Roundtable: Tenet (2020)

Tenet and the Return to the Cinema

Anton: Let’s start off with everyone’s first impression of the movie as well as the experience of returning to the cinema after nearly half a year. What did you think of Tenet? Is it one of Christopher Nolan’s better or worse films? And what was your experience of watching Tenet in a movie theatre in the age of COVID?

I’ll start. I enjoyed the movie a lot. It’s a big, brainy action movie and is very entertaining. I actually was happy about its long running time—roughly two and a half hours—given the compelling story as well as the experience of just being back in the cinema. It was weird, though, seeing a blockbuster like this on its opening Thursday in a mostly empty theatre. There being only a handful of audience members impacted the humour (there’s more laughter in a packed theatre) and even how the sound seemed to work in the theatre (but we can come back to that later in more detail).

Anders: I really dug the film, and the central conceits. But this isn’t a surprise, as I’ve enjoyed all of Nolan’s films to varying degrees, many of them a great deal. Yet, it seems like everytime Nolan releases a new film in the last few years it breeds some of the most irritating discourse, from both his fans and detractors, each convinced that the other camp are complete idiots; the pandemic certainly isn’t helping things this time. But to paraphrase what I said on Letterboxd regarding Tenet, you don’t have to like Christopher Nolan’s films as much as I do, but let’s just get something out of the way: its not simply a matter of those who don’t like Nolan’s films or Nolan’s films themselves being dumb. Either you’re interested in the ideas Nolan is exploring, which we’ll get to in a moment, or you’re not. I, for one, am very interested.

As for filmgoing in a pandemic, I understand some people in the United States are very concerned with people going back to the theatres, with legitimate reason as the rates of infection remain sky high. But Canada is not the USA. I felt the theatre was as safe as any other store or public place—ultimately very low risk. It was definitely odd to be in an almost empty theatre on the opening weekend of the film, and I agree with Anton that it does impact the communal experience to some degree, both in terms of shared social experience and also the physical experience. Regarding the aforementioned sound, I think some of it is the fact I haven’t been in a theatre in nearly six months, but man it was loud!

Aren: I like all of Nolan’s films a great deal—he’s probably my favourite blockbuster director working today—so it’s hard to rank his movies definitively. As well, I’ve seen all his other works several times and Tenet only once, so I can’t quite say whether it’s better than Inception or Batman Begins at the moment. I will say that I liked it a great deal and that I probably liked its time-inverting concept even more than the dream layers of Inception. Also, it was a nice return to the theatres after five months, even if it was surreal to watch a big-budget movie on a Friday with only a handful of other people in the audience. I also want to be clear that I never felt unsafe at the theatre. The theatre was so empty and the few people in the theatre so spaced out that it was far less uncomfortable than a typical visit to the grocery store, even if wearing a mask for two-and-a-half hours can feel a little cumbersome.

Anton: I also like all of Nolan’s films, and so it’s difficult to rank Tenet after only a single viewing. Right now, it’s probably middle of the pack for me.

The most obvious Nolan film for comparison is Inception, which I’ve actually admired more and more over time. In my view, the time-inversion conceit worked better after a single viewing than the shared dreaming conceit of Inception did. (I remember thinking Inception’s dreams were too real, not dreamlike enough. But I gradually realized that Inception is more about the nature of reality than dreams.) In any case, Inception and Tenet are something of a pair, in the sense that it’s Nolan’s return, after a decade, to a standalone action movie based on his own original idea. (Recall that Interstellar was conceived originally by his brother Jonathan for Spielberg.) Both are ultra-high-concept blockbusters that work within an established action genre: in Inception’s case, the heist movie, and in Tenet’s case, the espionage thriller. And both feature a cool ensemble-team cast in nice suits going through the usual action movie ropes: car chases, gun fights, fist fights, etc.

Anders: I was a huge fan of Inception when it came out, but Tenet might be even more up my alley on repeat viewings simply from the fact that I like spy thrillers like James Bond even more than heist films.

Anton: That’s saying a lot, since I think both you and Aren liked Inception far more than me in 2010. It was both yours and Aren’s top film of 2010, Anders.

Anders: Oh, I know.

Aren: Yeah, but 10 years is a long time. The Social Network would be my favourite film of that year were I to rerank it, but Inception still made it onto my list of the Top 50 Films of the Decade (at number 12). 

