Month: September 2020

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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 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."

Enlarge / By notifying hacking victims sooner and at higher levels, the FBI hopes to avert another high-impact communications breakdown. (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

On April 28, 2016, an IT tech staffer for the Democratic National Committee named Yared Tamene made a sickening discovery: A notorious Russian hacker group known as Fancy Bear had penetrated a DNC server "at the heart of the network," as he would later tell the US Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence. By this point the intruders already had the ability, he said, to delete, alter, or steal data from the network at will. And somehow this breach had come as a terrible surprise—despite an FBI agent's warning to Tamene of potential Russian hacking over a series of phone calls that had begun fully nine months earlier.

The FBI agent's warnings had "never used alarming language," Tamene would tell the Senate committee, and never reached higher than the DNC's IT director, who dismissed them after a cursory search of the network for signs of foul play. That miscommunication would result in the success of the Kremlin-sponsored hack-and-leak operation that would ultimately contribute to the election of Donald Trump.