Tenet: Everything we know about this Christopher Nolan film

Who is making it?

We know Nolan is producing the film with his wife Emma Thomas through their production company Syncopy. Warner Bros, Nolan’s studio of choice since 2005’s The Prestige, is the co-producer.

The creative team

Nolan has also penned Tenet’s screenplay. Ludwig Göransson is composing the music. Hans Zimmer, Nolan’s longtime collaborator, was unavailable since his talents were required for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Hoyte van Hoytema, who has worked with Nolan on Interstellar and Dunkirk before, has handled the camera. Jennifer Lame, whose recent credits include Marriage Story and Midsommar, is editing Tenet.

Who is in it?

Nolan’s ability to continuously churn out complex, big-budgeted movies that inevitably turn out to be blockbusters has led to actors lining up to work with him. The cast of his films is one of the best aspects of his movies. Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington, who rose to fame with Spike Lee’s darkly comic Oscar-winning drama BlacKkKlansman, is the leading man. Other names are Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, Michael Caine (a Nolan mainstay), Kenneth Branagh and our own Dimple Kapadia.

John David Washington and Robert Pattinson in a still from Tenet. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

What is it about?

Here is where it gets interesting, and weird. Frankly, we do not know for sure. Nolan likes to hold back information in not just trailers but also the movies and does not explain everything — instead, he trusts in the movie-goer’s intelligence to grasp whatever is happening and understand most of it, if not all. Tenet clearly deals with bending of time, but it is explicitly stated that it is not time-travel. It is inversion, which presumably means to reverse the flow of time.

How are they different? Well, I believe through a technology called Tenet, people do not “travel” through time, they back-pedal time itself. Time, we know, moves linearly, in a straight line. Tenet somehow changes that. John David Washington’s character is tasked with saving the world from World War III, and it is not Armageddon the world is facing, the promos say, but something worse.

Also Read | Tenet trailer: Christopher Nolan’s film ‘reverses the flow of time’

Exploring a concept that most people have not heard or imagined is nothing new to Nolan, who did that in movies like Inception and Interstellar. And Tenet’s “inversion” appears to be playing with time in a new way.

Release

Since Tenet is a Nolan movie, it will be released in IMAX, 35 mm, and 70 mm. When? The film is slated to be released on July 17, 2020, but few believe the film will see the light of day on that date since the pandemic is showing no sign of going away anytime soon. The movie will be pushed almost certainly.