Tenet is absolutely connected to Inception, even if it’s not a sequel like some people mused it would be. It approaches its high-concept in the same manner, restricting context as much as possible and teaching the audience about the rules of the world at the same time that it teaches one of the characters. The difference I would say is that Tenet is actually more linked to something like Dunkirk or Memento in how the film’s structure explores its concepts around time than Inception. Inception’s high concept allows Nolan to create fantastical images of cities bending in on themselves and hallways revolving, but the concept of inhabiting dreams doesn’t bear out on the structure of the film to the degree that it does in some of his other works. It’s undoubtedly about time but not as explicitly as some of his other films. Tenet is narratively interested in time and so the themes are embedded in the way that Nolan presents the film structurally.

Tenet and Nolan’s Thematic and Formal Interests

Anders: We’ve already begun to explore this question with some of the comparisons we’ve suggested to other Nolan-directed films and genres, so let’s really delve into the question of how Tenet fits into Nolan’s overall body of work.

Anton: Let’s state the obvious first. Although Tenet contains its own surprises and variations, this is very much the kind of film we would expect from Nolan, more so than his last film, Dunkirk (which was Nolan’s first war movie and first straight historical film, although it still shares many features of Nolan’s body of work). 

In fact, Tenet is so much “A Christopher Nolan Film,” it will be interesting to see if David Bordwell feels compelled to incorporate Tenet into a future edition of his book, Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages. Tenet supports so many of Bordwell’s arguments about Nolan and his oeuvre, most particularly the idea that Nolan is conducting a formal, even experimental, project with his blockbusters. 

Anders: On the way home from the film, Anton, you’ll remember, I noted that Tenet further clarifies a thread woven through many of his films, more than just the themes related to “memory” or “trauma,” but larger than that. The common thread is, what is the human relationship to time? Memento is about how we remember, that is how do we retain (or not) information from the past to the present and subsequently a continuity of self? Inception is about the experience of time, its dilation or expansion and how it can shift and change in different states of mind. Interstellar is about how our position in space (in all aspects of the term) is shaped by time, that is to say it draws on the idea of gravity as a unifying variable of both space and time. With Tenet, it’s about the direction of time, how entropy has a singular direction.

Anton: Yes, clearly one of Nolan’s chief concerns is time, and how film manipulates our experience of it.

Anders: We can expand this shared thematic interest to his other films as well, especially how cinema can formally manipulate our relationship with time, with crosscutting and narrative layering as Nolan’s most notable interests, as we see in Dunkirk and in the Batman films and The Prestige. What makes his films particularly satisfying for those on his wavelength is how they simultaneously explore our experience of time thematically, and how cinema can manipulate or play with it. It’s a very classical unity of form and content.

Aren: It makes sense that Nolan would inevitably make a film like Tenet, which doesn’t explore time through the lens of memory, dreams, or gravity, but explicitly on its own terms. He takes time, which flows forward from our perspective, and presents a film where it can flow backwards simultaneously. In certain sequences, he forces us to comprehend the forward and the backward at the same time, which is difficult to follow in the moment, but extremely rewarding in how it gets us thinking about things we take for granted, such as our basic comprehension of how time works.

Anton: Interstellar and Tenet are both interesting variations on time-travel stories. Although neither tells a conventional time-travel narrative, involving going back in time or to the future in a basic sense (think The Terminator), they’re both interested in how time, as a dimension of reality, is manipulable and relative like other properties. Consequently, both films are invested in making us re-experience key sequences from earlier in the films, and they deploy the full resources of cinematic technique to convey different experiences of time, encouraging the audience to ponder the experience of time itself. Both also use cinematic technique and time to create some pretty kick-ass action sequences.

Nolan’s Development as a Director of Action

Anders: Some people don’t think Nolan’s films are particularly notable for their action, and can become a bit caught up in the chaotic quick-cutting style typical of our time, rather than the more coherent style typical of Hong Kong films, and more recently something like John Wick. 

Anton: Yes, Bordwell for one thinks that Nolan’s action storytelling is sometimes clumsy or inept, even if he admires other aspects of Nolan’s technique. Ebert’s former web editor, Jim Emerson, famously dunked on Nolan’s action scenes, particularly the semi-trailer chase scene in The Dark Knight.

Anders: But I think Tenet might be a step forward in his action filmmaking. The gunfights and car chases, because of the conceptual nature of the forward/backward time, are more clearly choreographed and have to be more precise. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have the same impact at certain instances (i.e. I’m being vague here to avoid explicit spoilers, but I think particularly of the return to the Oslo Freeport and the car chase in Tallinn).

