Overview
UPDATE: JULY 1, 2020 — Due to worldwide cinema closures and other concerns around COVID-19, Tenet will no longer release on its initially scheduled date of Thursday, July 17, 2020. Instead, it will now release on Thursday, August 13. This article has been updated to reflect that change.
To find out more about the status of COVID-19 in Australia and how to protect yourself, head to the Australian Government Department of Health's website.
Every ten years, Christopher Nolan sends audiences on a wild journey. The Batman Begins, The Prestige and Interstellar filmmaker makes movies more often than that, but a decade seems to be how long it takes to indulge his weird and wonderful side. In 2000, that led to Memento, the film that helped bring the writer/director to broader attention. In 2010, Inception and its dreams within dreams were the end result. Now, in 2020, Nolan is trifling with time and tasking BlacKkKlansman's John David Washington with trying to stop World War III, all in the trippy Tenet.
Indeed, when an initial trailer for the film dropped last year, it instantly gave off big Inception vibes. Combining temporal trickery, logic-defying stunts, Michael Caine and an ominous, droning score will do that. The fact that the trailer didn't reveal much in the way of narrative detail also helped more than a little. Now, a new sneak peek has just hit after first premiering via the video game Fortnite — and it provides a bit more information. This being a Nolan flick, Tenet is certain to save its biggest surprises until it releases in cinemas; however, the new trailer does confirm that communicating with the future and reversing the flow of time are both on the agenda.
Yes, that paints a very intriguing picture, with the new footage combining fresh clips with a few sights already seen in original trailer. Washington plays a spy, partnered with Robert Pattinson, who is trying to stave off something worse than a nuclear holocaust. To do so, he "journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time", according to the film's official synopsis. That means inversion — not time travel, as he makes plain in the new footage.
Tenet also features Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki (Widows), Harry Potter's Clémence Poésy, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Avengers: Age of Ultron), Himesh Patel (Yesterday), Martin Donovan (Ant-Man) and Kenneth Branagh — with the latter also starring in Nolan's last film, the World War II epic Dunkirk.
And as for when you're likely to see the filmmaker's 11th feature, it's currently now slated for a mid-August release — a change from its initial mid-July release, which was listed in the text beneath the new trailer on YouTube. It's interesting to note that the trailer itself doesn't include a release date, however. The film has been heralded as the big blockbuster that'll help reopen cinemas after their COVID-19 shutdown, but whether that'll happen is yet to be seen — and will depend upon the status not just of cinemas Down Under but around the world, and especially whether theatres have opened en masse in the US (including in major markets such as New York and Los Angeles).
Check out the latest Tenet trailer below:
Tenet is slated to release in Australian cinemas on August 13, 2020. We'll update you if that changes again.
Top images: Copyright: © 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures