Tenet on 70mm

Don’t try to understand it… An original, $200 million-plus action film released in the thick of a worldwide disaster, Christopher Nolan’s “quantum Cold War thriller” remains one of the strangest objects ever to occupy the center of 21st-century studio moviemaking. It is a time-travel blockbuster that, in practice, the film industry asked to help reverse the collapse of theatrical moviegoing itself. John David Washington stars as an unnamed operative recruited by Tenet, a clandestine organization seeking to prevent a dying oligarch (Kenneth Branagh), armed with a time inversion device, from ending the world. From its palindromic structure and deliberately murky dialogue submerged beneath Ludwig Göransson’s blaring, flipped score to its dense, hermetic plot and nested conspiracies, the film seems designed to resist first-pass consumption. Spycraft is lavishly labyrinthine, a marriage story becomes a police-state horror, and the protagonist ultimately finds himself revealed as the future architect of the very machinery he’s been navigating. Especially resonant as a pandemic-era release, Tenet arrived in a world already fractured by asynchronous experiences of time, and—perhaps most frighteningly—a new era in which everyone’s actions can be indexed and weaponized by unseen forces downstream.

Filmed by Hoyte van Hoytema using large-format 65mm cameras in both 5-perf 65mm Panavision and 15-perf IMAX formats. FLC is screening from one of the 5-perf 70mm prints struck for its 2020 theatrical release.