Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold i... Read allArmed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
- Won 1 Oscar
- 50 wins & 137 nominations total
- Male Voice
- (voice)
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- Writer
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- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThe production team purchased and then crashed a real 747 airplane into a hangar. The stunt was all practical effects, with no visual effects or CGI. Director Christopher Nolan had originally planned to use miniatures and set-piece builds. However, while scouting for locations in Victorville, California, the team discovered a massive array of old planes, and it became apparent that it would actually be more efficient to buy a real plane of the real size and to perform the sequence for real on camera.
- GoofsOn many occasions during the movie, some characters are manipulating gold bars too easily relatively to the gold's density. The larger gold bars from the plane scene weigh about 20kg and would not be easily picked up with one hand. The smaller bars from the crate would weigh about 5kg.
- Quotes
The Protagonist: You wanna crash a plane?
Neil: Well, not from the air. Don't be so dramatic.
The Protagonist: ...well, how big a plane?
Neil: That part is a little dramatic.
- Crazy creditsThe Warner Bros and Syncopy logos are respectively shaded red and blue, the colors used in the film to represent normal/inverted time.
- Alternate versionsThe United Kingdom subsidiary of Warner Bros. to maximize their UK cinema audiences, made their "Distributors Cuts" as recommended by the BBFC, to remove 9.3 seconds of footage from the cinema theatrical version, to secure their preferred "12A BBFC" rating. Removed from 72:34 until 72:43 minutes, showing Sator (Kenneth Branagh) during a violent fight, repeatedly kicking his wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki). When the original 150:00 minutes version was seen for advice, the BBFC indicated that for the uncut version, the "15 BBFC" rating was likely. The "12A BBFC" rating version was later released on home video in the UK, with the "12 BBFC" rating.
- SoundtracksThe Plan
Written by Travis Scott (as Jacques Webster), Wonda Gurl (as Ebony Naomi Oshunrinde) and Ludwig Göransson
Performed by Travis Scott
Produced by Ludwig Göransson and Wonda Gurl
Travis Scott appears courtesy of Cactus Jack/Epic Records
By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment
Among Nolan's previous works I'd say 'Tenet' owes the most to 'Inception' for its complex, ever-shifting, multilayered plot. For Inception it was the Russian-doll dreamworlds within dreamworlds. For Tenet, it's playing with time and time reversal (as you see from any trailer or synopsis out there). We've had any number of time-travel movies before, and one sure thing they're good for is setting up paradoxes, but the way Nolan deploys this on screen is at times genuinely and startlingly new (as just one example, there's a car chase on a busy freeway where one car is speeding backwards but time-reversed, so from its POV it's racing forward, which is why it can travel that fast driving backward ... and there are many more scenes that I won't spoil.) There are things here we've never seen on screen before.
In the barest of bare-bones summary, the plot is all about a hunt for The Algorithm, something that enables this messing with the timeline The uber-evil Andrei (Kenneth Branagh) aims to use it to start WW III, or even (in a total burst of nihilism) ring down the curtain on all of reality. The shadowy team called Tenet aims to stop this. Keep up with it if you can. On the surface, it's an excellent James Bond imitation. Exposition scenes are followed by thunderous action, rinse, repeat -- pretty much from start to finish. How confused you are at any given moment depends (like Inception) on how many questions are running through your mind: why are we in THIS location now, who's doing what to whom, and what precisely are the characters after? The overall impression, though (again, like Inception) is that there IS substance underneath the high-octane surface and that repeated viewings and study will bring it out. We'll see.
So the production quality is, as usual for Nolan, first-rate. There are big, bravura scenes (wait till you see the big opener in a concert hall) but plenty of close, person-to-person ones to balance. One thing that might be a little jarring is that the scene-to-scene transitions are extremely abrupt and extremely frequent, and I assume that's deliberate -- there's no time for viewers to think even if we want to. But I'll accept that as a feature rather than a bug. The overall flow isn't necessarily helped by the music score (by Ludwig Goransson), which is epic but also insistent and omnipresent. Too much of a good thing. Lots of the personal scenes would just have worked better for me with no background score stepping on the dialog.
For the acting: I thought John David Washington (as The Protagonist) was OK but rather wooden, and he's on screen most of the time. I kept visualizing Will Smith in the part instead -- but maybe he'd have taken over the movie too much and that's not the result Nolan wanted? I don't know. But I liked Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki quite a lot. They both have substantial, essential roles and they have more nuance and humanity than anything they've done before. Kenneth Branagh still can't do a good Russian accent (though to be fair, not many native-English actors can) and although he's fine, I think as an actor he's much better suited to Shakespeare or Hercule Poirot. There's a big cast of smaller roles (among which is the always-welcome Michael Caine), adding to the difficulty of keeping up with what's developing.
So there it is. I'm looking forward to figuring out more of what's under the hood of this thing.
- gcsman
- Sep 7, 2020
Details
- Release date
- Countries of origin
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- Also known as
- Merry-Go-Round
- Filming locations
- Linnahall, Tallinn, Estonia(national opera house Kyiv)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Budget
- $205,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $58,504,105
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $9,353,090
- Sep 6, 2020
- Gross worldwide
- $365,304,105
- Runtime2 hours 30 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix