At the start of the year, it was one of the most, if not the most, anticipated movie(s) of the year. That's a likely outcome for any new Christopher Nolan release.
Then it was our greatest gauge of how coronavirus was affecting the movie business, as its ever-changing release was a moving goalpost for when things might be getting "back to normal," which would in turn signal to other movies it was safe to debut. When it became clear things weren't getting "back to normal," eventually they just had to release the thing.
Then it became a further cautionary tale to movies considering releasing by taking in a paltry box office compared to what it could have made under normal circumstances. Quite unjustly, I imagine, it will go down as a historic flop.
I still haven't seen the thing. Movie theaters have not been open in the state of Victoria, the hardest hit by COVID in Australia, since early July. Having learned our lesson by a spike in cases, now the government is delaying the potential re-opening of cinemas as one of the last benchmarks in our return to some semblance of normalcy.
But yesterday, I stopped preserving it as a gift waiting to be opened at some point in my future, because I have no idea when that time is ever going to come.
I had been holding back one of my Filmspotting podcasts that's more than a month old now, because I didn't want to hear spoiler talk about Tenet. Now, the Filmspotting guys are good about avoiding actual spoilers, but I think you would agree that a Christopher Nolan film can be best when you know nothing about it. Even the premise of some Nolan films is something that's only revealed once you start watching, and Tenet seemed like a prime example of that.
What ultimately caused me to cave is that their review of I'm Thinking of Ending Things was nestled into the second half of the podcast. I wanted to access that review, and forwarding through content I don't want to hear is just not how I roll. (Especially when I'm out for a six-and-a-half-mile run, and I need most of the podcast's 93 minutes to get through it.)
So yeah, yesterday I "gave up" on Tenet.
Which was a sad but very 2020 thing to do.
The good news is, they didn't do a special spoiler section on the movie (sometimes they warn us to press stop if we haven't seen it, then proceed to spoil it), and that they were both flummoxed enough by the movie that they mightn't have been able to spoil what happened even if they wanted to. So Tenet has not been totally despoiled for me.
The bad news is, they did describe certain shots, certain techniques, that I would have been thrilled to come across organically while watching the movie. And that's the kind of thing they definitely do have to talk about if they want to talk about anything at all.
The "I'm not sure how I feel about it" news is that both podcasters considered it the worst Nolan film they've seen. Not by leaps and bounds, but by enough of a margin that they didn't really doubt that conclusion.
So maybe that's another way Tenet is like 2020. In the end it is a disappointment, and we just don't understand what to make of it.
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