Why do so many Christopher Nolan movies concern themselves with the concept of time? Almost every revered director has a signature theme or particular sub-genre they become renowned for, whether it's Martin Scorsese and gangsters, Alfred Hitchcock and suspense, or James Cameron and making tons of money. In the case of Christopher Nolan, the director regularly returns to time as his hallmark. Whether he's bending it, reversing it, breaking it or saving it, Nolan movies often bring some aspect of time manipulation to the table, which has contributed in no small way towards his reputation for head-scratching plots.

This influence can be seen as early as 2000's Memento, which interlaces color sequences (ordered in reverse) with black-and-white scenes playing out chronologically, thus giving the viewer a distorted sense of time - all because Guy Pearce's protagonist can't remember anything beyond the last 15 minutes. Though more to do with dreams, Inception includes a time-altering element of its own, where each dream layer runs incrementally faster than reality. Interstellar explores time dilation as it pertains to wormholes and space travel, and Dunkirk uses time to frame each of its three chapters. However, it's Tenet where Christopher Nolan really gets to mess with the timeline, introducing the mechanic of "inversion," which reverses the entropy of a person or object - time-travel but in real-time.

Related: Inception: How Long Cobb & Mal Spent In Limbo (In Real World Time)

Christopher Nolan obviously finds time a fascinating area to explore in film, and the director revealed exactly why in a 2020 interview with NPR, where he described time as "the most cinematic of subjects." During the conversation, Nolan points out that the medium of film is the sole method for we humble humans to experience time differently. In everyday life, time goes forward, and there's very little anyone can do about that with our current scientific knowledge. According to Nolan, however, the camera lets audiences experience "seeing time backwards, slowed down, sped up..." These comments elaborate upon Nolan's previous explanation from a 2018 AP interview. Here, the director pointed out how film audiences can sit in a theater for 2 hours and experience events over periods of hours, days or years, and playing with this overlooked phenomenon made for a rich vein of creativity.

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Christopher Nolan's obsession with time hits upon the very reason cinema is such an enduring art form. The best movie experiences speak to topics that audiences can relate to (and literally everyone can relate to time), while letting the viewer experience stories beyond the realms of reality, whether that be the high-octane antics of a secret agent, or an alien encounter. Nolan's recurring manipulations of time do both, taking the most universal of topics and depicting it in strange and impossible ways - moving backwards, aging rapidly, or living for decades inside a dream while mere minutes pass on the surface. This proves Nolan's point that time and cinema are natural bedfellows.

It's testament to Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker that despite a 20-year relationship with all things temporal, each of his timey-wimey efforts has offered a different flavor, subtle in some cases, deliberately obvious in others. Following is a noirish crime thriller that makes frequent use of time-jumps to play with the audience's perception, while Dunkirk contains a ticking countdown element to heighten the tense evacuation. One could watch both without even noticing how Nolan is toying with the clock. Conversely, Inception and Interstellar show the interpersonal consequences when two different people travel through time at different speeds - especially with Inception's Mal, who is so changed by her experience, she's unable to readjust to reality.

But it's through Tenet that Christopher Nolan finally takes his paradox preoccupation to its logical conclusion - the Temporal Pincer Movement. The entire closing sequence of Tenet is Memento on steroids, with one team of soldiers moving forwards as nature intended, and another coming back from the same mission just as the others arrive. 2 hours isn't really enough to do these lofty concepts justice, but you can feel Nolan scratching a long-held itch in every scene, as time becomes both a threat to humanity and its solution. Christopher Nolan wants his movies to give the audience a unique experience of time, and that's a goal he has achieved... time and time again.

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