Tenet Trailer Breakdown: Christopher Nolan whips up another visual puzzle and teases with a piece of it 

If the new trailer of Tenet leaves you more bewildered than before and you think that there is something you don’t understand, well, you are not alone. Nolan’s trick is to make you think that you are missing something while in reality there isn’t enough to fully grasp what’s going on in the universe of Tenet. Understanding that the trailer isn’t a puzzle in itself but only a piece is the trick.

We hear lines like ‘time inversion’ and ‘this reversing the flow of time..’ and see John David Washington jumping falling in reverse from a building, catching the bullet in the gun, and the car crash that happens in reverse. As you try to quickly deem this time-bending phenomenon a superpower, you get a ‘no’ from Nolan in the form of a witty meta line from Robert Pattinson referring to Dark Knight Rises’s mid-air flight crash - “Don’t be so dramatic.”

What you can glean from the trailer is that Washington’s character, armed with this time-bending capability, has to save the world from something worse than Armageddon. Dimple Kapadia says, “There are people in the future who need us...who need a Tenet.” So, the film could be about altering the present or the past to save the future, but there are hints that it won’t involve time travel.

We are in exactly the same scenario that we were a decade ago when the Inception trailer astounded us. We didn’t fully grasp what we had seen but we knew it is something that’s going to blow us away. Even after two trailers, Nolan hasn’t given away much. All he still has for you is just a word: Tenet.