Aren: I think you’re hitting on something that’s very true, but I’d say that the typical criticism about Nolan’s action filmmaking style tends to focus on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Inception marked a turning point in his approach. I’d now say that Tenet is another moment of improvement.

It’s too early to say whether Tenet is better than Inception as a high-concept action film, but the action is definitely better. I’ve rewatched all of Nolan’s films this summer and there are clear moments of progression in his action filmmaking. Inception was a big improvement over The Dark Knight, which came out only two years previous to it. (Say what you want, but it’s inarguable that The Dark Knight Rises has better action than The Dark Knight.) 

Anton: Can one of you briefly clarify what exactly is supposed to be bad or flawed about his early action sequences? Are we just talking about shaky-cam? Or a lack of visual coherence?

Anders: Some of it is that. I think that certain films, Batman Begins especially, rely on shaky-cam and fast cutting to disguise a fairly simple action set up. There isn’t that intricate choreography you’d see in The Matrix or something like Jackie Chan. But also, more importantly the complaint was that Nolan doesn’t retain spatial continuity in the cutting. Emerson’s complaint was that Nolan crosses the so-called 180º line in the Dark Knight chase scene, that is meant to help the audience stay oriented, so it’s never clear what side the van transporting the Joker is being attacked from or whether the characters are facing front or back in the van. 

Frankly, it’s a bit pedantic at times. It’s not like these are hard and fast rules. Spike Lee violates them for instance all the time, most recently in Da 5 Bloods, and I didn’t hear a lot of complaints about that. Nolan is more interested in creating an experience rather than reveling in the actual stunts. So, it might also be a case of people once again just being interested in different things.

Anton: Well, Nolan does seem to revel in using practical effects in his action sequences. When filming, Nolan tends to actually crash cars, semis, or airplanes (in the case of Tenet).

Aren: When I’m talking about flawed action scenes in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, I’m nitpicking, as they don’t have bad action. But they lack the coherence and finesse of some action in Nolan’s later films. They rely on editing to carry the action, instead of choreography. Part of this was a thematic choice, as Nolan is emphasizing Batman’s reliance on deception in his crime fighting, but the editing can be jumbled in moments. Once you get to Inception, Nolan is letting the camera breathe more and not cutting as quickly in the action scenes. Then in The Dark Knight Rises, he’s content to let us watch Bane and Batman fight without cutting too much, relying on choreography over editing.

In my estimation, Tenet marks another improvement, where the high concept doesn’t detract from the intricate choreography. Whether we’re talking the Tallinn car chase or the Oslo Freeport fight, there is some wonderfully simple, yet complicated action here, in that the action is satisfying and easy-to-follow in terms of physical actions, but the concept of the action sequence is mind boggling. Even the brief moment in the restaurant kitchen where the Protagonist beats the crap out of the cronies is nicely done.

Anton: We’ve already noted the Bond connections, but that restaurant kitchen fight is very much a Jason Bourne scene, with the Protagonist’s improvised use of a grater, or just the general punch-hard-and-trash-the-place feel of the scene.

Anders: Oh, man. When he hit that guy with the cheese grater I felt that viscerally. Great action filmmaking.

Also, Nolan’s films—and Tenet continues this trend—tap into the condition of “wonder.” He’s good at creating singular images that stick with us and kind of become significant “hooks” in the film. Think of the rotating hallway in Inception. In Tenet, it might be the idea of the bullets functionally being “caught” by guns as time runs in reverse.

Anton: The conjuring of wonder is perhaps an under-explored feature of Nolan’s works, especially his standalone high-concept blockbusters, namely, Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet.

I can point to specific moments in each of those films when I experienced those ambivalent feelings of wonder in response to certain moments of dialogue or visual spectacle. 

There’s that moment in Inception when they talk about how long time will be in the bottom layer of the big dream heist, and it’s 10 years, and you could feel the audience groan under the weight of time along with the characters. And then, similarly, in Interstellar, you felt the dread of time’s weight on the water planet. That sequence was also great at conveying the sublime when you realize the mountains are a gigantic wave coming on the horizon. Interestingly, both the moments I’ve highlighted are specifically about inducing wonder in relation to the film’s manipulation and presentation of time.

