An Analysis of the Tenet and The Batman Trailers

What does this mean?

Think about it like this: most time travel stories involve traveling back and forth through a forward-moving reality. For example, the character goes back and forth between 1975 and 2020. Even though they are traveling to different years, time itself is still moving forward. In Tenet, though, time itself may actually be moving in reverse. How else would you explain someone falling upwards to the roof of a building? It’s a symmetrical mirror of our normal reality, everything is the exact opposite. It’s like if we had to walk backward to get to our destination.

The real question is, how can a story be told this way? Nevermind specific events in this plot; nobody knows much about that yet. But how can a story be told where time is completely in reverse? Will this movie be full of scenes with guns catching bullets instead of shooting them? Something tells me that Nolan will make it more nuanced. Maybe some scenes will have time moving forward, and others moving back. I have no idea, but I’m excited.

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Nolan’s track record

Here’s why I not only think the hype is warranted but why I think the film will actually surpass its lofty expectations. Nolan has a catalog of critically acclaimed dramas that experiment with time and nonlinear narratives. Memento, Inception, and Interstellar are examples of his movies that bend and contort the classic “beginning, middle, and end” narrative. Usually, the order of the scenes does not coincide with the order of events in the actual storyline. Memento may be the most similar to Tenet in the sense of things being in reverse. In that movie, the storyline is told in reverse, putting the audience in the same confused state as the main character is, who suffers from memory loss. The difference is that time itself wasn’t reversed in Memento, it was just how the narrative was presented.

Inception also has similarities in the sense of using alternate realities. In that movie, there are four different levels of reality: the real world, and then three levels of dreaming. Each level takes the character further away from the real world, making it a dangerous endeavor. However, the characters in Inception are able to decide for themselves if they want to go to the dream worlds. We don’t know if the Tenet characters are able to control time inversion, or if they’re involuntarily in a universe that operates that way. Either way, the point is that Nolan has experience in succeeding with these types of themes, and there’s no reason to believe why he won’t do it again.

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