25 Greatest Film Deaths This Century

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is as confusing as it is loud, but it has all the elements of the filmmaker's best work, bringing together the puzzle-like construction of movies like Memento with the epic stunt and setpieces of the Dark Knight trilogy.

We join CIA operative the Protagonist (John David Washington) as he is recruited by Tenet, a secret organisation that uses inverted entropy to move backwards through time. The Protagonist’s contact is Neil (Robert Pattinson), a time-served operative of Tenet, who brings him on board to stop Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who is communing with the future and planning to detonate a bomb to invert the entropy of the world and destroy its past.

In the epic final sequence, time is used in all directions to thwart the antagonists’ plans, but the Protagonist still comes face-to-face with death, and it's thanks to an inverted operative’s intervention that he survives. It is only after all is said and done that we learn the operative was Neil, sacrificing himself to save the Protagonist - and to see him alive after his death, but unable to be saved from his fate, is a new kind of emotional pain.

The one saving grace is that, although dead, Neil’s journey is far from over from the Protagonist’s perspective, who heads back in time to found Tenet and recruit his saviour. Poetic, and a significant death that goes overlooked when people recall the admittedly bombastic, setpiece-heavy film.