This article contains spoilers for Tenet
Here is a short, far-from-exhaustive list of what Tenet is not about: Area 51; the grassy knoll; 9/11; Bruce Lee faking his death to fight the triads; the moon landings; whether or not we're run by a cabal of lizard people; chemtrails; the shape of the earth; the whereabouts of the real Paul McCartney (and whether he's hanging out with Elvis and Tupac); who killed Jeffrey Epstein; 5G; what exactly is going on under Denver Airport.
You could be forgiven, though, for mistaking the film for some giant conspiracy theory, were you to wander down any of the digital rabbitholes devoted to understanding exactly what Tenet means. On Reddit, Christopher Nolan fans have spent the last few weeks furiously debating whether Neil is actually Kat and Sator's son. What would happen if a time inverted body came into contact with its normal-time-travelling counterpart. Even whether you could have sex while travelling backwards through time (conclusion: yes, but it's going to end very strangely).
To be fair, Tenet is a film that encourages these kinds of debates by offering up a bunch of questions, then providing precisely no answers. For all that the Tenet ending attempts to wrap a neat bow around all those time loops, as my colleague Olivia Ovenden put it, when the credits roll, what we're left with is a trailing ellipsis, rather than a full stop. As Travis Scott's theme song starts up, you're left wondering what the hell you just watched, and what happens next. How does the Protagonist found the Tenet organisation in the future? If what's happened has, as everyone keeps banging on about, happened, then surely everyone knew, all the time, how everything would unfurl? And, wait a minute, are there now two Elizabeth Debickis wandering the earth in the same timeline?
Whatever his flaws, Nolan's great skill as a director is in providing oddly dissatisfying blockbusters, where plots are left ragged, and you're unsure exactly what you just saw. This kind of open-ended filmmaking is normally the preserve of arthouse cinema, but Nolan sneaks them into films with Marvel-sized budgets. Does Inception end in a dream, or reality? When did Matthew McConaughey enter the black hole in Interstellar? And who was Alfred really looking at in the café the end of The Dark Knight Rises? These trailing ellipses make for films that live with you long after you leave the cinema. You puzzle them out in the shower, debate them with friends over too much red wine, get oddly angry when someone thinks they've got the right answer on Twitter.
This is anathema in today's franchise-obsessed blockbuster. To cue up the sequel you need to wrap everything up neatly by the credits, so that you can toss in a cliffhanger as your post-credits scene. But this is film as junk food; satisfying in the short-term and nutritionally empty. It's too easy to digest. Better to leave a film with something to chew on.
So here's the true explanation of what Tenet actually means: whatever you think it means in any given moment. It's a work of fiction based on logic that, though it nods its hat to science, is ultimately imaginary. Entropy can't be reversed, a gun can't catch a bullet, Robert Pattinson does not have a wardrobe full of neckerchiefs. It's fun to mull these things over but it sucks the joy out of that process when we demand precise answers to things that are deliberately muddled. As with Tenet's sound 'issues', the film's science is a way to convey ideas around identity and reality. It's a movie, not a peer-reviewed research paper. Nolan uses theoretical physics in the same way he used amnesia in Memento or the Joker's psychopathy in The Dark Knight: as engines to power the plot and place his characters in situations that test and challenge them. What the ending of Tenet means doesn't, ultimately, matter. Focus instead on the ride that gets you there.
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