Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned There’s No Place Like Home

After spending months playing a game of chicken with a deadly virus, Christopher Nolan’s new movie Tenet is finally out in cinemas, and after seeing it I can’t help but feel that the post-pandemic world is the perfect environment for it.

Time in Tenet moves in mysterious ways. Lots of people are wearing masks (which makes it difficult to understand what they’re saying half the time), and the rules can be very confusing. It’s all a little bit overwhelming.

There’s a line in the movie that lots of critics have picked up on. “Don’t understand it,” says a scientist who tries to explain all the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. “Try to feel it.” The problem is, it’s hard to feel anything when you’re given so little to go on. People often describe Christopher Nolan as a cold or unfeeling director, and I don’t think that’s fair. Look at Interstellar: a movie with the central idea that love is the one force in the universe which transcends the laws of time and space. The scene where Matthew McConaughey watches decades of messages from his children, while hours has passed from his perspective, is utterly gut-wrenching. Here, though, he’s so interested in the stagecraft that his characters feel like an afterthought. The protagonist doesn’t even have a name, for Gods’ sake – he’s just called The Protagonist. 

Still, Tenet might be a load of cobblers, but it’s terrifically well-made cobblers. The palindromic fight sequences and car chases are like nothing I’ve ever seen before, with half the action going backwards before everything gets flipped on its head. Nolan’s commitment to practical effects gets pushed to the limits during a scene in which a jumbo jet explodes while a bunch of gold bars fall out the back, as if he’s gleefully shouting to the audience: “Look how much money I can spend!” And while I don’t think there’s such a thing as a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to watch a movie – a truly great film doesn’t stop being great if you watch it on a mobile phone – there’s no denying that there’s something special about seeing Tenet in a dark room with a screen so big it fills your eyeballs and speakers so loud they rattle the fillings in your teeth.

The thing that really moved me though, more than anything in Tenet, was how remarkably normal it felt to be back in that room. The last film I’d been to in the Before Times was a press screening of The Hunt in early March. Lockdown hadn’t yet been imposed but there was a definite tension in the air. I remember a throwaway line about hand sanitiser got one of the biggest laughs of the night.

I’ve spent months watching both the big chains and independent cinemas alike struggle with the enforced closure, wondering when their doors would reopen – and, more importantly, when I’d feel safe setting foot in them again. I turned up at the Sheffield Odeon, mask in hand, preparing myself for the uncomfortable feeling of other patrons pressed in around me, breathing their miasma.

Instead the lights went down, and that overly chipper voice I used to hear at least once a week piped up: “Hello! And a warm welcome to Odeon,” and I nearly wept. For two-and-a-half hours, I didn’t worry about social distancing, or working from home, or when I would next be able to hug my family and friends. I didn’t even care when I knocked over my M&Ms and spilled half of them down the sides of my seat.

I was back in my happy place. Just like I’d never left.