Christopher Nolan is the visionary director of тιтles including Inception, Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight, and the underrated sci-fi adventure Tenet. Nolan was well on his way to becoming a household name in the 2000s, but he cemented his status in Hollywood history with his 2024 Best Director win for Oppenheimer, also the Best Picture winner that year. Christopher Nolan’s best movies, as well as his only comparatively worse ones, share elements such as grand scale, high-octane and gritty action, and creative twists on the concept of time.

Nolan’s fascination with time may continue in The Odyssey, which offers him new opportunities for non-linear storytelling. Nolan has played with flashbacks, reverse timelines, and concealed previous events in past movies. However, his movies that engage with time on a pseudo-scientific level are rarer. For instance, Inception deals with the dilation of time when people experience what they believe is a longer stretch of time in a dream. However, Nolan’s only true time-travel movie remains criminally underrated, due to some unfortunate issues with presentation.

Tenet Is Christopher Nolan At His Most Creative

Nolan Does Time Travel Like It Has Never Been Done Before

With Tenet, Nolan showcases one of the most inventive takes on time travel in cinematic history. Tenet follows the character known only as “The Protagonist” (John David Washington), who becomes involved with a specialized organization called Tenet. Using high-tech stations as gateways, Tenet’s agents can travel back in time — and to the people in the original flow of time, they appear to literally be moving in reverse. With characters potentially changing directions at any point in a timeline spanning years, the layers of these journeys are very complex.

Yet this premise and its mechanics are Nolan showing off some of his best conceptualizations and allowing him and his crew to deliver mind-boggling visuals. The primary conflict revolves around the characters trying to prevent people from the future from destroying them, the starting point for some fascinating philosophical trains of thought. We see explosions and car crashes happening in reverse; there are also some strong production design and lighting choices that highlight all the other elements, coming together in a deeply enticing sci-fi narrative and musing on the possibilities of time travel.

Christopher Nolan’s Main Tropes All Come Together In Tenet

Masked Enemies, Family Reunited, Grand Scale, & Time

In fact, many of the most popular tropes of Christopher Nolan’s movies come together in the best way possible in Tenet, making it a sleeper culmination of his career. We had already seen characters experiencing a kind of time travel through dilation in Inception and Interstellar, but Tenet takes it to the next level with actual time travel, in a way no one would ever expect. Anyone who loved the suspense fostered by The Dark Night‘s flawless opening scene will appreciate this trope coming back around, with several twists delivered due to ᴀssailants being obscured by masks.

There is also the element of families being separated and reunited, which appears against the backdrop of the larger plots of Inception and Interstellar as well, with Tenet‘s Protagonist taking it upon himself to help a mother secure custody of her son and leave her violent oligarch husband. Finally, Tenet delves into the familiar themes of Nolan’s career of humanity’s hubris and mortality in the face of a world-ending threat. How an entire city, planet, or reality is destroyed are also touchpoints of the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer.

Tenet Is Held Back By How Inaccessible It Is

Tenet Is Just Way Too Complicated

Admittedly, Tenet‘s biggest problem that hindered it from being another smash hit for Nolan is that it is too complicated. Early on, the movie doesn’t make it entirely clear how The Protagonist is connected to certain people and organizations, leading to his work with Tenet. While we can understand the time travel pathways directly applicable to the main characters, the movie gets to a point where all the overlapping time travel is impossible to keep track of. Overall, the characters’ motivations and goals are muddled, and viewers are forced to accept the vague vibes of it all.

This overdone complexity makes it difficult for audiences to connect to the story and therefore the characters. While we don’t understand the exact mechanics of how they all came to know and care for each other, the dynamics between the main trio of The Protagonist, Neil (Robert Pattinson), and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) are compellingly portrayed. Robert Pattinson is competently charismatic and cheeky as Neil, driving home his mysterious but affectionate connection to The Protagonist. John David Washington and Elizabeth Debicki’s interactions are thoughtful and gentle, illustrating the theme of humanity that comes through with him wanting to protect her.

Kenneth Branagh is also viscerally terrifying as Kat’s abusive husband, the villain of the movie, and the pair’s relationship effectively shows the push and pull of power in this story. However, a lot of the best character moments rely upon the audience focusing on the acting in a contained sense, because thinking too much about the broader story brings it down. There are also several supporting characters whose importance isn’t justified. While Clémence Poésy and Dimple Kapadia are also very intriguing in their Tenet performances, their scenes feel like more distractions from an already convoluted narrative.

The Spectacle Alone Is Enough To Make Tenet A Masterpiece

Just The Feeling Of It Makes Tenet Great

However, even only sort of understanding of the plot or characters of Tenet is enough to experience the feeling of it. Out-of-context interactions are witty and interesting enough, as they navigate this one-of-a-kind adventure. We can understand the themes of freedom and friendship in meaningful moments, even if the story surrounding them isn’t at its best. But of course, the draw of any good Christopher Nolan movie is its spectacle, and Tenet does not fail to deliver in this regard. The style of action is very akin to a slick spy thriller, and the characters make some wild moves to get the job done.

But then the fact that they are occasionally fighting people who are moving backward makes everything about this movie’s action stand out more. There are car chases with one or multiple vehicles going in reverse. Masked figures may be enemy soldiers from the future — or they may be one of the characters we are supposed to trust. The razor-sharp score that accompanies all of Nolan’s movies also elevates Tenet. I’ll concede that this is not the director’s best movie, but it has so much going for it, which it sometimes feels like people are not willing to see.