Can’t watch Tenet? Now is the perfect time to revisit Inception

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  An old man waiting for someone "from a half-remembered dream." [credit: Warner Bros. ]

Director Christopher Nolan's hotly anticipated new film Tenet is finally playing in select theaters. But not everybody is able to watch it-New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are all major US markets where theaters remain closed. If you're not among those lucky enough to live near a reopened theater where the film is showing-and you're not keen on driving for four hours to find an open theater-now is the perfect time to revisit what is arguably Nolan's masterpiece: the mind-bending thriller, Inception, which marks its tenth anniversary this year. The film grossed over $829 million globally and was nominated for eight Oscars, winning four. (It lost the Best Picture Oscar to The King's Speech.)

(Spoilers below, because it's been ten years.)

Nolan first submitted his treatment for a horror film involving "dream stealers" to Warner Bros. back in 2002 but decided he didn't yet have sufficient experience as a director to do justice to what he envisioned, which he knew would require a large budget. "As soon as you're talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite," he told The New York Times in 2010. "And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale."

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