What about Tenet? Any moments of wonder for you guys? There was something pretty uncanny about the scene when you see Branagh’s villain, Sator, talking backwards and you start to realize the scale of inversion in the film.

Anders: The return to the fight at the Oslo Freeport has some remarkable choreography, and is uncanny. But I think the other thing I would point to is the larger scale of the film: Tenet takes some of what Nolan learned in Dunkirk and applies it here. You mentioned the weight of time that is conveyed in both Inception and Interstellar, that successfully lends them this massive feeling of the sublime you mention. 

But, while I love those films and their conceptual scale, I don’t think Nolan has ever staged battles on the scale of the final “temporal pincer” move — Dunkirk, for being a war film, isn’t really about combat — the large squadrons of red and blue teams moving in different directions in time, I found it exhilarating. There is one scene that has played in a few of the trailers of a building “un-exploding” on the bottom, only to have a rocket blow the top of the building off after it is made whole for a second. It’s a stunning visual effect that leaves your brain kind of fascinated, almost like a kinetic version of the Escher-like constructions that Nolan created in Inception.

Anton: Can I note that the red and blue teams and the setting, in a deserted city, really evoked the video game Halo for me?

Anders: Absolutely!

Aren: I’m drawn to that hallway fight in the Oslo Freeport. It’s such a complex concept but executed so well. In essence, it’s just a simple brawl, but it’s complicated because the one combatant is moving forward in time while the other is moving backwards in time. They’re interacting, but each combatant’s experience of that interaction is completely different. The fact that we return to that scene makes it doubly exciting, but even the first time around, I thought the fight was awesome.

Anton: I thought that fight was gripping but it was almost hard to understand, not for cinematography or editing, but for seeing body movements in different temporal directions.

Anders: Yes, it’s not that it’s poorly done, absolutely the opposite, but it’s literally hard to wrap one’s mind around it!

Aren: Also, Anton, to your point about moments of wonder and awe, I had one of those in that Branagh scene you mention, where my brain finally caught up to what Nolan was doing with the time concept. I then got excited about the possibilities of what was to come and Nolan didn’t disappoint with how he inverted the film on itself and really satisfied the earlier promise. I also think the temporal pincer of the ending is pretty startling. Just thinking about it makes me kind of excited because it’s so ambitious, making parallel editing a part of the actual time-space of the film’s narrative.

Possible Issues with the Sound Mix

Aren: We also need to address the possible sound issues. Many people online are commenting that the sound mix in Tenet is impossible to hear at times, similar to complaints about Bane’s voice in The Dark Knight Rises and lots of the dialogue in Interstellar. While I disagree that it’s an issue with the mix, I do admit that parts of the film were hard to understand. One aspect of this is that characters are often wearing masks in the film, which makes for muffled dialogue. 

But I think the more likely culprit is that the theatres are not calibrating the audio levels properly. For one, there are fewer people in the theatre to absorb the sound, so they ought to be playing the movie at a lower volume. Also, it seems like theatres love to crank up the bass while ignoring the rest of the audio. You get the booms, but subtler moments like dialogue can get lost in the mix.

Anton: I found the dialogue hard to discern at times, but I would point out that for all of the claims about bad sound mixing that you note above, I have had no trouble listening to those very scenes and films when watching them at home on Blu-ray. It’s only in the theatres that I have had problems. I do believe that some movie theatres turn up the bass and rumble, thinking it adds to the overall effect, but it actually messes with the mix.

Anders: Yes, it’s likely a combination of the actual design of the film—masks and layered or quickly spoken dialogue—and the theatres messing up the mix—wanting to pump up the bass and not calibrating for the lack of bodies in the theatre.

But like Anton says, I’ve never had an issue hearing things at home, even if the mix on the Inception Blu-ray blasts the glass in your windows out if you aren’t careful.

Sator Square and Cinematic Influences

Aren: Nolan clearly has an interest in esoteric history, such as the Sator Square, which is a palindromic word square from the ancient world that was found throughout the Roman Empire, most notably in Pompeii (which is mentioned in the movie). The square features three words written forwards and backwards that spell out words in each column and row. These words are: “sator”, which is the name of Branagh’s antagonist; “arepo,” which is the name of the art dealer that provided Kat with the forged painting (whom we never meet); and “tenet,” which is the title of the movie and the palindrome within the centre of the word square. But “arepo” is also “opera” backwards, which is the setting of the opening scene in the film, and “sator” is “rotas” as is “rotating,” which connects to Sator being the key figure that rotates between the forces of the past and present; he’s the temporal hinge. So clearly Nolan is fascinated with the mysterious history of this ancient word square and used its words to formulate key elements of his story. I kind of love how much of a nerd he is in this historical approach to screenwriting.

