So after doing many videos on Christopher Nolan's TENET since the film's release and
after gaining some key insights into his filmmaking life with the Nolan
Variations, I wanted to do an analysis of how TENET is the pinnacle of Nolan's filmmaking
ideas, themes and overall fears.
As most of you know, I really enjoyed his latest film and after many rewatches, TENET
continues to get better and better from my own perspective.
In this video, I'm going to be discussing the reasons
why TENET is the culmination of Christopher Nolan's early filmography, and why seeing
the director go from his earlier work to now, is something that became highly intriguing
while rewatching the film.
This video will contain brief spoilers, so if you do happen to be someone who hasn't
seen TENET, then I would recommend watching this video afterwards.
If you want to see more on the film including videos on the Nolan Variations book that I
am currently covering, then don't forget to subscribe to the channel and turn on your
notifications.
Also, if you enjoy this video remember to give it a like rating.
But without further ado, let's dive into why Christopher Nolan's TENET is the pinnacle
of the director's early films.
So director Christopher Nolan has spoken in many interviews for TENET, and in particular,
he's mentioned how the idea of the film came about.
He's talked about how the film's inverted format was developed after
Memento, Nolan’s neo-noir about memory and self-deception, which even began with footage
in reverse and a bullet re-entering a gun, which Nolan claims was the genesis of this
“time inversion” concept.
But along with that of presenting inversion, these ideas came about through genuine fears
of the future.
Just like Memento's structure, TENET's arrangement forces the audience to work out the relationship
events, as we witness effect before cause, and slowly reorient our interpretation of
the story.
But Tenet also does this, both as a physical concept through the directionality of time
as we perceive it and as a thematic message about the consequences of the things that
happen surrounding time.
This theme manifests in both the individual decisions made in the film and also through
the summary of human action and its long-lasting effects.
In Nolan's previous film, Interstellar, we watch as humanity rescues itself from a dying
Earth thanks to the actions of our descendants, who have evolved beyond the dimensions of
time.
However, in Tenet, we get a thematic reverse to the events of that film, as the plot is
revealed to be based around our descendants’ anger at the world we ruined.
Unlike Interstellar, TENET applies a more textural approach in favour of a spy genre
and elements that we've seen develop in Nolan's films over the years, through
action, thriller and many more genres.
This is because of our perspective when it comes to the protagonist, a man of duty but
also of emotional attachment to the people around him, even if he's explicitly
connected to them.
Neil's mainline in the film, perfectly summarises this approach, when he says, “What’s happened,
happened…
It’s not an excuse to do nothing”.
The threat is more invisible than in Interstellar and some of Nolan's other work, where Anglo-Russian
oligarch Andrei Sator hopes to cause “the end of
the world” by sending a doomsday device back to the future from which it came — a
future we never see.
The film’s climax is also infused with devastating urgency, thanks to the use of another dramatic
tool that Nolan likes to use, which is the illusion of two events happening at the same
time.
Many of Nolan’s films depend on this by using cross-cutting.
They feature multiple scenes and timelines which overlap at their most emotionally charged,
sending either metaphorical effects through time or literal effects through reality, like
when “kicks” sent characters through dream layers in inception.
This illusion is given form in Tenet’s larger premise.
Sator, who acts as a broker between present and future, buries containers and transmits
their location, with generations coming and people in the future finding those containers
and sending “inverted” materials back in time.
The journey taken by these materials lasts centuries or even millenniums each way, but
for the senders and recipients at either end, the effect is instant.
The film’s climax even structures fully around this idea, with the Protagonist and
his team attempting to stop a device known as “the algorithm” from being buried and
discovered in the distant future.
Should they fail in this moment, someone would activate the device generations from now and
turn time itself in the opposite direction, destroying our present as we know it.
The result, in theory, would feel instant and as Priya mentions, the present-to-future
part of this undertaking is a naturally occurring phenomenon, so normal that we don't recognize
it.
Like she says earlier in the film, “E-mails, credit cards, texts.
Anything that goes into the record speaks directly to the future".
This is a recognisable fear explored in both Interstellar
and Tenet, with the question being, "can the future speak back?”
This builds on the fear that Nolan ultimately has,
which is, How will we be judged years and years from now, and what if we could be made
known to that consequence?
Interstellar explores the greater optimism towards
these ideas of the future, whereas Tenet is about retribution, and anxieties travelling
back at us from a future time.
We get this literally and metaphorically, and the way Nolan has explored time in all
of his other films in similar and different ways has all lead to this fear of the future
that he claims to have in interviews for TENET.
Even when the concepts are less involved in particular scenes like when Sator’s wife
Kat tells the Protagonist about her husband’s freeport, and he re-explains this to his partner
Neil, we get a thematic bridge.
In effect, it feels like a conversation between Kat and Neil, two characters who are yet to
meet with the present communicating with the future, which is placed thematically into
the film’s dialogue.
Like so many other of Nolan's films, scenes like this portray cause-and-effect,
separated by time, but ones that unfold side by side.
At this point, Tenet is still linear in its progression, but as the film goes on, it loops
back onto itself and becomes a story where cause-and-effect are now inverted, both in
a practical and a thematic sense.
Nolan essentially embedded the concepts that he has been touching
upon in his other work into the whole structure of TENET'S narrative and structural themes.
This is why he said that the film has taken over two decades to make
because this idea has only been build upon as the years have passed, during which he
has made other classic films involving time.
