Our latest look at Christopher Nolan’s next big film is finally here. Warner Bros. has released a full trailer for Tenet, showing off a movie that continues the director’s fascination with time.
Nolan is notoriously secretive when it comes to his movies, and the first teaser for the project left plenty to the imagination: a mercenary or agent (played by John David Washington), wakes up in the afterlife, and is tasked with preventing a horrifying war, with Nolan’s usual obsession with playing with time.
This new trailer shows off more of what to expect. Washington and his companions are working to prevent a global catastrophe — World War III, something worse than Armageddon. There’s an element of time distortion involved. Not time travel, as Washington’s character puts it, but “inversion.” To demonstrate, he shoots a bullet-ridden tablet, only to have the bullet fly back into the gun. “You’re not shooting the bullet,” someone explains. “you’re catching it.”
When the action kicks in, we see that the characters are certainly doing something with time: fights take place out of sequence, ships travel backwards, and crashed cars put themselves back together. Like the rest of Nolan’s films, this one looks like it continues his trend of examining time and how it can be manipulated, but also that he wraps it up into an action-thriller with high-stakes fights and explosions.
The film also stars Robert Pattinson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki, Michael Caine, Himesh Patel, Clémence Poésy, Andrew Howard, and others.
The theatrical industry has been shut down due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and tons of summer blockbusters have been shuffled to release slots later this year and next spring, but Warner Bros. and Nolan have been pushing for the film to stay with its original release date. As such, the film boldly says that it’ll be debuting in theaters on July 17th, 2020. Hopefully, it’ll be safe to go to out to catch the film by then.