Anton: Sator not only is a pivotal figure, a point of rotation between the two directions of time, but I also believe he’s the first person we literally see rotate in the device that inverts an object in time.

Aren: We see the combatant in the Oslo Freeport before that scene with Sator, but it’s true that we don’t get the full rotation until Sator in Tallinn.

Anton: You’re right. But we don’t entirely know what we are watching in that Oslo Freeport scene (the first time around that is).

Anders: Since you pointed out the Sator Square to me on the weekend, I’ve been puzzling over it and what it means. It’s very clever, but I’ve been trying to think if it’s anything more. It seems to suggest to me that the pondering of the nature of time, via the written word that, at least in the West, is sequential but also reversible. It suggests the almost magical connotations of the Sator Square, that is only realized in the unspecified future in which the time inversion technology is developed.

Aren: Yes, historically the Sator Square helps us comprehend how direction informs narrative, as the words on the square imply different stories depending on the direction we read them. It was also apparently used in magical rituals throughout history.

Anton: I think the square also has significance when we talk about linearity. Language, like film, and most every human endeavour, is perceived in a linear fashion. But palindromes, such as the words in the Sator Square, indicate how, for example, reading left to right or top to bottom is just one way of perceiving language, which suggests that on a larger level different directions of perception might be possible.

Anders: Also, it anchors the film in a larger picture of human history than just our contemporary moment. The film goes out of its way to say that the stakes are not for just one nation, it “exceeds national interest,” as the scientist mentions to the Protagonist in an early scene. But the stakes are also not temporally limited. It affects everything.

As far as cinematic influences, I think we may have mentioned in the past, but Nolan is clearly influenced by conceptual art films like Alain Renais, and shares some of his thematic interests. There’s more than a touch of Je t’aime, je t’aime in Tenet, with its time travel conceit.

Also, this is even more of a “Bond film” than Inception. The Protagonist is literally a secret agent.

Aren: It’s definitely a Bond film. Branagh’s Sator is a Blofeld-level archvillain and the Protagonist is literally saving the world with his mission. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

I also couldn’t help but see a Primer influence throughout the film. Obviously, there’s the inversion of Memento’s structure, but Primer has the constant inversion upon itself with the time travel mechanics. This film copies that.

Anders: Yes, exactly, particularly the idea that the “time travel” doesn’t happen instantaneously, and the shipping crates are like larger versions of the boxes from Primer. What it means is that in each film, plans have to be set in motion on a much larger frame of scale, and characters might be following the schemes of figures who they scarcely perceive. I thought the end of Tenet very nicely gestured toward some really cool temporal scale.

The All-Star Cast

Anton: I think it’s interesting how the first teaser trailer was actually engaging these concepts of time, but that the marketing team was savvy enough to sort of use the tag lines to tap into other contemporary concerns, such as representation in film. “Time has come for a new protagonist.” That means something else once we’ve seen the film, but when I first saw the teaser, I couldn’t help but think of Nolan having a black lead actor in the main role, among other things. But the film’s main concern is actually not issues of identity but rather the direction the Protagonist is travelling through time!

Aren: It’s no surprise at this point that Nolan has assembled a massive cast to round out the film. John David Washington stars as the Protagonist, Robert Pattinson plays his partner Neil, Kenneth Branagh is the arms dealer villain, Sator, and Elizabeth Debicki is his estranged wife Kat. Michael Caine shows up as a British Intelligence officer, Aaron Taylor Johnson appears midway through as an army operator while Yesterday’s Himesh Patel is another spy used by Washington and Pattinson. It’s a big cast of stars, with only Branagh and Caine actors who’ve worked with Nolan before.

John David Washington is a savvy casting in the lead role. Apparently, Nolan was impressed by his performance in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and cast him because of it. It makes sense because that film highlights Washington’s charisma and knack for banter, which is essential to making the Protagonist likeable. As you can tell from the character’s name, there’s no backstory to Washington’s character and no personal details. We know that he’s American and has presumably worked for the CIA and that’s it. So Washington has to make us like and care about him without having the script do any work. And I think he pulls it off. He’s got his father’s charisma, but he also brings his own suave energy to the role. He works as a kind of James Bond figure.

