‘Tenet’ is Christopher Nolan’s least accurate movie with “no real content”, according to science
Even when he’s making films that seem far-fetched and fantastical by nature, Christopher Nolan has always sought to achieve the utmost levels of authenticity, realism, and immersion, whether he’s dealing with facts or billionaires dressed up like bats who spend their nights beating the shit out of criminals.
It’s something he’s been striving for since the beginning of his career. Nolan’s breakthrough feature Memento became the subject of countless scientific studies, and neuroscientist Christof Koch went so far as to describe the Academy Award-nominated mystery as “the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media.”
The entire Dark Knight trilogy was predicated on Nolan operating under the mindset that Christian Bale’s Batman was a character who could feasibly exist in the real world. Sure, he wears an armoured rubber suit and fights against face-painted anarchic clowns and muscular masked warlords, but the comic book adaptations never deviated too far from gadgets, technologies, and action scenes that were semi-believable.
Admittedly, Inception got a little more leeway by repeatedly plunging itself into the subconscious where literally anything can happen, whereas Interstellar drafted in Kip Thorne as a sounding board and advisor to ensure that even though it was a blockbuster sci-fi involving deep space travel, distant planets, and wormholes, it wasn’t going to be dragged over hot coals by the scientific community.
The recurring theme is that regardless of which genre Nolan chooses to operate in, whether it’s amnesiac revenge stories, costume-clad comic book epics, mind-bending heist flicks, or existential cosmic adventures, he’s got at least one foot firmly planted in realism. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule; in the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s case, it’s Tenet.
Theoretical physicist and professor Claudia De Rahm echoed many of Nolan’s most vocal critics when she criticised the movie for “trying to be clever without really being clever.” Tenet required plenty of exposition to explain its core concepts of inversion and entropy, leading the scientist to lament how “there are a lot of times where they use science jargon, and it’s just jargon with no content.”
In her eyes, the biggest offender by far was Robert Pattinson’s Neil. While he delivered his word salad with the requisite amount of gusto and conviction to make it sound at least semi-convincing, those with knowledge in his particular field weren’t quite as sold on his explanations of Tenet‘s various MacGuffins.
“What he was saying was random words,” De Rahm told the Los Angeles Times. “It was ‘radiation’ and ‘positron’ with no real content. The only real word he was saying was ‘entropy’, but he wasn’t explaining anything. He says he has a master’s in theoretical physics. It’s not much to have a master’s in theoretical physics. Don’t say that to him, but having a master’s in theoretical physics doesn’t mean you understand everything in the world.”
Very few people would call Tenet Nolan’s best film, and as it turns out, even fewer of those in the know would call it his most scientifically accurate.
