Seeing ‘Tenet’ in IMAX Really Did Help Me Appreciate It More

Tenet may be Christopher Nolan’s most divisive film. I’m here to tell you that all the cries out about it how it “makes no sense” have no merit, especially if you watch it in IMAX, as in its recent rerelease.

Quite frankly, it is a movie where you don’t need to know everything that is happening, as Nolan himself has discussed. Seeing it in IMAX without distractions made me realize that whatever was labeled as “confusing” beforehand was really just me focusing too much on details that aren’t important to understanding the plot, so maybe Christopher Nolan was on to something when he said that was how people should see his movies.

The main concern people had about Tenet was that they didn’t understand the motivation behind the plot in the first place, but it’s really about something pretty simple: stopping Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from destroying the world using a catastrophic version of the same time manipulation technology as the characters in the film. When the Protagonist (the character’s only name, played by John David Washington) is confronted with the idea of time being a nonlinear thing, he is thrown into a world of espionage to try to stop the end of the world.

He embarks on a mission to find everyone who would eventually play a part in the creation of the weapon, if Sator’s plan were completed. Sator plans to cause “the Algorithm” to be unleashed, which can completely reverse the entropy of the entire world, cataclysmically reversing time for the planet.

The main plot of Tenet revolves around stopping Sator, who has set up a system so that the minute his heart stops beating, the information necessary to create the Algorithm will be blasted to the smartest and wealthiest people in the world. This, in turn, means that the Protagonist and his team cannot just kill Sator without trying to first prevent him from possessing the complete Algorithm in the first place, and they finally succeed in getting the Algorithm and breaking it into pieces.

A movie about characters who need each other

Tenet really boils down to the dynamic of its characters. Neil (Robert Pattinson) is there for the Protagonist when he needs him most, and we are given hints that it’s a mutual feature of their relationship in the future. Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) desperately needs the Protagonist’s help in taking down Andrei, and without him, she would never have made it out of her marriage alive and with her son.

Taking out all of the “confusing” elements of the movie, you can still sit and understand the motivations that these characters have and why that forces them together. It is through the Protagonist’s relationships that you can understand why he is on this boat or why he connects with Neil, and that’s why, to me, Tenet ends up being such a fun watch.

Tenet, Oppenheimer, and weapons set to destroy us all

It is a known fact that without Tenet, we would not have Oppenheimer. Robert Pattinson famously gave Christopher Nolan a copy of American Prometheus as his wrap gift. More than that, Tenet uses the creation of the atomic bomb to point out how the evolution of science can lead to the fall of mankind. 

Both of these movies are about men trying to stop what other men have created. Oppenheimer is more about a man trying to stop his own creation from destroying the world, but it still has the same themes present. Watching Tenet and then Oppenheimer back to back, Nolan’s commentary on man’s destruction is tied together beautifully, but it is made abundantly clear in Tenet that the evil people of the world will try whatever they have to in order to succeed, including creating a world-destroying algorithm. 

Nolan has said you don’t have to understand all of Tenet to enjoy it, but having seen it now in IMAX, everything was incredibly clear. 

(featured image: Warner Bros.)