Why Tenet is one of the most exciting and moving blockbusters of the 21st century

Christopher Nolan is a pretty big deal in the blockbuster scene and an important figure culturally, especially since Oppenheimer. Despite this, there is one film that is fairly under appreciated. To me, it is one of the most exciting and cinematically innovative blockbusters of modern cinema. That film is Tenet, Nolan’s infamously complex $200 million sci-fi action spy odyssey. A film that flips our understanding of time to deliver a vastly entertaining, ginormous action spectacle and a philosophical, moving exploration of the power of human will. It is the film I defend the hardest of those I feel are under-loved.

On its release, many wrote Tenet off as too hard to follow and one of Nolan’s lesser efforts. I was also fairly lost by the third act on my first watch, but I left the screen with this unshakeable feeling of having seen something that radically altered my understanding of time itself. Nolan has always been fascinated with time, but this was the most he had come face-to-face with it. I loved Tenet for how it totally shifted my understanding of time as an abstract but human concept; my appreciation has grown much deeper since.

Tenet understands our relationship to time as mortal beings in a way not many other films do. Time is simply a word we invented to conceptualise the forward flow of events we experience as we move through each day. Our understanding of everything in this world is in some way tethered to the perceived forward flow of time. We understand ourselves through time, we understand the things happening around us through time. Humans do not exist without time. What was so exciting about cinema as a medium when it was first born was that it suddenly gave us the ability to experience time outside of ourselves, allowing us to see the flow of time from a new perspective. The camera is inanimate and thus does not experience the flow of time in the way us subjective human beings do. It captures an objective image of a section of time, allowing us to escape our own current section of time to immerse ourselves in another. If the camera captures an objective image of the forward motion of time, we quickly realised that it also allowed us to see time in an entirely new way. Backwards.

Time is only understood visually as we see the world move forward in front of us, and cinema visualises time in a way no other art form can express.

How does this link to Tenet then? Tenet follows The Protagonist, an unnamed special agent who uncovers a plot that threatens to destroy the world. This plot revolves around the concept of inversion, being that humans have found a way to invert the entropy of objects (essentially meaning their direction of flow through time) and send them moving backwards in time. The Protagonist soon encounters human beings that have been inverted, moving backwards in his perspective but forward in their own. It is a bafflingly hard concept to understand on paper, but that is where the root of Tenet’s cinematic genius lies. Time is only understood visually as we see the world move forward in front of us, and cinema visualises time in a way no other art form can express. If our normal understanding of time is an innately visual concept, then reversing this can only be understood visually. It is impossible to re-wire your brain’s understanding of time for one single movie, so early on Nolan makes an absolutely clear point about how to approach the film. The scientist explaining the concept of inversion to The Protagonist tells him ‘Don’t try to understand it. Feel it’. I was lucky enough to see the film in February 2024 with an in-person introduction by Nolan himself, and of all the ways he could have set up his film, he chose to echo this line of dialogue. If you do not abide by it, you are unlikely to experience its truth anywhere near the level you are supposed to.

The concept of people not going back in time but moving backwards through time, is astonishingly new, taking advantage of the camera’s inherently objective understanding of time to tell a story we have never seen before. Nolan’s films often revolve around mind-bending sci-fi concepts, but none of them have ever been quite so inherently visual as inversion. It cannot be verbally explained in the way Inception or Interstellar’s scientifically rooted concepts can. It has to be seen to be understood and most seem to struggle to word the fact that they understand it, myself included. Because we understand the forward flow of time so well, it makes sense that we can on some level understand the polar opposite of that. It makes sense on some inherent level because we are inescapably time-bound beings.

Tenet’s master stroke is at the halfway point. Having experienced everything moving forward until then, The Protagonist inverts himself in an attempt to undo a mistake he made in a car chase just before. We see inversion through his eyes for the first time, and through ours. We quickly understand that while inverted objects are moving against time, they still experience their backwards movement as the same forward flow we experience everyday. The world around the inverted now seems backwards, but their minds function as though still moving forwards. No matter what, we will always experience time as a forward motion.

