Christopher Nolan movies are always events.
than-life, action-packed, ideas-driven, and (mostly) original, they’re created to be big-screen spectacles that awe mass …
Christopher Nolan movies are always events. than-life, action-packed, ideas-driven, and (mostly) original, they’re created to be big-screen spectacles that awe mass audiences and drive hefty returns. For Nolan to say that his latest, “ Tenet,” a palindromic global spy thriller starring John David Washington, is his most ambitious is no small thing. Add the fact that it’s the first major Hollywood film in the COVID-era to open in U. S. cinemas in almost six months and you can understand why even “event film” feels too small for “Tenet.” In the best of times releasing a film is exciting and tense. But now? “This is a very heightened experience for all of us,” Nolan said. It is a film that has been brewing in Nolan’s mind, in some ways, for decades. It started with an image of a bullet being sucked back into the gun. He toyed with the symbolic concept in “Memento,” but always wanted to make it more concrete. Over the next 20 years, Nolan and his producer and wife Emma Thomas would see their films amass nearly $4.8 billion at the box office. And with each new one, they challenged themselves to go further. With a starry ensemble including Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, and, naturally, Michael Caine, “Tenet” takes audiences to Tallinn, Estonia, Italy’s Amalfi Coast, England, Oslo, Denmark, Mumbai, and Southern California’s Mojave Desert as Washington’s character, The Protagonist, tries to save the world. Seven international locations is a massive undertaking for any film, but in each one there was a big action set piece to accomplish. “I think back to where we were even 10 years ago and one or two of the set pieces in ‘Tenet’ could have probably been the climax of one of those earlier movies,” Thomas laughed.
