A theory about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming spy/sci-fi movie Tenet is gaining traction online: that the top-secret plot includes using the movie’s "time inversion" mechanism to stop the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
We can expect Tenet to provide us with Nolan’s usual mix of twists, philosophical ideas and time-warping technology, and there has been a recent trend in Hollywood movies of retelling or revising history. But what evidence is there for a possible 9/11-related thread to Tenet’s plot, and how likely is it that one of the year's biggest movies would go for such a controversial subject?
In interviews from an upcoming issue of Total Film Magazine, Nolan explains that he wrote his latest script to play with audience expectations of the spy movie genre, pushing traditional conventions “into some interesting and unexpected territory.” It's quotes like these, along with Tenet's highly secretive pre-release marketing, that has led to some interesting social media theories about how the time inversion device will be used.
Film critic Esther Rose laid out the case on Twitter for the Tenet 9/11 speculation. First, we know the film centers around an anti-terror plot, and that a major scene involves an airplane crash. Second, the CIA Director during 9/11 was named George Tenet. In post-9/11 investigations, Tenet was accused of having possessed enough information to potentially stop 9/11, was he able to relive the months preceding the tragedy. A scene in Tenet's latest trailer appears to include highly blurred photo of the Twin Towers in the background.
How convincing are these pieces of evidence? Tenet's latest trailer shows an airplane crashing into an airport hanger, not a building, with Robert Pattinson letting us know his plane-crashing plans are “not from the air: don’t be so dramatic,” in a cheeky The Dark Knight Rises reference. Perhaps the good guys are somehow redirecting the hijacked plane? Alternately, this scene could have nothing to do with 9/11. The plane used in this scene is a Boeing 747 -- not the 767s that were tragically hijacked -- so this lead doesn't really hold up.
What about the allusion to the former director of the CIA? The shared name seems an undeniable link, so even if Tenet doesn't literally feature 9/11, perhaps the idea of "time inversion" is intended to raise questions about the way we deal with era-defining political events. It should be noted, however, that the official title of Nolan’s movie is TENET, in capital letters, presumably making the word some kind of acronym. The etymology of ‘tenet’ also suggests the title may be more about the idea of a uniting belief, founding principle, or critical point in time.
It feels like the 9/11 Tenet theories are more related to Nolan's previous work than to evidence from the trailers. After all, The Dark Knight is arguably the best recent mainstream meditation on the War on Terror, and Dunkirk was lauded by veterans of the real event for its sensitive and accurate portrayal. Other prominent directors have recently played with historical events to address wider cultural ideas. Tarantino’s bloody fairytale endings (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Inglourious Basterds) are among the most notorious recent rewrites, while movies like Oliver Stone’s JFK and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen show that directors have long-used revisionist histories as a storytelling device.
The verdict? Based on the dialogue in Tenet's trailer, the characters are aiming to stop a “certain Russian national” connected to World War Three, which is not armageddon, but “something worse.” Perhaps Nolan has chosen 9/11 as the spark that eventually leads to the next world war. Such a movie would need to walk a moral tightrope higher and thinner than the one from Man of Wire. Still, Nolan may be one of the few directors who could pull off such an audacious storyline.