CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

dizzyingly high stakes. He’s inducted into a mission after seemingly passing a test of bravery, with the aim of “trying to prevent World War 3”, with an outcome worse than a nuclear holocaust. The trailer also hints at some kind of time-travel or time-distortion elements: a boat goes backwards over waves, a car is flipped on to its roof before it bounces back to its wheels and continues driving in reverse, Washington is seen surveying a bullet-sprayed scene, before announcing that whatever happened here, “hasn’t happened yet”.

Then there was a prologue that played with IMAX screenings of Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker. In that scene, Washington is called in with a mystery team when an Eastern European opera house is stormed by terrorists. If you were lucky enough to catch the prologue, you’ll probably be left with more questions than answers. You get a sense of the tension and scope, without having much idea what’s going on.

Nolan had previously called Tenet, “No question… the most ambitious film we’ve made.” Filmed across seven countries, it boasts a huge international cast and large-scale action set-pieces. “It’s a film of great ambition and great scale that takes a genre, namely the spy no sense a re-tread. But I think that there are elements of Memento. I think the obvious film I would compare it to is Inception, because it is a similarly globetrotting, mind-bending, huge… spectacular. But I read a bunch of stuff early on when people were speculating about what it was, and speculating that it was a sequel to Inception. And it’s very much not that. So I almost hesitate to compare the two. But when you look at where it sits in Chris’ body of work, I would say it’s in that vein.”

ny Nolan fan will know of his love of the spy genre, particularly the James Bond films. “I’ve wanted to do a spy film for a very, very long time,” he explains. “Since I was a kid, really. Since I first started thinking about making films, I’ve wanted to do something in this genre.” The writer/director works in a way where he’ll sometimes file away an image or conceptual idea for later use. “Tenet brings together a lot of different things I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he says. “Specifically, there are images and things in the film that I’ve been thinking about for at least 20 years… I’ve been working on the specifics of Tenet, in its current form,