STACK #194 Dec 2020

FEATURE FILM

The stakes are high indeed, with World War III looming and the fate of the world in the hands of Washington’s Protagonist,

who is investigating the use of technology that can reverse an object’s trajectory, following the discovery of bullets that appear to have travelled backwards in time. But as the film points out, it’s not time travel per se, it’s ‘inversion’. “The movie challenges

...if you could invert the flow of entropy for an object, you could reverse the flow of time for that object, so the story is grounded in credible physics

our traditional ways of interpreting time, interpreting what we perceive is real, our

learned behaviours,” says Washington. “There’s a lot more going on. I had never read or seen anything like

this before. Nobody has. Chris deals head on with how we understand the physics of time, all

through the lens of this character. I don’t know what his fascination with time is, but I love how he deals with it in his movies.” While fantastical, the notion of inverting time is a theoretical possibility for physicists and is determined by the law of entropy, which states that all things trend toward disorder. “Every law of physics is symmetrical – it can run forwards or backwards in time and be the same – except for entropy,” explains Nolan. “The theory being that if you could invert the flow of entropy for an object, you could reverse the flow of time for that object, so the story is grounded in credible physics. I did have [physicist] Kip Thorne read the script and he helped me out with some of the concepts, though we’re not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate. But it is based roughly on actual science.” When it came to realising the concept

learned over the years: if you can have a range of different techniques allowing you to keep changing the trick that you’re using shot to shot, it becomes much harder for the audience to be pulled out of the film. It’s much more immersive.” Nolan hopes that Tenet will deliver a new experience in action cinema and the spy genre for audiences. “I want to give them a different way of looking at it, so they get some of the sense of excitement that I had as a kid watching those kinds of films. We’re trying to give the

onscreen, the filmmaker was well aware that it would not simply be a case of reversing the camera or winding the footage backwards. “There is an interaction between the direction of time and the environment we’re in: how things move around us and even the air we breathe,” he says. “The notion of inversion is an asymmetrical one, so the rule-set was complicated and had to be addressed in more complicated ways. That meant a variety of techniques, from cast and stunt performers being able to perform fight scenes and running and walking in different directions, to vehicles that would drive forwards or backwards in various configurations so that we could, shot to shot, completely change the technique we were using to create the particular visual. Something we’ve

audience a new experience that re-injects that sense of the unknown in movie action sequences. We really want to give people a ride like nothing they’ve had before.”

• Tenet is out on Dec 16

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012) The finale to the Dark Knight trilogy featured Batman, Bane and Catwoman at play in a propulsive three-hour superhero epic that’s perhaps Nolan’s finest venture into the DC universe.

INCEPTION (2010) This mind-bending sci-fi

INTERSTELLAR (2014) Nolan’s cerebral and visually spectacular sci-fi drama sends a team of pioneers from a blighted Earth on a mission into deep space to discover whether humanity has a future home among the stars.

DUNKIRK (2017) The director’s exploration of one of the most crucial events of World War II – the evacuation of British and French forces from the shores of France, with the Germans in hot pursuit – is a relentless and affecting experience that rewrites the rules of the war movie.

milestone involves a guy who makes a dubious living filching corporate secrets from people’s heads via complex dream- sharing tech. Now he must plant an idea in a businessman’s mind with the help of a talented team.

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