The signature of Christopher Nolan’s work beyond clean crisp visuals and booming score is his puzzlebox like approach to structure and story. Nolan likes to play with notions of time and reality, albeit in consistent and precise ways.
His upcoming international espionage thriller film “Tenet” appears to be Nolan taking that to even further heights, sticking to his style to the point that it’s surprising he didn’t name the film “Inversion” just to give himself a fourth movie with a single word title starting with ‘In’.
The movie is bound to be a head scratcher, with co-stars like Robert Pattinson and John David Washington saying they understood it upon reading the script but it has taken them a long time to fully process it and even now they remain uncertain on some things.
In a new interview with Total Film recently, actor Kenneth Branagh admits he isn’t quite sure if he is the villain of the movie even though the recent trailer appeared to paint him as such:
“Given the nature of it, as Chris to some extent sort of reinvents the wheel here, a lot of people start engaging with John David Washington’s character in both expected ways…so you might expect me to be an antagonist…but then [the story] doesn’t quite follow what you might expect as the story plays out.
I kid you not, I read this screenplay more times than I have ever read any other thing I have ever worked on. It was like doing the Times crossword puzzle every day, I would imagine. Except the film and the screenplay didn’t expect you, or need you, to be an expert.
In the playing of it, and in the scenes, he keeps up turning, or playing forward and backward, our expectations of what the character should be. So my conversations with [Nolan] about my character were constant, because the character’s evolution was not set. It was a series of constant surprises”
Branagh plays a Russian character in the film who seems to be either a powerful businessman or organised crime figure – though it’s not clear who. What little is known about the film involves attempts to stop the world descending into war and chaos with the help of technology allowing for temporal inversion in limited pockets – effectively reversing causality so effect precedes cause.
The film remains on track for a July 17th theatrical release.
