Tenet is not a movie about time travel, according to director Christopher Nolan. With plot details about the upcoming being slim, there has been rampant speculation among fans that Tenet will dive into time travel, a hallmark of previous Nolan films. While Nolan is sitting in the director's for what looks to be another Summer blockbuster, the film will star John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki.
It's no secret that Nolan is obsessed with the idea of time, playing around with it in a myriad of ways in his films. In the 2000 thriller Memento, the main character has short-term memory loss that resets every 15 minutes. Time flies all over the place in 2010's Inception, which functions in people's lucid dreams. And time travel plays a critical role in 2014's science fiction space epic, Interstellar. While it appears the concept of time, and the manipulation of time, will play a role in the movie, time travel itself will not be the focus of the film.
In a recent interview with EW, Nolan insisted that "This film is not a time-travel film. It deals with time and the different ways in which time can function. Not to get into a physics lesson, but inversion is this idea of material that has had its entropy inverted, so it’s running backwards through time, relative to us." Even though Tenet isn't a time travel movie, the manipulation of time will still clearly play a role in the events of the film.
Fans are excited to see Tenet in theaters, but the film has slowly come to life amid the Coronavirus pandemic. Recently, the release date of Tenet was pushed back by two weeks, from July 17 to July 31. It will follow Disney's Mulan into theaters, hoping to help revive the struggling industry. Many movie theaters are reopening in July, meaning that Tenet will be one of the first new films fans will have an opportunity to see this Summer. Nolan likely wishes his film wouldn't have been affected by COVID-19, but the film may benefit from fans being eager to return to the cinemas.
The inversion idea has already been revealed through the original trailer for Tenet. In that trailer, John David Washington's character is seemingly able to catch bullets with his gun, aided by the inversion of time. The car crash sequence in the trailer seems to demonstrate the same concept. It's unclear how inversion is going to work throughout Tenet, but it will surely maintain the same emphasis on time that Nolan strives for in many of his films.
Source: EW
