The new Warner Brothers film Tenet, a time travel movie revolving around time travel and World War 3, came out September 3rd. What made the movie stand out was that amidst a global pandemic it still was only in theaters.
The entirety of the movie experience felt off from what I considered ordinary, which I had already expected coming into the theater. The staff was a skeleton crew, the theaters had one tenth the people in them, and the restaurants near it were closed down.
It started off weird when I was buying my tickets, I was just about to purchase the seats (ten of which were taken) and then it said that it was sold out. I was perplexed at first but later found out that they were only letting fifteen people into the theater.
Once I got to Kaleidoscope, where the movie theater was located, I was shocked to find that five or so shops and/or restaurants were closed down, these places had lots of foot traffic pre-pandemic because of the theater.
What was also perplexing was to see that some of the people were not wearing masks. Once I walked into the theater I saw about 7 people in the lobby and then scanned our tickets and went to Theatre 1, I noticed that only a quarter of the showing rooms were open.
Going to sit down I realized a couple things, the lights were not dimmed yet and the theater was still playing previews about the same length, maybe even longer (25 minutes). It was five minutes into the movie the lights still were not dimmed, then I saw a guy walk outside and shortly after the lights dimmed. According to the theater employees you are not allowed to take your mask off in the theater by protocol but I saw a couple of people doing it anyway, I thought it was fine seeing as the closest person to me was 12 feet apart but some people’s feelings might differ.
The movie was extremely loud, this could be because the theater was understaffed, the movie’s sound was engineered in covid-19, or the sound engineer just wanted it loud. Other than that the movie was really good and there were no other hitches in the movie theater experience. The story was amazing, which makes sense seeing as the person behind the film was Christopher Nolan, the director of legendary movies such as Inception, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight Trilogy.
So if you’re craving a movie theater experience with a blockbuster film right now Tenet is the way to go. It will give you the closest experience you can have to normalcy, with the exception of being in a pandemic and all the things that come from that.
