Is 'Tenet' Christopher Nolan's Stealth Sequel To 'Inception'?
The new three-minute trailer for Christopher Nolan's Tenet is here, and in the time-honoured Nolan fashion it's left everyone with more questions than answers. Even the Dunkirk trailer managed to make an event that happened 80 years ago seem like it might involve a wormhole to another dimension.
There's a lot to unpack there, but one of the bubbling theories when the first Tenet trailer dropped was that this would be a kind-of sequel to Inception – not a straightforward picking up of the story that Leo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb left hanging, but a shading in of the reasons why time and space are more malleable in the Inception-verse.
"Is Nolan not offering some other perspective into Inception's universe and the various sci-fi tools used to do transcendent espionage therein?," asked one Redditor, with a degree of verbal obfuscation that Nolan would have been proud of, during a discussion.
One tantalising theory is that Tenet will pivot around a military experiment with the same kind of technology which Cobb's criminal gang would later exploit for their own ends. So, not a sequel, but a nod to the shared dream-logic of Nolan's films.
Another suggestion – and this might be a reach – is that in the below screenshot, Rob Pattinson and John David Washington are talking while in the same limbo city where Cobb went to visit his family.
It might even be that Michael Caine's tweedy professor in Inception is revisited in Tenet. Don't bother asking Caine what Tenet's about, though.
"All I had was one day’s work and he gave me my pages," Caine told The Hindu in March. "I did my part and shot only with John David [Washington]. I haven’t heard anything since." You can't fool us, Michael – we're taking that as a definite yes.
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