Few people have put their life, their reputation, and also (sometimes) the lives of others on the line more stridently on behalf of the theatrical experience than Christopher Nolan, who was very insistent last year that his latest movie, Tenet, be released in theaters , even though a theater is, objectively, a pretty awful place to be if you’re trying to avoid breathing in another human’s lung crud. But Nolan insisted, lest the primacy of the movie theater experience be diminished…and then the primacy of the movie theater experience kind of got diminished anyway, because not a lot of people went out to see Tenet in theaters, because they didn’t want to die. (Also, the tepid Tenet response probably contributed to Warner Media’s decision to start releasing its blockbusters simultaneously on HBO Max, at which point the veins in Nolan’s head really started to bulge.)
Still, good news for Nolan (in a bad sort of way): It turns out that there’s actually a much worse way you can view films like Tenet than in a streaming window, and that much worse way is on the teensy tiny screen of Nintendo’s 20-year-old Game Boy Advance hardware. Which is exactly what content creator Bob Wulff has done in the above video, taking Nolan’s time travel action epic and jamming it onto 5 Game Boy Advance cartridges, then streaming it in all its 6 frames per second glory. (At least he’s running it on a GBA SP—god only knows how those crisp visual would look without the all-important backlight.)
To some extent, Wulff’s project sort of makes Nolan’s point for him, in that Tenet’s visual ambition can’t really achieve themselves on a screen the size of a bar coaster. On the other hand, watching it in this format won’t cause you to risk catching COVID, so, you know: Point to Team Spite.