Someone put Christopher Nolan's ‘Tenet’ on Game Boy Advance cartridges

Back in August, Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. released Nolan’s newest mentally tortuous genre entry, Tenet, in movie theaters nationwide. We don’t know if you remember, but things with the pandemic were still really, really shitty seven months ago. Nolan, though, if you weren’t already aware, is a film auteur, so he repeatedly expressed his fervent hope that audiences would ignore a deadly, once-in-a-century pandemic (then overseen by a deadly, once-in-a-century disaster of a President) to go see another of his confusing sci-fi movies with terrible audio on the biggest screen possible. Thankfully, it appears most people agreed with our assessment at the time that doing that would be a terrible idea.

But many still haven’t forgiven Nolan’s obliviousness, as evidenced by this recent video from YouTuber, Bob Wulff, who decided to compress the ever-loving-hell out of Tenet’s video file to fit onto a Game Boy Advance cartridge. Well, technically five cartridges, but the sentiment remains: fuck that guy.

Not as difficult as it sounds — As Wulff explains early in the video, you don’t actually need too much hardware to undertake this righteous endeavor: mainly just some writeable GBA cartridges and a device capable of flashing them. Oh, and as the YouTuber carefully explains, a “legally obtained” copy of Tenet from which to rip the video file. There’s a few editing programs you’ll also need for the project, which Wulff lays all out in the above tutorial, too. The key here is working around the Game Boy’s 20+ year-old hardware restrictions.

Creative cheat codes are necessary — Given the fact that Tenet clocks in at right under 2.5 hours (because of course it does), the file needed to be split across five separate GBA cartridges. (As Wulff explains, each one can hold only about 30-minutes of video while maintaining a decent amount of visual clarity). “Most Game Boy Advance ROMs are 16MB. These are 32MB each,” he says at one point, to give you some perspective. Anyway, after he “threw that shit into Media Encoder” along with a few other programs, what you (sorta) see is what you get: the entirety of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, albeit in one tiny, grainy, totally-not-what-he-would-want package.

“You know, now that I think about it, I still haven’t actually watched Tenet,” Wulff confesses near the end of the video, which you know what? Same. But, if we were ever going to subject ourselves to it, we think this five cartridge GBA version would be the way to go.