Now while, at this current point, I don't think TENET is Nolan's best film in
terms of quality, I do think it is the pinnacle of his ideas and one which only grows through
these bold ideas on rewatch.
Every time I watch the film, I find myself loving it even more and the perspective changes
every time.
Not just through noticing something I didn't see before, but
through a character's perspective within the situation at play.
So alongside Nolan's fears of the future, the next point is about how he chooses to
play with the idea of perspective.
In the Nolan Variations book which I've been reading, Nolan clearly identifies a love for
shifting the perspective of the audience and watching this through the camera and the way
it is used, Nolan has been making non-linear films since his very first feature, Following,
but then in Memento, he deals directly with how people perceive the effects of time.
In the film, Leonard Shelby can’t recover from the death
of his wife, since his amnesia has left him unable to feel time’s passage.
Other Nolan films like Dunkirk explore differing perceptions of time through different experiences,
while Interstellar and Inception expand on Memento’s idea about trying to change one’s
view of the past, with characters attempting to enter memories and events which have already
occurred, in order to change their outcomes.
Like Nolan says in the variations book and in the
secrets of Tenet art book, Time, as imprinted on celluloid, is a way for the filmmaker to
go deep into the concept as it is embedded within the medium of film.
The camera can be used to mislead the audience
and cut downtime into how the filmmaker wants his or her story to be shown.
It's something that Nolan’s characters have always attempted to gaze upon and alter in
a very distinct way, and it's as if the director was twisting a reel of film around to present
conflicting scenes.
Film is all about time and Nolan uses this concept
as the formula with which he can work with and in TENET, we literally get the director
making this as the plot.
And the plot is all about challenging the perspective
through time.
Tenet runs shot film forwards and backwards through a projector at once, so that past
and future might meet in the middle, and so that cause and effect might be perceived in
opposite directions.
As Clemence Poésy’s scientist explains, no matter which way she plays the video of
the Protagonist “dropping” or “catching” the bullet, he’s the one who made it happen.
The process of trying to comprehend this new perspective becomes part of the drama and
part of the Protagonist’s mission, whether he’s navigating the inverted physics of
a car, or trying not to kill himself in the past while avoiding being killed in the present.
It's all about the situation at play and The protagonist guides you through that, as the
plot is bigger than any one sole character in the
narrative.
This is where I think people who watch TENET become lost in what the film is actually getting
at.
I did a whole video essay a while back on the protagonist
being the audience and this something that I recommend watching to get more details on.
But to dive into how TENET uses the protagonist as an audience viewpoint, it's very important
when discussing how the film uses perspective.
The Protagonist, after some mysterious help from the future saves
the audience from bombs planted beneath their feet and creates the Protagonist’s guilt
over failing to protect his team.
After taking a pill to try and save them, we see that later in the film, his failure
to protect Kat after putting her in harm’s way drives him to turn back the clock.
First, he travels back through the Tallinn chase to stop her from being shot, and failing
that, he attempts to stop Priya from sending him on his mission at all, also to protect
Kat from becoming the death of the incident.
When Ives and his team of time-travelling soldiers arrive to explain the plot mechanics,
the only “rule” The protagonist doesn’t readily accept is “What’s happened, happened.”
Like Nolan's other characters in other films, the Protagonist spends a good amount of TENET
attempting to change past events in order to relieve his guilt.
As much as Tenet is about entropy and the chaos of the universe and sending a character
into the journey of this, it’s also about the chaos
of humanity, and our tendency to cause harm.
The film asks the audience the question of Can we undo this?
In a physical sense, we can if we begin to reverse
its effects, but can this be applied to humans?
The inversion of time may be able to fix something that's broken, but the Protagonist's problems
engrain in his soul?
No matter which way the Protagonist is able to perceive time as we see in the film, he’s
also burdened with the consequences of decisions he’s already made.
Despite being freed from the limits of perception, and the audience is directly placed in his
shoes during these events, he still has to live with own his choices.
The ending of the film gives us a very realistic answer to this but showing us that he can
only make up for his choices moving forward, even if he still suffers with the guilt of
them.
All of Nolan's films focus on the guilt of decisions by the main protagonists and Nolan
has essentially taken this primal element of his
early filmography and launched it into an entire narrative about the fears of the future,
the perspective of time within that, and a protagonist who we can witness
the events through.
As summarised by the final war sequence, TENET is a film that conditions audiences to reorient
the way they see things.
Tenet is different in that it is a sensory experience through detailed artistry, with
each and every moving piece aimed at the time through maximum effect and at forcing reinterpretation
of itself.
Right from its pulsating opening sequence, the IMAX format that Nolan uses presents movement
that increases with characters through backward and forward motion.
It's an experience of cinema that uses the lens as a look on time, which is what the
film camera is, to begin with.
TENET challenges this and brings us an action journey that is so unique yet also one which
pays homage to what we love about film, to begin with.
It's Nolan's pinnacle of his early filmography, through obsessions,
themes and filmmaking.
But let me know down below what your thoughts were towards Tenet and what you think about
the ideas it portrays, which have been expanded by Nolan throughout his films so far.
For more videos on TENET and the work of Christopher Nolan, then don't forget to subscribe to the
channel and turn on your notifications.
Also if you enjoyed this video remember to leave a like rating.
Just to let you know, I will be continuing my Nolan Variations Series in the next few
weeks, so make sure to keep a lookout for whenever I post.
But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.