Christo­pher Nolan returns with the first trail­er for Tenet

Just as the reviews for Cats trick­le out and mark what we thought was the final sur­prise of the moviego­ing year – one unex­pect­ed delight more. Today unof­fi­cial­ly kicks off the movie cal­en­dar for 2020, with a look at per­haps the most hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed release of next year, from a direc­tor who doesn’t do small movies.

The first trail­er for Christo­pher Nolan​’s much-mur­mured-about Tenet arrived online today, fore­telling an out-of-the-ordi­nary espi­onage pic­ture. We see lots of the stan­dard tropes for the genre – car chas­es, sea­far­ing escapes, close-range gun bat­tles – but there also appears to be some com­po­nent of time trav­el in the mix.

John David Wash­ing­ton stars as an agent induct­ed into a high­ly clas­si­fied pro­gram ded­i­cat­ed to fore­stalling the impend­ing end of the world. But they’re not wor­ried about nuclear arse­nals or any­thing; this will be worse, which pos­es the ques­tion of what could be worse than anni­hi­la­tion rain­ing from the sky. Maybe it’s got some­thing to do with the odd tem­po­ral eddies that roll parts of one tableau in reverse while the space around it moves forward.

In true Nolan fash­ion, the trail­er goes light on any clar­i­fy­ing details, pre­fer­ring to instead show Wash­ing­ton and his cast­mates (a heavy­weight ensem­ble includ­ing a leather-gloved Robert Pat­tin­son, Eliz­a­beth Debic­ki, Mar­tin Dono­van, and Nolan favorites Michael Caine and Ken­neth Branagh) in action. The set pieces oper­ate on the director’s sig­na­ture grandeur of scale, too, with men launched from the ground onto the side of build­ings and boats per­ilous­ly sidewind­ing around wind turbines.

The only thing that the trail­er seems to be miss­ing, going from the Nolan play­book, is a man wracked with guilt over his inabil­i­ty to save his wife. Though who knows, it’s all pret­ty light on dia­logue, and Debicki’s con­nec­tion to the plot has yet to be seen. In either case, it appears to be a Nolan joint as no one else can man­age: a com­bi­na­tion of block­buster-cal­iber Hol­ly­wood might and an art­house cere­bral streak. 2020 is going to be a fun year.

Tenet comes to cin­e­ma in the US and UK on 17 July, 2020.