Tenet (stylized in all caps, previously as TENƎꓕ) is a 2020 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife, Emma Thomas. It stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The film follows a CIA officer who is recruited into a secret organization, tasked with tracing the origin of objects that are traveling backward through time and their connection to an attack by the future.
Nolan took over five years to write the screenplay after deliberating about Tenet central ideas for more than a decade. Pre-production began in late 2018, casting took place in March 2019, and principal photography lasted six months in multiple countries. After delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tenet was released in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2020, and in the United States on September 3, 2020. It was Nolan's last film to be released by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Tenet was the first Hollywood tent-pole or blockbuster to open in theaters during the pandemic and grossed $376.6 million worldwide on a $205 million budget, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2020 despite failing to break even. The film received generally favorable reviews, but divided critics more than Nolan's previous works. It won Best Visual Effects at the 93rd Academy Awards and received numerous other accolades.
Plot
On "the 14th,” the Protagonist leads a covert CIA extraction during a staged terrorist siege at an Opera House in Kyiv. Compromised, he is saved from KORD forces by a masked operative whose bag has an orange trinket. The Protagonist retrieves an artifact but his team is captured and tortured. He swallows a suicide pill but wakes up to find it was a fake—a test that only he passed. He is recruited by "Tenet", a secretive organization that briefs him on objects with "inverted" entropy that move backward through time. With his handler Neil, he traces inverted munitions to Priya Singh, an arms dealer in Mumbai.
Priya reveals that she is also a member of Tenet and that the man who inverted her bullets, Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, is communicating with the future. Sator's estranged wife Kat Barton is an art appraiser who authenticated a Goya forged by her friend Arepo. Sator purchased the Goya and used it to blackmail Kat into staying with him. To earn Kat's help, the Protagonist and Neil try to steal the Goya from Sator's freeport facility at Oslo Airport but are thwarted by two masked men who emerge from either side of a machine. In Mumbai, Priya explains it was a "turnstile"—a device that inverts entropy. The two men were the same person but traveling in opposite directions through time. She reveals it was Sator who sabotaged his CIA team and that KORD has the artifact, which is weapons-grade plutonium.
Believing the Protagonist has destroyed the forgery, Kat introduces him to Sator in Italy. Sator agrees to help steal the artifact, which the Protagonist and Neil do in Tallinn, but they are ambushed by an inverted Sator holding Kat hostage. The Protagonist hides the artifact and rescues Kat, but they are recaptured and taken to a freeport in Tallinn where the inverted Sator interrogates them for the location of the artifact and shoots Kat with an inverted bullet. Tenet troops led by Commander Ives arrive, but Sator escapes into the turnstile. To save Kat's life, they also invert via the turnstile. The inverted Protagonist drives back to the ambush to retrieve the hidden artifact, but encounters Sator who overpowers him and takes it.
To un-invert, the Protagonist travels further back in time to the Oslo freeport, fights his past self, and enters the turnstile, followed by Neil and Kat. Later in Oslo, Priya tells him Sator now has all nine pieces of the Algorithm, a device future antagonists need to invert the entropy of the world to destroy its past. Priya planned for Sator to get the artifact to reveal the other eight pieces in preparing his dead drop. Recalling an earlier conversation with Michael Crosby, he realizes it is a nuclear hypocenter detonated on the 14th in Sator's hometown, the closed city of Stalsk-12.
On a Tenet ship traveling back to the 14th, Kat reveals Sator has terminal cancer and is omnicidal. They surmise that after the Kyiv opera house siege on the 14th, Sator returns to a family vacation in Vietnam to take his own life, sending the dead drop coordinates to the future via a dead man's switch.
Arriving at the 14th, Kat poses as her past self in Vietnam as the Tenet forces in Stalsk-12 try to recover the Algorithm. They use a "temporal" pincer movement—inverted and non-inverted troops create a diversion so the Protagonist and Ives can steal the Algorithm before detonation. Sator's henchman, Volkov, traps them in the hypocenter. Calling from Vietnam, Sator explains the antagonists are trying to prevent catastrophes due to climate change. As Volkov is about to execute the Protagonist, an inverted soldier with an orange trinket appears and sacrifices himself, enabling the Protagonist and Ives to escape with the Algorithm. The hypocenter detonates in Stalsk-12 just as Kat kills Sator in Vietnam.
In Stalsk-12, the Protagonist, Neil, and Ives arrange to separate and hide pieces of the Algorithm. The Protagonist notices the orange trinket on Neil's bag. Neil reveals that he was recruited in his past by a future Protagonist and that Neil has known him for a long time. Neil leaves them his piece of the Algorithm as he inverts to return to where he sacrifices himself in the hypocenter. Later, in London, Priya plans to kill Kat to maintain the secrecy of Tenet. Having realized that he is Tenet's creator, the Protagonist kills Priya and watches Kat leave with her son.
