Tenet: The Core Anatomy of Christopher Nolan’s Most Complex Structure
Tenet: The Core Anatomy of Christopher Nolan’s Most Complex Structure
Just like in literature, science fiction cinema often doesn’t depict science itself, but rather reflects the reality shaped by dominant cultural orders. After the Cold War, rapid scientific advancements inspired a kind of scientific curiosity within popular science literature, awakening philosophical questions about free will, parallel existence, and destiny.
Global film production quickly recognized this curiosity and transformed it into cinematic form — integrating concepts such as wormholes, the butterfly effect, time travel, and quantum consciousness into its narrative architectures. Through this, cinema both offered a scientific framework that satisfied the audience’s curiosity and managed collective anxieties within an era of growing mistrust toward reality itself.
In 2020, a year when society once again faced an atmosphere of uncertainty, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which he both wrote and directed, allowed audiences to experience entropy and the two-way flow of time.
The story follows a CIA operative recruited into a secret organization, tasked with tracing the origins of objects that move backward through time and uncovering their connection to a future attack unfolding in the present.
To capture expansive visuals, the film was shot using the ARRIFLEX 765 camera on 65mm film, with IMAX systems especially employed for high-resolution action sequences. This choice of camera mirrors the complex process of intelligence gathering, letting viewers feel the intricate flow of information in each meticulously framed shot. Nolan demonstrates entropy by accelerating time and distorting images, as seen in the chaotic single-take airplane crash and the opera house explosion. Just as in physics, where order and disorder define the boundaries of objects in the universe, in cinema, “framing the images” can define the boundaries of the audience’s experience—a thought that struck me as a viewer.
Inverted Hero’s Journey
The structure of the film, much like humanity’s attempt to create order within chaos, is built upon a distinct algorithm. The protagonist — an unnamed character — does not follow the conventional “Hero’s Journey” scheme familiar from most Hollywood narratives.
In this classical structure, the hero first loses themselves, then finds transformation through the act of return.
In Tenet, however, the hero enters the story already as a seasoned intelligence operative — someone who has long crossed thresholds of transformation. The narrative does not conclude with his “return home” or reintegration into society.
Instead, the protagonist comes to realize that he has been the architect of it all from the beginning (the Latin root of Tenet meaning “to hold” or “to establish”). He is not a traveler embarking on a quest, but rather a creator of the path itself — a conscious observer who awakens to the paradox of time.
In the classical model, the Mentor carries knowledge before the hero, foresees the future, and prepares the hero for it. In Tenet, however, this role is transformed through Neil. He moves alongside the protagonist within the moment, across the bidirectional flow of time, bringing knowledge from the future into the present. His mentorship is not hierarchical but collaborative, built on companionship and temporal reciprocity. Neil stands as a figure tied to the protagonist’s future self rather than an external guide.
Similarly, in traditional structure, the Shadow or Villain represents the hero’s internal fears and weaknesses. In Tenet, the conflict is not personal but cosmic, representing the chaos embedded in the universe’s very mechanism.
The character Sator, a Russian oligarch who seeks to destroy the world through an inverted entropy device, embodies the concept of reversed creation. His name, Sator — meaning “creator” or “initiator” — symbolizes his potential to erase both the past and the future.
Thus, defeating him is not merely a physical triumph but a metaphysical awakening — the hero’s realization of time as destiny-consciousness.
Nolan thereby conveys entropy not only through visual imagery but through the existential motivations of his characters.
The Script Algorithm: The Sator Square
The film’s characters and locations are structured around a “metaphysical idea” encoded in the Sator Square. This palindromic arrangement of five words—Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, Rotas—relates to cosmic order and the cyclical nature of time:
Sator (creator, planter, doer) represents the ambitious businessman trying to reconstruct a device that can invert entropy.
Rotas (wheels, roads) serves as his corporate empire, a front for running his inverted-time weapon project.
Arepo (the one who plows) is an unseen artist, connected to Sator’s wife, whose fake artworks become instruments of manipulation.
Opera (work, labor) is the opera house—the film’s opening set—where chaos is unleashed as Sator attempts to retrieve part of the algorithm.
Tenet (principle, foundation) is the name of the protagonist’s espionage team dedicated to saving the world.
These five elements are more than symbols; they create an algorithm linking characters’ motivations, locations, and the two-way flow of time. The protagonist doesn’t just fight physically but also gains a consciousness capable of managing entropy and grasping temporal paradoxes. The film thus generates its own order out of conceptual and narrative chaos.
Experiencing Entropy Through Cinema: Time Structured Within the Frame
Cinema does not merely record time; it shapes, confines, and reconstructs it. The director’s act of framing—arranging images within the borders of the lens—resembles the physical process of imposing order upon chaos.
Each shot, each cut, each reflection of light represents a single configuration chosen among infinite possibilities. In this sense, cinema is not a passive observer of duration but an active practice of consciousness, freezing and reorganizing time within the limits of the frame.
With the precision of a scientist, Nolan invites the audience to experience a universal principle through the camera’s eye. He structures action within duration by organizing chaos into rhythm, much like a physicist observing entropy.
Filmmaking thus becomes the process of controlling the random—the scripting of events, the orchestration of seemingly spontaneous conflicts, the balance of rhythm through movement, dialogue, and framing.
Through his use of editing—cuts, reversals, and temporal inversions—Nolan dramatizes chaos, allowing viewers not just to watch the film but to feel entropy itself.
In his own words: “Don’t try to understand the film. Feel it. It’s not a puzzle to solve.”
And yet, no matter how much order the director imposes, he can never fully determine how the audience will experience the film.
Time within the film touches each viewer’s consciousness differently. When a spectator says, “We didn’t understand anything,” they are, in fact, engaging directly with Nolan’s paradox:
cinema does not exist to explain its algorithmic order, but to make us feel it.