Opinion: Tenet is a movie that is shaped by climate change yet fails to appropriately confront the crisis
By Diletta De Cristofaro, Northumbria University
"Time is relative, okay? It can stretch and it can squeeze, but it can't run backwards. It just can’t", a scientist explains in Christopher Nolan's 2014 movie Interstellar. But in Nolan’s latest film Tenet, released in cinemas in August 2020 and now available for home-viewing, time can run backwards.
In keeping with Nolan’s longstanding fascination with disrupting chronology, the future is attacking the present in Tenet, trying to precipitate the apocalypse by inverting the world’s entropy. Entropy, which can be interpreted as a system’s degree of disorder, is connected to the irreversible flow of time from past to present to future, as in a closed system entropy can never decrease. But in Tenet, future scientists have found a way to invert the entropy of individual objects and people, and thus their direction in time. As Neil, the character played by Robert Pattinson, explains, inverting the entropy of the entire world would mean "end of play": "everyone and everything that’s ever lived destroyed, instantly."
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Trailer for Tenet
The reasons behind this attack remain oddly unquestioned by the characters, and thus unexplained to the audience, until the movie’s final sequences. At the height of the action-packed concluding fight between good and bad guys, it’s revealed in passing that, as with Interstellar, the premise of Tenet’s plot is climate breakdown. "How come they [future generations] wanna kill us?", the unnamed protagonist, played by John David Washington, asks. Sator, the villain played by Kenneth Branagh, responds "because their oceans rose and their rivers ran dry. Don’t you see? They have no choice but to turn back".
You’d be forgiven if you missed this brief exchange in the midst of the confusion of SWAT teams moving backward and forward in time, accompanied by Nolan’s trademark baffling sound mixing, which often makes dialogues nearly inaudible. But the very limited space given to this exchange, which nevertheless holds the key to Tenet’s entire plot, is indicative of a movie that is shaped by climate change, and yet fails to appropriately confront the crisis.
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From RTÉ TEN, John David Washington tells Alan Corr all about making Tenet with director Christopher Nolan
In comparison, the premise of Interstellar’s space odyssey is explicitly about a climate breakdown scenario. The movie depicts a planet Earth that is about to become uninhabitable for the human species, due to crop failures and pollution. The film blames excessive consumption and wastefulness for the environmental collapse, proposing space colonization as the solution to the crisis. This is arguably a problematic fantasy solution, which risks keeping us from attempting to curb global warming, lulling us into thinking that, by the time things get really bad on Earth, we’ll be able to hop on a spaceship to other planets.
At least, however, the consequences of unfettered climate change – an uninhabitable planet and human extinction – are at the centre of Interstellar, made tangible by the desolate scenes taking place on Earth. In Tenet, instead, Nolan’s fantasy approach to the climate crisis reaches new heights. It’s precisely the nature of climate change – an irreversible process that is well underway and through which we may have already written a catastrophic future for our species, alongside many others – that prompts the future scientists imagined by Nolan to research ways to reverse the flow of time.
From RTÉ Lyric FM's Culture File, Rob Long on why Tenet didn't storm the multiplexes, and other lessons in knowing your audience
Yet, Nolan’s focus is solely on the threat of the entropy-apocalypse. Tenet’s typical disaster movie fantasy of an exceptional individual who manages to prevent this entropy-apocalypse hides the fact that there is another apocalypse, climate breakdown, which is ongoing in both the audience’s world and in Nolan’s film-world – and no one, not even Tenet’s Protagonist, is doing much to avert it.
Tenet closes on Neil congratulating The Protagonist on their successful mission by claiming that "it's the bomb that didn’t go off. The danger no one knew was real. That’s the bomb with the real power to change the world". That may well be, but what about climate change, a bomb whose detonation has already started and whose danger is under everybody’s eyes, including those of Neil and The Protagonist?
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Chris Wasser recommends where to begin with the work of Christopher Nolan
Nolan presents his audience with an exculpatory fantasy in which it’s future generations who are attacking present ones, diverting attention from the fact that the exact opposite is happening with the climate crisis. As science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson reminds us, it is present generations who are threatening the survival of their descendants by "creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost".
At a time when scientists warn us that our failure to grasp the urgency and consequences of global warming is condemning us to a "ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals", we simply cannot afford the fantasy approach to the climate crisis that Tenet offers. As narratives are foundational to the ways we understand the world, we need stories that confront climate breakdown, not hide it.
Dr Diletta De Cristofaro is a Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