This is where the film’s examination of the universe and our relationship to time comes in. On his mission against Andrei Sator, the antagonist seeking to build a device that will invert the entire world, The Protagonist comes into contact with two crucial figures. The first is Kat, Sator’s wife, who allies with the protagonist in the hopes of escaping her abusive marriage and keeping her son safe. Kat is the only element of the film I would criticise as Nolan’s recurring difficulty with writing fully-fleshed out women becomes very visible. The other key figure is that of Neil, a mysterious agent who joins The Protagonist early on but always seems to be one step ahead in his understanding of events. With the end of the world on the line, these three figures form intense bonds that only grow stronger as they become each other’s only hope.

When The Protagonist first inverts himself, he goes back into the car chase he previously experienced forwards to prevent himself from accidentally giving a crucial plot device over to Sator. He finds that even inverted he still aids this very event, because it has already happened in the forwards flow of time. He saw this event happen forwards, so by going backwards through this flow of previous events that are now set in time, he ensures it happens by being there to facilitate it as both a forwards and backwards moving agent. After this, a line oft repeated by Neil becomes much clearer in its meaning. ‘What’s happened’s happened’ he says, extending this phrase at the film’s end to say ‘which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, not an excuse to do nothing.’ What has happened in The Protagonist’s forward experience of time will also happen in his backwards experience. There is nothing you can do to change what has happened in time.

It is the experience of eventually coming to understand inversion alongside The Protagonist that is precisely how the film teaches you its message that there is nothing we can do to stop or change time.

A big part of why I have kept coming back to Tenet is that the experience of keeping up with its narrative is so complex that every time feels like the first watch. You are not supposed to perfectly join every dot in the moment (save that for later) but you are supposed to feel its flow so that the film can make its ultimate point. It is the experience of eventually coming to understand inversion alongside The Protagonist that is precisely how the film teaches you its message that there is nothing we can do to stop or change time.

If this sentiment seems nihilistic, Nolan inverts it to make an incredibly hopeful statement. We come to learn that Neil has in fact been sent back in time by The Protagonist’s future self to assist in stopping Sator’s plan, but this also requires him to die in the final battle to enable our Protagonist’s success. Neil and a teary-eyed Protagonist say goodbye to each other as Neil accepts that he must invert himself once more to move towards his death, otherwise he would never have been there in The Protagonist’s forward flow to help him save the world. What has happened already in The Protagonist’s time will indeed happen, and in effect has already happened, in Neil’s flow of time. Neil must die and The Protagonist must live on.

Why do we care for anything other than to enjoy the time we have with the people and things that make us happy?

To me, Nolan’s ultimate point is that if we are indeed powerless to escape ‘the mechanics of the world’ then we must accept these mechanics and fight with everything we have to make the best of our time. Humans are time-bound beings unable to escape our perception of time’s forward flow. We cannot transcend this basic fact but that is not ‘an excuse to do nothing’. The Protagonist learns this in the same way we do, and chooses to fight for the people he loves. Love is nothing but human beings pushing back against time’s inevitable marching towards an end, so as to exist beyond time’s reach with the person they care for. This is what The Protagonist fights for, regardless of whether he loves Kat or Neil platonically or romantically. Why do we care for anything other than to enjoy the time we have with the people and things that make us happy? Tenet reminds us that there is nothing we can do to escape what always feels like our little time on earth, but that there is so much humanity and hope in fighting to do something good with every second we get to spend here.

It is an incredibly complex, hopeful message, one that the film most fully communicates at its close once the mission is over and the viewer can see the larger picture of events as clearly as The Protagonist finally does. Only by seeing the world in a way that seems to break out of our conventional experience of time can we see that there is still nothing we can do to transcend it. The most human thing we can do is try anyway. Tenet is an insane thrill ride, accompanied by a deliriously loud, endlessly entertaining musical score, and action scenes so bonkers and large you can never take your eyes off them. Within these blockbuster trappings, Tenet manages to bring us closer to the essence of cinema as a time-bound medium whilst reminding us of just how much humanity there is in our subservience to time.