-and-date on the service without the benefit of a negotiation. Legendary’s even more expensive picture, Dune, is getting the same treatment. The other companies that finance Warners movies, Village Roadshow and Bron, are also said to be aggrieved parties that might end up going to court.
And then there’s the talent. Dune director Denis Villeneuve is said to be among those who felt most strongly that a traditional big-screen release was essential for his film. Chu, who along with Lin-Manuel Miranda went through an intense courtship with multiple suitors for In the Heights and who had turned down a huge Netflix offer for Crazy Rich Asians because he cherishes the communal theatrical experience, told an associate he was “shell-shocked” after being informed of the Warners decision.
Sources say WarnerMedia insiders have been hoping that Disney will follow its lead and shift its slate to streaming. But Disney, which had seven billion-dollar-grossing movies last year, isn’t about to do that. Instead, it is moving some films to streaming, as it did with Hamilton and Artemis Fowl — likely Cruella and more — but an agent notes that the way Disney has handled the shift stands in stark contrast to what Warners has done. “They didn’t do a unilateral thing,” he says, adding that studio executives made pre-emptive calls to talent and their reps that helped smooth the process.
It’s also worth noting that Disney+, which has dwarfed HBO Max in terms of subscribers, has gotten a lot of mileage out of one original hit, The Mandalorian, which is based on an iconic movie property. “There’s never been a full-fledged franchise blockbuster launched on a streaming service,” observes an executive at a Warners competitor. “It starts with theaters and it starts with opening weekend.” And so far, those blockbusters have been the ones that generated merchandise sales and theme-park attractions.
Warners doesn’t have theme parks but it has reaped big benefits from movies that almost certainly would have been dropped onto HBO Max had the option been available at the time. Consider last year’s megahit Joker. Film studio chief Emmerich was not a fan of the project; it was defended by worldwide marketing president Blair Rich, who was recently pushed out. Emmerich lowballed on the budget to discourage director Todd Phillips from making it, and when the filmmaker persisted, sold off half the movie. Joker then became a cultural phenomenon that grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, was honored with 11 Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix. Would any of that have happened had Joker been dropped onto HBO Max?
Despite their assertions to the contrary, many industry insiders believe that neither AT&T chairman Stankey nor Kilar has much interest in the legacy movie business. Kilar has said this move was made for the fans and told CNBC, “If we start our days and end our days focused on the customer, we’re going to lead the industry.”
That brings to mind a line in the new Netflix movie, Mank — a warning delivered to the upstart Orson Welles by grizzled veteran Herman Mankiewicz: “You, my friend, are an outsider, a self-anointed savior-hyphenate. They’re just waiting to loathe you.”
It also leaves out a long-standing Hollywood maxim: Content is king. And content comes from artists who aren’t always motivated purely by money. Says an agent who represents extremely important talent with business at Warners: “You had a decades-long legacy as being known as the most talent-friendly studio. Now you’ve gone from that to a studio that in starburst colors lit up a sign that says, 'We don’t give a fuck about talent.’”
 
I saw this for the first time last week. At one point I was standing in my living room like, "What the fuck is going on." Not because I was confused, but because even with me understanding what was going on I asking myself was all this necessary? Like he tries to top Inception with an even more complicated premise. And when it all unfolded I was even more like why?

I didn't dislike it, but damn Chris.
 
I saw this for the first time last week. At one point I was standing in my living room like, "What the fuck is going on." Not because I was confused, but because even with me understanding what was going on I asking myself was all this necessary? Like he tries to top Inception with an even more complicated premise. And when it all unfolded I was even more like why?

I didn't dislike it, but damn Chris.
don't forget he did the same damn thing with the dark knight rises with that bullshit plane stunt that didn't have a purpose but to top the stunts in dark knight.

a lot of filmmakers do that...feel the need to one up what they did in the previous movie...but it usually ends up being an inorganic unmotivated storywise spectacle that's just a lot of shock and noise.

Thats what they do action wise...story wise is just what you said....the one up becomes this super complex thing that ends up being convoluted to the average watcher and for those who can decipher it you're all like that was kinda much for such a simple outcome :dunno: :dunno:

examples..Wachowskis and the matrix movies...anything youre STILL figuring out some 20 years later isn't clever it's just needlessly complex.:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

but nolan and the Wachowskis kinda paint themselves in the corner....take away the inverted time premise and you have a movie that could be done with Jason Stratham for a third of the budget. :giggle:
 
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I saw this for the first time last week. At one point I was standing in my living room like, "What the fuck is going on." Not because I was confused, but because even with me understanding what was going on I asking myself was all this necessary? Like he tries to top Inception with an even more complicated premise. And when it all unfolded I was even more like why?

I didn't dislike it, but damn Chris.

