Since hitting the scene with Memento, Christopher Nolan has been a director willing to tackle challenging concepts while simultaneously trying to entertain an audience. Now, with his latest movie, Tenet, Nolan may have outdone himself by crafting a wildly complicated script.
For a while, we’ve gotten hints that Tenet could be a mind-bender, especially from the trailer, but now that it’s out in theaters and many have seen it, it looks like it could be Christopher Nolan’s most complicated movie yet. It looks like that all goes back to the script, which Nolan wrote, as Elizabeth Debicki recently told Comicbook.com the script is just as perplexing. Here’s what she said:
It's all in the script, which is sort of a remarkable. It's like a blueprint of Christopher Nolan's brain. It's one of the most intense and complex and fascinating scripts I've ever read. Making it, I have to say really honestly, making it for me, I had to take it piece by piece and literally sometimes minute by minute. And by that, I mean sometimes before the camera rolled or someone said 'rolling', I would then run from my starting mark and I would run to Chris, and I would say 'Which direction?' Like, remind me, 'cause I don't want to, you know... So it was sort of like, piece by piece for me. But then when I watched the whole movie, I had kind of an experience in a way, strangely enough, almost like it was the first time I was seeing them. 'Cause it was the first time I was seeing all of it pieced together and sort of going, 'Oh, that's... Oh, I see, that's that?' And so there was a lot of that for me.
It's one thing to experience the confusing nature of Tenet in a theater, but I can’t imagine being an actor in the movie and trying to keep everything straight so you don’t mess something up. Props to Elizabeth Debicki for staying on top of it.
As it so happens, Elizabeth Debicki wasn’t the only member of the cast to be confused. Even the film’s star, John David Washington, said he had questions for the director every day on set, but it sounds like Christopher Nolan had nothing but patience for the actors' questions.
What makes Tenet so confusing is its use of time inversion, the concept of reversing an object's motion through space-time relative to other objects. Though that sounds a lot like a time travel movie, Christopher Nolan has insisted it’s not. Regardless, the complicated material made it difficult for all involved in the production and has only raised even more questions about the movie. Be sure to read CinemaBlend's review of Tenet and keep checking back for more coverage about it.
