The hero, named only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is recruited to thwart the plan of embittered Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) to destroy the world. Nolan’s fascination with temporal phenomena, which has been a thread running through all his films, here manifests itself in such devices as ‘time inversion’ ‘entropy reversal’ and ‘time pincer movements'.
The cast also includes Robert Pattinson as the Protagonist’s British ally, Elizabeth Debicki as Sator’s abused wife and Michael Caine, in his eighth Nolan movie, as a British intelligence officer. As Nolan himself advises, don’t treat this film like a puzzle to be solved, just sit back and enjoy the ride. And if you don’t understand every twist… it’s not the end of the world!