The legacy of the 2010 blockbusterInceptionwas recently celebrated with a 10th anniversary screening in select theaters. A new preview for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movieTenetwas also attached to the screening. An audience member who was able to catch the preview used his Twitter handle @ljwr_ to provide the following details regardingTenetwith a series of tweets.
The details revealed from the teaser confirm a lot of what fans have already known or suspected. Although initial rumors had peggedTenetas a time-travel movie, the first official trailer confirmed Nolan had something much more unusual in mind, in terms of ‘time inversion’, which involves a branch of science known as retro-causality, where cause and effect are reversed in time.
The comment about shooting the same scene in forward and reverse also sheds light on Nolan’s earlier remarks while discuring his collaboration with celebrated editor Jennifer Lame, in which Nolan had claimed that the way the movie was shot made it one of the hardest projects ever to edit in post-production:
“I joked with [Lame] when she first came on that this might be the hardest movie any editor has ever had to cut - and I’m not sure she would dispute that right now. Working out all the aspects of portraying time running in different directions meant going beyond what was down on the page, as the execution lay with a successful translation of the visual.”
The fact that most of the stunts in the film involvedpractical effects instead of CGIshould come as no surprise to Nolan fans, who are well-aware of the filmmaker’s penchant for building elaborated set pieces instead of shooting everything in front of a green screen.
Perhaps the most unexpected part of the notes from the preview is that the movie will apparently lay a great deal of stress on the theme of family and personal relationships. The marketing forTenethas presented the film so far as a slick espionage thriller with sci-fi undertones.
It seems, just likeInceptionandInterstellarused their sci-fi adventure settings to tell the tale of men trying to reconnect with their children,Tenetwill also rely on interpersonal bonds to give the story a strong emotional core.
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan,Tenetfeatures stars Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branaugh, Dimple Kapadia, Martin Donovan, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Himesh Patel, Clémence Poésy, Denzil Smith and Michael Caine. The film arrives in theaters in select U.S. cities Sept. 3.
