In lieu of the big screen, Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet trailer has officially dropped on Fortnite‘s party royale. This isn’t the first time Fortnite‘s party royale island has been used as a social space for creatives. The island has seen live music sets from the likes of Diplo and Deadmau5, and now it can add Nolan to their list of presenters.
It’s an interesting decision for Nolan to make considering his position as an ardent champion of film. However, Donald Mustard, Epic Games‘ worldwide creative director tweeted that the idea of using Fortnite as the platform for release was Nolan’s own idea.
The idea of debuting the TENET trailer came from a phone call with Christopher Nolan. We were all talking about our love of seeing new trailers in a THEATER and how sad we were that we can’t do that right now – but how maybe this could be the next best thing. Hope you love it!
— Donald Mustard (@DonaldMustard) May 21, 2020
While I can’t say that debuting the trailer this way is the next best thing to the big screen — I was distracted by the dancing players next to me and the pixelated quality of the trailer — there is a live-event element to watching the release via party royale that can mimic the effect of being in a theater with an audience.
So what can we take away from this new trailer of Tenet?
We got a lot. We already know that Nolan loves to dabble with concepts of time, not just traveling through it but experiencing it in a new and warped way. This trailer offers a little bit more meat to the plot. Once again, we are aware that the protagonist played by John David Washington is out to prevent World War III, but now he and his enemies are working with the concept of “inversion”.
As it’s succinctly demonstrated in a scene with Clémence Poésy, Washington pulls the trigger on a gun but instead of a bullet shooting out, it leaps back into the gun along with its casing. “You’re not shooting the bullet, you’re catching it.” If that isn’t enough to get your mind doing mental gymnastics, the trailer is packed with timey wimey fight sequences that move both forward and backward in time, paired with a musical score chock full of auditory elements of rewinding.
Alongside Washington and Poesy are Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Himesh Patel, Dimple Kadapia and familiar Nolan faces like Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine.
Washington was interviewed after the trailer release on Fortnite and said, “There were nuggets of information, breadcrumbs of information that I was surprised [Nolan] was willing to reveal. I love that he did. Being a fan of Christopher Nolan, this seems like something different. We’re familiar with his films, we obviously know his films, but this seems like something different. This seems like this is where he is about to take us for the next ten to fifteen years of film making.”
From international landscapes to insane practical effects (that was an actual plane crashing into an actual building!), the only question left on my mind is when will we get to see this movie? Nolan is determined to release it in theaters and after this look, I have to agree with him.
For now, the theatrical release date for Tenet is still July 17th, 2020.
This is still coming out in July? I’ll believe it when it happens.
Looks dope
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