"Tenet" Reviewed in 70mm IMAX
The IMAX experience was outstanding, with practically a standing ovation thanks to the amazing print and projection system

After a year of COVID 19 lockdown, and closed cinemas, "Tenet" finally played in 70mm IMAX for two weeks late in March 2021 at the AMC Universal CityWalk IMAX, in Los Angeles, USA.

"Holy crap does this movie look good on film. Shut off the digital projectors!"

I’ve been eagerly awaiting "Tenet" for quite sometime. As a huge fan of large format filmmaking, it’s always great to see it being used for “normal” movies. Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema have been a great team so far, but they haven’t yet made a more “normal” movie until "Tenet". The trailers were very enticing as well, with a great cast and very interesting plot line revolving around inverse time. The boxes were checked and I couldn’t wait to see the movie at our local 15 perf IMAX theater and probably Cinerama Dome on 5 perf 70mm as well. However, the global pandemic prevented a wide release of the movie at its scheduled dates. With that said however, I was able to see a special screening of the 5 perf print and recently (finally) the 15 perf IMAX print. I’ve also seen the film twice at home on UHD BluRay, in stellar 10 bit full HDR 4:4:4 quality.

For what it’s worth, "Tenet" is a very basic -end of the world style- spy thriller with one little tiny element that makes it different; people in the know can go backwards in time. Now the device that does this is a bit clunky, the explanations are a bit vague, lots of “you don’t really want to know how it works” dialog, but it’s fine because the basic premise is all the audience needs to know. Had it been a normal spy thriller, without the fancy twist, it may have worked totally fine. However, it’s clear the twist was the movie, which I guess makes sense for Christopher Nolan, but so much time is wasted on it, we don’t really get a complete spy thriller. It’s more like a 90 minute spy thriller, with another hour tacked on that explains what you just spent 90 minutes watching, isn’t what you thought it was. Not saying that’s bad, but there just isn’t enough time to flesh out the characters and the plot drives endlessly. The only time you get to reflect on anything is during the credits, which for a movie that’s 150 minutes long, full of complex paradoxes and overlapping timelines, you really do need a break somewhere to let the audience relax and think things through. That’s really my biggest beef and had it been 3hrs long, had there been some quiet intimate dialog scenes to understand the characters motivation, maybe it would have been better. Doesn’t help the score is very over-powering and the sparse dialog is muddied heavily by the music and effects. It’s as if the center channel is simply mixed too low on purpose, so the audience focuses more on the visuals and less on the dialog?

John David Washington is fantastic and since the film centers around his character, it was important to choose the right actor. I think Nolan nailed it and honestly ALL the cast is great. From Robert Pattinson who is Washington’s side kick, to Elizabeth Debicki, who comes out of nowhere to be one of the most critical characters in the story. Of course Kenneth Branagh smashes it out of the ballpark as the Russian antagonist, but that’s to be expected. I put a lot of emphasis on the cast in this film, because many of them have to walk, fight, shoot and talk backwards in scenes, which is not easy. They did quite a bit of training and the end result is very seamless.

My friend Chester Milton worked with the camera crew (over 250 people total, making it the largest project Nolan or Hoyte had ever made) on the European and American shoots. I also have talked extensively with Fotokem’s lab folk about the post production aspects and how they were able to fix the mistakes they made in Dunkirk, to make the 5 perf and 15 perf prints stellar this time around. "Tenet" was a tricky shoot due to the myriad of locations and working with large format the entire way through. Nolan pushed his crew to get the production done under schedule, which made the days very tricky for them. There are many stories about Nolan wanting the crew to try new un-tested things on set, wasting countless hours in an already tight schedule to then throw them away in post, which is too bad. He also does not storyboard, meaning that time on set is a lot of experimentation rather than simply shooting.

Like "Dunkirk", the film was shot mostly with 15 perf, except for intimate dialog scenes, which were shot on a myriad of cameras from the Panavison System 65mm 5 perf sync sound cameras made in the early 90’s for "Far and Away" to the Arriflex 765 and even a few shots were done with the new Logmar camera, though the final cut does not feature them. The 765 was used on a few scenes, but my friend said the final cut does not feature anything of any substance from that camera. Thus, the bulk of the movie was Panavision System 65 5 perf cameras and a batch of 15 perf IMAX cameras (MSM 9802, MKVI and MKIII) for any scenes where dialog was not critical. Funny enough, on this movie, you can hear the camera in scenes a lot more than on other Nolan movies, which was interesting. Nolan used a handful of very special Hasselblad lenses that he acquired over the years as his “A” lenses, which is what he primarily used. There was also a group of Panavision Sphero 65 lenses he used on the 5 perf cameras.

The film was processed and finished at Fotokem here in Burbank California. They spent 6 months finishing the film and due to the delay on release thanks to the pandemic, Nolan was able to tweak the cut even more, making a slightly different cut for theatrical and throwing away one reel of the film. For digital this may not have been seen, but for the film prints, there for sure will be a splice done by the projectionist to fix that problem, though I never saw one. They still did 35mm reduction dailies for 15 perf shots and 5 perf dailies (projected using a Kinoton projector) for the sync sound material. The film would be shipped to LA, processed, printed and shipped back to whatever destination the production was at. Sadly they couldn’t use Cinelab London, a phenomenal facility with top notch techs, because they currently can’t do reduction OR prints of 70mm material. So Nolan was stuck using the last fully featured lab in the world in California.