I just went to a mid-morning screening of Tenet ...

Six key takeaways from Christopher Nolan's mind-melting blockbuster.

My head hurts. My ears are ringing. My face is numb. My mouth tastes like cardboard, and I have to keep telling my feet how to move.

Outside this West Auckland movie theatre, after nearly three hours sitting through Christopher Nolan’s head-spinning backwards blockbuster Tenet, I attempt to go down the up escalator.

Oops.

I’m not sure if I’m doing it because I’m disorientated, or that I’ve just watched people and planes and cars and things do things they really shouldn’t be doing.

This is the loudest experience I’ve had since I went to two Tool shows in two days six months ago.

Honestly, I was just excited to leave the house and be amongst people. Today, Auckland experiences its first taste of Lockdown Level 2.5, and after nearly three weeks of doing nothing but making snack platters for my kids, I was so damned ready to see the smiling, happy faces of literally anyone else that I’m not related to.

At the mall, everyone wore masks and avoided each other.

Up the escalator and into the cinema, I realised I was the only person in the movie theatre.

Look! I’ve got the photo to prove it.

Literally the only person I talked to when I left the house for the first time in three weeks was the guy I asked for a ticket and popcorn.

Anyway, what about the film? It’s big! It’s loud! It’s too much! It’s waaay too much!

But I liked a lot of it. I haven’t yet worked out whether that’s because it was just nice to sit in the dark and engulf far too much sugar and salt after sitting on the couch doing nothing for three weeks, or that it really did rule.

I’ll work that out once my headaches subsides and the tinnitus disappears.

In the meantime, here are six Tenet hot takes worth pondering ...

• Robert Pattinson got good. Like, really good. He’s the best actor in a film - excluding Sir Michael Caine grotesquely chewing on a piece of expensive steak for far too long - full of some pretty good performances. He’s got old school Hollywood chops. He could be Indiana Jones. He should be a Star Wars hero. Maybe he’ll become Quentin Tarantino’s muse. Wherever he’s going, whatever he’s doing, from this point on, I’m all in. That thing with FKA Twigs is forgiven.

• Tenet’s trailers gave nothing away. You can watch them over and over again, but they really give no clues about what Tenet is really about. So, what is it about? I’d love to tell you, but then I’d have to travel back in time, find a different time portal, hook myself up to an oxygen machine, create two SWAT teams and orchestrate a pincer movement, steal the algorithm, then kill you. Once you see Tenet for yourself, you’ll understand what I’m saying.

• It’s like Dunkirk crossed with Inception. Tenet’s set pieces are absolutely stunning. A jumbo jet crashes into a building, spilling gold bars all over the tarmac. A car chase full of reverse engineered crashes and backwards speed racing as those Nolan horns cascade around you. The whole thing revolves around a claustrophobic fight sequence that you’ll sit through twice - and love every second of. Nolan does big bigger than anyone.

• It made me miss travelling. Tenet globe trots at the click of a finger. Once minute they’re abseiling down buildings in Mumbai, the next they’re at the opera in Ukraine. They’re art thieves in Oslo, sunning themselves on a yacht in Vietnam, and going to war in dusty Russian dead drop zones. God damn I wish I could use my passport.

• Some of the dialogue is terrible. Tenet’s main star is Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington. He’s pretty good! But even he can’t get over some of the smooshy crap he’s forced to say. At one point, he declares: “I am the protagonist.” Umm, yeah dude, you’re on the posters and shit. Of course you’re the protagonist.

• You’ll need a PHD in physics to fully understand it. After two-plus hours of discussion about inversion and algorithms and the physics of time travel, I gave up fully trying to understand Tenet and felt all the better for it. It will help if you’ve seen Inception a bunch of times and devoured the Reddit messageboard theories, but this is a whole new level of Nolan carnage. I already warned you it gave me a headache. It’ll probably give you one too - but in the best possible way. Go see it! You might just get a movie theatre all to yourself like me.