Tenet

Christopher Nolan returns with his latest mind- and time-bending opus, Tenet; while it claims to be coming to theatres, the obvious unknown is when that might really be. Regardless, for the time being we have its latest trailer, which musically plays on its central conceit of time inversion in a couple of subtle and clever ways.

Apart from that extenuating consideration, however, the trailer for Tenet offers mostly fairly standard epic music fare for its soundtrack, with the possible exception that it may be musically following along with the central conceit of the film. In the world Tenet, it appears that time can be inverted—in several instances, we see a sequence playing out within the world as if it were recorded and played backwards, but this “reverse” motion is moving forward through our perception of the flow of time. It’s a concept that perhaps obviously ought to be seen to be better understood. 

For those who may be familiar with music theory, the chord progression for the main motif for the first minute of the trailer follows a G major / C minor / D7 / Eb cycle. This progression offers a mix of consistent shifting and confounding of the tonal centre while also retaining a sense of internal logic, arguably music like the manipulation of our perception of the rules of time happening in the trailer’s visual narrative. 

The musically trained audioviewer may not expect the C minor chord, which borrows from the parallel G minor key; the D7 and Eb, similarly, remain within G minor, but this D7 chord resolves deceptively to the relative major of G minor, which would be Eb major. Finally, the move from Eb major back to G major is another dramatic shift, with the G note serving as a common tone to hold the other disparate chords together in the listener’s ear. This oscillation between parallel major and minor keys is a signature move in the toolkit of epic music composers, and it works especially well here as we see a corresponding oscillation between scenes with a regular sequence of time and those presenting inverted time.

The arrangement also strikes a rich balance between synthesized notes and orchestral tones, with one or the other piquing the attention of the ear at different points such that one doesn’t tire too quickly of the intense arpeggiations of the strings or the reverberant oscillations of the sequencers. Note also the midpoint of the trailer, where--at 1:20--the sound of the kettle opening is outlandishly emphasized, sounding more like a clock. 

In the second half of the trailer, more emphasis is granted to the percussion and lower end of the synth arrangement, dipping into an almost gratuitous use of triplets. Notice also at 1:50 how the soundtrack itself appears to sound almost as if played in reverse; this presages our realization that the flipped car crash on the highway is playing out in inverted time—and the music synchs with the car’s assured landing.

Notice also the backwards-sounding percussion at about the 2:05 mark, and again at 2:24, with the attack envelope of the instruments obviously inverted—it’s subtle, so as not to be overplayed or gimmicky, but it’s definitely present. There’s arguably little question that the readily identifiable reversed sounds of various musical instruments are being leveraged to help aid the sense of time and motion agnosticism at the centre of the film. 

At the time of writing, Tenet is on track to arrive in theatres on July 17th.

— Curtis Perry