Tenet preview: Revisiting Nolan

The COVID-19 pandemic elicited an unprecedented response from studios that pushed their opening dates to safety. Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, was initially scheduled to herald a return to theaters this weekend. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

Nolan is one of the few blockbuster directors who understand that speaking down to audiences’ intelligence rarely breeds good results. His films are intricately constructed puzzles that invite audiences to probe into mysteries.

Here is a list of some of his best to temporarily satiate the anticipation for Tenet.

Inception (2010). In many ways, Inception is Nolan’s quintessential film; it revolves around a heist, but the MacGuffin in question isn’t a weapon or money — it’s an idea tucked neatly inside a dream. In Inception, it’s possible to create and articulate shared dreams. As such, Nolan’s film acts as a metaphor for filmmaking itself. In a dream, we are spectators in the dark, shown flashes of images linked only by the weakest fibers of our irrational, subconscious minds — we only make sense of the dream after the fact. In Inception’s intricate finale, the sharp match cuts between the four layers (three layers of dream, and reality) force the audience to string disparate images together to form a cogent storyline, and only after the film finishes can we piece together Nolan’s labyrinthine puzzle.

The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 to 2012). Nolan’s influence on comic book films cannot be overstated. Before 2005, few franchises dared take such source material seriously. Enter Batman Begins (2005) — a neo-noir mystery that explored trauma, corruption and fear, all filmed in desaturated shades of brooding amber. The series took a turn to even more heinous material with The Dark Knight (2008), an apt parallel for terrorism that deconstructed notions of chaos and order, before concluding with The Dark Knight Rises (2012), which was a more narratively formulaic venture than its two predecessors, but still served as a satisfying metaphor for pain and war.

Memento (2000). In films, there is plot and there is story. The plot consists of all the events as they are directly presented. The story is how audiences understand these events. In Memento, story and plot are separate. Nolan’s film follows a man searching for his wife’s killer. The only problem is he suffers from anterograde amnesia (he cannot hold new memories for longer than 15 minutes). Nolan tells the story backwards and forwards simultaneously, creating a mind-bending thriller whose two halves only meet at the end.