Cast
Also appearing are Jefferson Hall, the "Well-Dressed Man", whom the Protagonist tries to extract at the opera house; Andrew Howard as the Driver who sabotages the CIA's Kyiv operation and tortures the Protagonist; Wes Chatham as SWAT 3, a member of the Protagonist's covert CIA team in Kyiv; Denzil Smith as Sanjay Singh, Priya's husband; Jeremy Theobald as the steward at the Reform Club; Laurie Shepherd as Max, Kat and Sator's son; Jack Cutmore-Scott as Klaus, an employee of security firm Rotas at the freeport in Oslo; Josh Stewart as the voice of a Tenet agent in Mumbai; and Sean Avery as the lead soldier on the Red Team.
Production Writing and pre-production
Writer and director Christopher Nolan conceived the ideas behind Tenet over the course of twenty years, but began working on the script in 2014. The title, as well as being a palindrome, is an allusion to the Sator Square. Inspired by a feeling about how he imagined Sergio Leone made Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Nolan avoided watching any spy films that might influence him while making Tenet, instead relying upon his memories.
The science fiction aspect of the film revolves around the ability to reverse the entropy of things and people, resulting in time reversibility. While the film does refer to real concepts from physics, among them annihilation, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon, the grandfather paradox, and Feynman and Wheeler's Absorber Theory, Nolan stated that "we're not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate". Commenting on the scientific aspects of writing the script, he stated: "I think the scientific method is the best tool we have for analyzing and understanding the world around us ... I've been very inspired by working with great scientists like Kip Thorne, who I worked with on Interstellar (2014), who also helped me out with some early analysis of the ideas I wanted to explore to do with time and quantum physics on Tenet, although I promised him I wasn't going to bandy his name around as if there was some kind of scientific reality to Tenet. It's a very different kettle of fish to Interstellar."
For both the production and the distribution of the film, which had an estimated budget of $200 million, Nolan continued his relationship with Warner Bros. and his production company Syncopy. Tenet was the last Syncopy film to be distributed by Warner Bros. before leaving the film studio in January 2021. Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley traveled to scout for locations in February and April 2019. Disappointed with the Royal Swedish Opera as a potential stand-in for the Kyiv Opera House, Crowley instead chose the Linnahall, which fit his affinity for Brutalist architecture. The production decided to film at the National Liberal Club after management at Sotheby's refused to participate, at Cannon Hall after Thornhill Primary School in Islington and Channing School were deemed unsatisfactory, and at Shree Vardhan Tower after it was determined that security at the Antilia was too high to film there.
Casting
John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki were cast in March 2019. Each of them was permitted to read the screenplay only while locked in a room. Nolan chose Washington based on his performance in BlacKkKlansman (2018). Washington kept diaries in which he expanded the Protagonist's backstory. Pattinson took some of Neil's mannerisms from political journalist and author Christopher Hitchens. Kat was originally going to be an older woman, but Debicki's appearance in Widows (2018) convinced the filmmakers otherwise.
The casting of Dimple Kapadia, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh was announced as filming started. Kapadia's screen test was put together by director Homi Adajania while working on his film Angrezi Medium (2020). Caine was only given the pages from the script that included what was filmed on his one day of work. To take his part, Branagh rescheduled production on his own directorial venture Death on the Nile (2022), and claimed to have studied the manuscript more times than any other in his career. Himesh Patel joined the production in August. Martin Donovan's inclusion was revealed in the first trailer for the film.
Design and special effects Special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher watched World War II films and documentaries to find reference points for the film that were based in reality. Prop prototypes were often 3D printed. Costume designer Jeffrey Kurland and his team cut and stitched the clothing for the film in the United States, manufacturing it for the main cast and thousands of extras. Production designer Nathan Crowley ordered around thirty military wristwatches from Hamilton Watch Company, each analog with a digital countdown.
Filming
Principal photography, involving a crew that Pattinson estimated at 500 people, began on May 22, 2019, in a soundstage in Los Angeles, and eventually incorporated seven countries—Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Filming in Estonia took place in June and July, with the Linnahall, Pärnu Highway (E67), and adjacent streets closed to facilitate the production. Kumu Art Museum doubled as the fictional Oslo Freeport. Barbara's office was built in a former law court, the Tallinn Freeport exterior was at the city docks, and a room at the Hilton Tallinn Park Hotel was also used. Mayor of Tallinn Mihhail Kõlvart expressed concerns about potential disruptions, as the shooting schedule required that the arterial Laagna Road be closed for one month. A compromise was eventually reached, involving temporary road closures and detours.