Anton: Washington is so good, I hope he becomes a big star.

Anders: Absolutely. Washington and Pattinson inject these characters who could be, or are literally in the case of the Protagonist, nameless ciphers with personality, character and charm. We care about them. Washington is also able to add some humour in what would otherwise be a very blank role: honestly, how many of these kinds of movies, that involve the initiation of a character into a new reality, basically have the characters as kind of blanks. Here, Washington gets that his character is a kind of James Bond, he’s kind of having fun even as the stakes are frighteningly high.

Also, Robert Pattinson has a great rapport with Washington, acting as the perfect sidekick, even as he reveals that he knows far more than he’s actually letting on. Pattinson does it with a grin.

Aren: Can I just say that I also like that the Protagonist isn’t motivated by trauma? Almost every action movie hero nowadays has a tortured past that informs all their actions (as I briefly discussed in my Extraction review). Nolan has contributed to this trope in past films. I enjoy the refreshing change of pace of having a movie motivate me to cheer for a hero without manipulating my sympathy for those that suffer.

Anton: I was pleased. Nolan in particular has a history of having his main male protagonists motivated by deep trauma (recall Cobb or Bruce Wayne, to name only two), so it was almost a relief to have the Protagonist possess other motivations. That said, the Protagonist sort of latches onto Kat’s trauma and tries to save her from her terrible domestic situation, so Nolan still has a thing for personal tragedy with his characters.

Aren: Yes, Kat has the tragic past and complicated personal situation that fuels the emotional motivation in the film. She occupies the role that Cobb does in Inception, for instance.

Nolan’s Shadowy Corporate Dystopia

Anton: Maybe the last topic we have time for is something that Tenet really brought to the foreground of Nolan’s work. It’s Nolan’s vision of the world, particularly in Inception and Tenet, but there are also elements of it in the Dark Knight Trilogy and his other films. Nolan’s films depict a world that is very international and globalized but also almost dystopian in its vision of a global order dominated by multinational corporations operating on the edges of law. One reference point for me is actually the video game, Perfect Dark. But this depiction of the world is there in the Hong Kong scenes in The Dark Knight as well. Think of the way that the Protagonist serves in a Cold War that is operating beyond or above national lines. In Inception, the team is hired by corporations to steal IP from their competitors and they travel around the globe. And it comes up in Nolan’s subtle use of international casting, which we’ve discussed above.

Aren: I like your comparison to Perfect Dark and that fits. Remember, Nolan is hugely influenced by Bond and so his vision of the world is kind of a modern-day version of the dynamic between MI6 and SPECTRE, a secret national organization and a rogue terrorist organization vying for control in the shadows. It’s no accident that the Daniel Craig Bond films ripped off Nolan’s style and applied it back to the James Bond 007 series itself.

Anton: The obvious outlier is Dunkirk, which is a national anthem type of movie in part, without being jingoistic. But Dunkirk is also depicting a real historical event.

Anders: Yes. I don’t remember if we got into this in our Dunkirk discussion in 2017, but I would go so far as to say that Dunkirk is almost one of the few “anti-war” films in its structure and narrative focus, but I digress.

Anton: The movie could be patriotic while still being anti-war.

What also intrigues me is that Nolan’s vision of the world seems pretty cynical and dystopian and yet the heroes are often idealists in some way, with a personal loyalty to family or to an idea that becomes the order for them that the external world seems to lack.

Anders: I think what’s interesting in Tenet is that it connects the condition of being beyond national interest to both the good and the bad. The people fighting to protect existence are, as I mentioned before, beyond “national interest,” but so is Sator. But of course, Sator is a product of history too, of the downfall of the Soviet state and unrestrained capitalist power grab that followed its fall. It’s even mentioned in the film, that he just happened to be there at the right time in the right place.

So, the structure of the film and its narrative is not just incidentally global or even bigger. Nolan weaves stateless spaces and times into the film, such as the key role of the Freeport (I didn’t really understand what these special free trade zones were until I was reading about them after the film, but they are real and essentially a massive tax break for the rich).

But the film’s not about either bashing corporations or lusting after the beautiful life of the elites lounging on the Amalfi Coast. It’s about an idea that goes beyond even our own time period, stakes that ripple forward and backward in time.

Tenet (2020, UK/USA)

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan; starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Himesh Patel, Martin Donovan, Clémence Poésy, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh.