252 - Tenet - Second Screening

Birmingham's full-size IMAX cinema closed in 2011, having proved unprofitable (the independent venue it became, the Giant Screen, closed four years later for the same reason), so it's off to the Manchester Printworks, home of the second-largest screen in the UK, for our second viewing of Tenet. We ask whether the full IMAX experience is worth it, Mike comparing the feeling of the images offered to those he saw in Dunkirk and The Dark Knight; José argues that it's detrimental to the film to be exhibited in different cinema formats, as shooting in IMAX's 1.43:1 aspect ratio, where the film is supposedly best seen, with the knowledge that it'll be cropped for conventional cinema screens for its wide release and home media, means that artistic, interesting composition is impossible - you can't compose well for two frames at once. Mike suggests that an easily overlooked pleasure of Christopher Nolan's cinema is turning his films over in your own head, playing with the logic, asking questions of it and trying to unlock the puzzle box - something he's been doing since his first screening, and which we both spend some time on after this one. Laying out the timeline, speculating on what might happen that we're not shown - this isn't the first of Nolan's films to invite that type of reflection. And Mike describes the pleasure of understanding things that aren't hidden but simply too many to grasp all at once the first time - now that he broadly knows the film, things that left him confused at first now smoothly fall into place. We reflect again on the film's score, performances, and action scenes, finding that rather than changing our initial impressions, this second viewing helps us to perceive and explain better what made us feel the way we did at first. We find more to discuss - the use of Elizabeth Debicki's height, the cost of Nolan's adherence to achieving visual effects without the use of CGI, the pleasure of the way in which Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character interacts with the heroes, whether Mike is just shit at watching spy movies - but our overall experience hasn't changed. What we liked, we still like; what we didn't, we still don't. Recorded on 30th August 2020.