Christopher Nolan told audiences that Tenet was “designed for the audience experience, the big screen experience.” And that is exactly why a spiteful YouTuber put the entire film on a Game Boy Advance cartridge to watch it on a 2.9-inch SP screen.
Nolan raised eyebrows when he insisted that Tenet be viewed in theaters, infamously slamming the film’s studio Warner Bros. for releasing it on the streaming service HBO Max. Unfortunately, the much-anticipated action film was due to premiere in the midst of a global pandemic. The threat of further spreading the virus, which would thrive in enclosed, crowded spaces like a movie theater, sparked a larger conversation about risking public health for the sake of entertainment.
Movie-goers weren’t impressed by the directors’ tantrum. In response to Nolan’s fixation on the “big screen,” YouTuber Bob Wulff put the entirety of Tenet on five — five! — Game Boy Advance cartridges so he could watch the spy thriller on a nearly 20-year-old console.
“So I got this idea when the whole meme was going around, about how much Christopher Nolan wanted to go to the theaters to see this movie,” Wulff said in the video. “You know, in the middle of a global pandemic, he said ‘This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen.’ So I immediately though, yes, exactly, we have to put this on a Game Boy immediately.”
The process was nearly as tortured and laborious as Tenet’s release, which was pushed back for months in hopes that American theaters would be able to safely reopen despite increasing COVID-19 cases. He cut the film into 30-minute sections to be able to fit it onto the 2001-era cartridges. None of the editing programs Wulff had were capable of converting the movie files into the .avi format needed for Game Boy cartridges, so he used a website that he said “looks like a scam.” He also exported the video into a widescreen format so it wouldn’t be cropped by the minuscule screen.
Wulff also had to balance the size of the video with the quality of the video, which proved to be a challenge.
“Since Tenet‘s a big boy, we had to sacrifice a lot of quality,” Wulff added. “So that’s how I got the movie Tenet onto five different Game Boy Advance cartridges just to have the absolute worst time watching it possible.”