'Tenet' Isn't An 'Inception' Sequel – It's A 'Dark Knight' Sequel

Warning: don't go any further if you don't want Tenet spoilers. There are a lot of Tenet spoilers here.

I started feeling a bit strange while watching Tenet for the first time this week. It wasn't in the running backwards, catching-the-bullet sense that the inverted characters were presumably feeling though.

Something in the washed-out, dusty, green-grey colouring, and the unstoppable force of a madman with nothing to lose and the power to destroy everything, tickled something in my brain. As the Protagonist swung out on the fire engine ladder to break into a lorry, the deja vu turned into a realisation.

Hang on. The Protagonist pulls off an audacious heist on an armed convoy, and disguises himself as a member of the emergency services. Remind you of any supervillains? Any at all?

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Now, obviously I'm not saying Tenet exists in the same universe or that it's stealth-sequel or any of the other slightly weasel-ish ways filmmakers have found to piggyback on existing intellectual property, even if Bruce Wayne is one of the few people on Earth who could afford to construct his own entropy-reversing turnstile. Filmmakers have their little flourishes. Sometimes that's all there is to it.

Some of the little threads between the two films are incidental, and certainly things you'd completely ignore if you didn't know it was a Christopher Nolan behind the camera. But it did get me thinking that if you strip away all the time-turning, the convoluted globe-trotting and the inscrutable dialogue, and there's a core of fundamental Nolanisms from The Dark Knight that he seems to be returning to in Tenet.

(There might well be more than I've listed here. I couldn't hear about 40 per cent of the dialogue, which is definitely less dialogue than I'd have hoped for having spent £15.)

Melinda Sue Gordon

There's that sickly greenish palette that bleeds through the Joker's big opening bank raid in The Dark Knight, the emergency services being used as cover for something untoward, but there's something deeper too.

Since making three Batman films with a Big Bad to fight against (which was a sensible dramatic decision; it'd be hard for Batman to smack an abstract concept in the face) Nolan has avoided a conventional bad guy. Dunkirk's tagline told us time was the enemy, chasing our protagonists down as its window slowly but surely closed; in Interstellar, though, it was the wide-open foreverness and unpredictablity of time that threw Matthew McConaughey's plans around.

Nolan also loves the idea of doubles: it's maxed out in The Prestige, of course, but The Dark Knight set up Batman and the Joker as "what happens when the Unstoppable Force meets the Immovable Object," as the Joker put it. They're opposites who will never stop tussling. In Tenet, characters see their inverted selves and, at one point, the Protagonist literally fights himself.

Kenneth Branagh's Alexei Sator and the Joker mirror each other too. They'd get on like a gigantic yacht on fire. They're two nihilists, but they have opposing interpretations of how to deal with how strange and uncertain life can be. The Joker embraces chaos, throwing events against each other to show everyone has a breaking point. Sator's plan – to save Earth from ecological catastrophe is to destroy the universe and time itself – is about control. If he can't have her, no-one can. Some men just want to watch the world un-burn.

So what does any of it mean? The way Nolan's looped back onto themes he last visited more than a decade ago is really about how the world's changed since then. The Dark Knight trilogy was very consciously a post-9/11 American story, brooding on the havoc that uncontrollable fanatics had wrought; Tenet is much more concerned with the concentration of power and control in the hands of the ultra-wealthy. The threat in both still comes from control being lost to people hiding in plain sight, but Nolan's more worried about conspiracies from above than below.