10 Small Details You Missed In Tenet

The most overt (yet overlooked) reference to Nolan's filmography is brilliant in its simplicity and narrative relevance. Memento, the auteur's sophomore effort, is similar to Tenet in its use of time reversal imagery and non-linear storytelling.

This is notably seen in the manner the bullet fired from Leonard's (Guy Ritchie) gun as well as inverted bullets return to their respective firearms. At first glance, they seem unrelated beyond their styling but Nolan himself confirmed the reference in a December 2020 interview with Complex Magazine (via Collider).

"I had this notion of just a bullet getting sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of a gun. It's an image that I had in Memento to demonstrate the structure of that movie, but I always harbored this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that. In a way, an idea comes to the fore when the time is right for it, and it's a hard process to quantify, so I was doing all these other things."

In addition to this, both films feature protagonists who are seemingly out of their depth in an unconventional setting, but are later revealed to be the architects of the events that play out in the narrative.