Didn't realize he did that one too. But while I was watching this one for the 40 mins I could stand, I thought this is just like Inception (another movie I couldn't finish) :thumbsdown:
 
Christopher Nolan objects to Warner Bros. release plan, but he’s happy you can watch ‘Tenet’ at home now
Director Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, “Tenet,” was released on DVD today. (Emily Berl for The Washington Pot)
By
Geoff Edgers
Dec. 15, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST

imrs.php


There may be no stranger time to make big movies. And nobody makes them bigger than writer-director Christopher Nolan.

His films (“Interstellar,” “Inception,” “Memento”) twist time and space and the conventions of traditional cinema. They also bend budgets, with his latest, “Tenet,” rolling in at $205 million. Which might be part of why so much of the film’s release — both in theaters in September and on DVD on Dec. 15 — has been centered on the tenuous state of an industry crushed by covid-19 shutdowns.

Nolan’s plan for the digital rollout of “Tenet” was to talk mainly about the home release of his 11th film. But instead, he finds himself blasting his own studio, Warner Bros., for its decision to kick its entire slate of 2021 films to HBO Max. This isn’t about money, he says. Nolan believes the studio is not only making a business mistake in shifting “Dune,” “Matrix X” and 15 other films to the streaming service. It is betraying the filmmakers.
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“It’s about what the French call droit moral,” he says in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles. “Do they own it absolutely, because they paid for it or they financed it? And that is not a purely legalistic question; it’s a question of ethics as well. It’s a question of partnership and collaboration. They did not speak to those filmmakers. They did not consult them about what their plans were for their work. And I felt that somebody needed to point out that that wasn’t the right way to treat those filmmakers.”

He declined to say how the HBO Max decision will impact his long-term relationship with Warner Bros., which declined to comment for this story. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talked about the making of “Tenet,” a mind-bending take on the James Bond films that stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh, as well as his writing process, philosophy on moviemaking, and “The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries and Marvels of Christopher Nolan.” Tom Shone’s just-published book walks Nolan through his catalogue, offering both a technical window into the work and an analysis of how Nolan’s life connects to his films.

(The following interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.)

Elizabeth Debicki, left, and John David Washington in a scene from ”Tenet.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP)

Q: I don't think people understand, because of how much discussion took place about the theatrical release, that in some ways this is the real release of "Tenet" in the United States. Back in September, hardly any theaters here were actually open for business.
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A: With all of the adversity in the world for 2020 affecting people in all kinds of horrendous ways, we were very lucky, very privileged to be able to release the film in parts of the world that managed the virus with appropriate response and then figuring out ways to safely reopen theaters. And the film did what it did with $300 million in those markets, and counting. Which sends a very positive message about the future of exhibition for when things can reopen safely and all the rest. In the United States, we were never able to release the film properly. I say “here” because I’m sitting in Los Angeles, and obviously to not open in your hometown and not be able to market the film because the studio was obviously hoping that Los Angeles and New York would open if the virus receded, which obviously has not happened, did not happen. The reality is, there’s people in the world with real problems. This is a pretty trivial concern about the release of film. But delving more into it, I’m a kid of the home video generation. And so we’ve all, and myself in particular, spent many years working with the studios on technical strategies of how to maximize image and sound quality for presentation, how we get it out there in that form and everything. And the short version of it is, I’m just super excited for people in America, in L.A. and New York in particular, to be able to see the movie.

Q: As I understand it, the idea for "Tenet" emerged 10 years ago?

A: The germ of the idea, the initial image being this idea of the bullet being sucked out of the wall into the barrel of a gun. That’s something I’ve had rattling around for about, gosh, 25 years. I used it in “Memento” in a metaphorical way, a symbolic way to explain . . . to sort of suggest the structure of the script beginning. But I’d always harbored an ambition to construct a story where the characters would deal with that as a physical reality. So, over the years, it’s sort of progressed in dribs and drabs and baby steps forwards, and eventually I realized that the spy genre, the big sort of globe-trotting espionage thriller, was the way I wanted to deal with that.
 
yaw know there is a spoiler discussion that breaks down a lot of this movie.



 
My thought was there was a plan to have there be a deeper love story but for some reason it was changed last minute.

Did he kiss her? I think they kissed on the yacht?

The studio thought there was no chemistry between the two? Which I agree with.

There is also a theory that Neil is a grown up version of Max, Kat's son. So there is some "history/future" with the family.

However it does not make sense why a spy was so caught up over this woman and her son.


The Protagonist gave the white chic a pussy pass. His obsession with saving his white queen is the worst part of the movie.
 
There is also a theory that Neil is a grown up version of Max, Kat's son. So there is some "history/future" with the family.

However it does not make sense why a spy was so caught up over this woman and her son.

That's interesting....Neil did say, for him that was the end but for the protagonist it was just the beginning....
 
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