Every­thing we know about Christo­pher Nolan’s Tenet

Christo­pher Nolan is Hollywood’s favorite Brit, enjoy­ing the stature of a limey Steven Spiel­berg capa­ble of bend­ing the machin­ery of the indus­try main­stream to his cre­ative will. He’s one of a small hand­ful of film­mak­ers able to put audi­ences in seats on their name brand alone – though to be safe on his lat­est fea­ture, he’s also hired a bunch of movie stars and har­nessed what appears to be the largest bud­get of his career.

Below, we’ve gath­ered all of the avail­able intel about Nolan’s top-secret new project, a sci-fi thriller with sky-high stakes. By the sound of it, Tenet is a mas­sive clan­des­tine oper­a­tion about a mas­sive clan­des­tine oper­a­tion, the purest refine­ment yet of the Nolan film­mak­ing ethic.

While the pre­vi­ous­ly released trail­er divulged the broad con­tours of the plot, much remains a mys­tery. John David Wash­ing­ton stars as a secret agent tasked with a vital mis­sion: pre­vent­ing the out­break of a third World War. That’s pret­ty by-the-book espi­onage-flick stuff, the twist on the for­mu­la here being that he must use time-trav­el to right history.

The trail­er makes men­tion of a fate worse than nuclear holo­caust, which rais­es the ques­tion of what could pos­si­bly be far­ther down the line than that. Pre­sum­ably it has some­thing to do with the car flip­ping over and then un-flip­ping over back­wards, or the gar­gan­tu­an steam­er ships cut­ting a path through the water in reverse.

What­ev­er the case, Washington’s char­ac­ter will ally him­self with a cast well-stocked with stars eager to get a cere­bral block­buster on their résumé – a line-up that includes Nolan reg­u­lars Michael Caine and Ken­neth Branagh along­side new­com­ers Eliz­a­beth Debic­ki and Robert Pat­tin­son.

The rest of the per­son­nel is equal­ly intrigu­ing: Nolan reunites with his Inter­stel­lar and Dunkirk cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hoyte van Hoytema, while bring­ing on Oscar-win­ner Lud­wig Görans­son as com­pos­er of the score. (You may know him as the tal­ent behind the Black Pan­ther incidentals.)

More excit­ing than any par­tic­u­lar detail about this ges­tat­ing film may be the sim­ple impres­sion of its sheer scale. Every­thing that’s leaked so far sug­gests an unprece­dent­ed under­tak­ing, from reports of Nolan shoot­ing across sev­en coun­tries to a rumored bud­get exceed­ing $200 mil­lion USD. Nolan doesn’t do small movies, not any­more, but this still sounds like it’s in a dif­fer­ent league.

While the mean­ing of the code­word ​‘tenet’ will remain an enig­ma until the release (per­haps it’s a ref­er­ence to for­mer CIA direc­tor George Tenet, a secret agent of sorts), that won’t be much longer. Warn­er Bros has set a world­wide release date of 17 July, and don’t expect a fes­ti­val berth at Cannes pri­or to that. Nolan has nev­er been much for the fes­ti­val cir­cuit, and the stu­dio will undoubt­ed­ly want to keep a lid on plot details for as long as possible.

Nolan’s films meet with such fab­u­lous suc­cess for mar­ry­ing the pop­corn thrills of a tent­pole sum­mer block­buster with more seri­ous-mind­ed the­mat­ic and styl­is­tic dis­ci­pline. Nolan believes in tak­ing the hard way, and judg­ing from the wild stunts on dis­play in the trail­er (men get­ting cat­a­pult­ed onto ver­ti­cal walls, giant water-strid­ing seacrafts flit­ting through the waves), he’s up to his old tricks.

Tenet opens in cin­e­mas on 17 July.