I crossed state lines to see Tenet
Christopher Nolan’s new film is thrilling nonsense, but that may be enough.
Starved for a live, communal film watching experience, on Wednesday I drove across the state line to Connecticut to see an “Early Access” screening of the new Christopher Nolan film Tenet. It was my birthday. I deserved it. But nobody would go with me. In fact, friends begged me not to go. “I’m against it,” one texted. Another said, “Ken, a movie is like marijuana, next you’ll be in a gym and then suddenly we’ll see you dancing on a boat at Lake Havasu.” They may have been kidding.
Maybe they had a point. But I didn’t care. I was reckless. Also, I was curious. How would it feel to go, willingly, into a theater with strangers. And what would the new AMC Theater experience be like. The movie itself seemed almost incidental, although Nolan, whose films routinely cost between $100-$200 million to make, has been at the forefront of advocacy for reopening theaters.
I went online, found the nearest theater where Tenet is playing, just over the Connecticut border in Danbury, about a forty-five minute drive. Online ticketing was not new to me, but I quickly saw that the seats were crossed out to reduce capacity: there were clusters of seats of three or four people, a few rows up front where every seat was available but none taken, and scattered single seats in the…
