15 Sci-fi Movie Characters Who Deserve Their Own Spin-Off

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was the first new film most of us saw after the initial UK COVID lockdowns, and it delivered the cinema of scale that we had been sorely missing for months, with OTT setpieces, nigh-impossible camerawork, and dialogue that could barely be heard over the explosions and Ludwig Göransson’s synth crescendos.

We join CIA operative the Protagonist (John David Washington) as he is inducted by Neil (Robert Pattinson) into covert organisation Tenet, which uses objects with inverted entropy to move backwards through time. But they’re not the only people who know about the objects, as Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) is communicating with his future self, and using the information he receives to build the Algorithm, a device designed to invert the entropy of the world and destroy its past.

Nolan's films are always about complex characters wrestling with either complex ideas, complex plots, or both, but not all his characters get their depths explored in the process. While present for much of the movie, Neil remains an enigma. Badass, noble, and stoically tight-lipped, he never reveals anything he knows about the Protagonist, who recruited him, trained him and has been doing missions with him for years, but which the Protagonist can’t remember because, well, for him it hasn’t happened yet. And it is these missions that would make the perfect fodder for another film, putting Neil front and centre and allowing him more space to shine.