All of Christopher Nolan's non Batman movies take place in the same universe
Organized by timeline (With lots of flashbacks, skip forwards and back, and some filmed in black and white, because that's the director we're talking about.). The world is similar to, but not quite, our universe. This will spoil all of the movies mentioned.
- In the late 1800s, Tesla invents a machine that can duplicate objects while attempting to create teleportation. Since the original machine is as much art as science, it accidentally works without anyone really understanding how it does so. Because this and the machine being destroyed, it takes some time to reproduce. It turns out that duplicated objects aren't perfect and degrade far faster, over a small number of years even if maintained well. Angier's clone (He is in fact a clone no matter how the machine works) was able to live just fine through Borden's trial, but was in fact suffering some health problems which would have killed him if he's survived past the movie, so due to the energy and maintenance costs of the machine, it isn't used. But as people work out how it operates, other uses are found.
- This information is kept secret, so life for most of society continues as normal. Including world war 2, where the Dunkirk evacuation and nuclear bomb development proceed about the same way they did on our own world, but with a few different people involved.
- Same deal with some modern day events, such as a man's wife being murdered and giving him anterograde amnesia, a couple of detectives going to Alaska to help solve some murders, and a London man getting pulled into a deadly con game.
- Tesla's attempt at teleportation turned out to involve a mix of time manipulation and the use of a 5th dimension. The machine was supposed to work by having electricity pull pieces of the object quickly, send them through a 5th dimension and back in time, and reassemble them very quickly at the receiver. However, the device was instead "mapping" the original object, and the receiver was assembling an entirely new object using information sent back in time through the 5th dimension. Which wasn't perfect, and needed to pull lots of energy from the 5th dimension which was not available large scale, so mass duplication was impossible. However, other uses could be found. One of these is a machine for synchronizing people's thoughts, with an appropriate chemical and a transmitter/receiver of 5th dimensional information, people's thoughts could be transmitted. Transmission is inefficient, only a small amount of information gets through. In waking life, this small bit of information gets swamped by everything else the brain is taking in. While sleeping, however, the input is enough to create predictable dreams and share them amongst people. When at least two people are sharing information, they tend to synchronize everything, which results in a shared, rules based dream with few oddities, consistent for everyone. The developers don't fully understand how it works, but after some adjustments and trials, they develop the dream sharing we see in inception.
- Because the dream's information exists in the 5th dimension and time manipulation is involved, dreams can actually experience time at different speeds, though the exact mechanisms aren't fully understood.
- In one experiment before all this was properly worked out, the dream created a recursive sequence of different sizes of its events. The man in doodlebug experienced one of these dreams.
- Eventually, environmental disaster starts. It seems to be linked to global warming in some way, but takes the form of a blight that destroys plants. However, a wormhole is discovered leading to several planets, leading to the events of interstellar.
- As the blight gets worse during the endurance's trip exploring all the planets, Eastern Europe's equivalent of NASA is taking a different route. Time reversing has been develop... uh, partly developed and partly sent back.....mostly sent back....time travel is weird, o.k. Anyway, backwards time had been made to work somehow, and the algorithm created at some point by someone. Eastern European (Russia? Multinational? Poland? Baltics? Doesn't matter too much) secret researchers get their hands on it, and decide in desperation to send the algorithm back to reverse time direction and stop the problem. Its a desperate move, but so is the endurance thing, and they find their helper in Andrei Sator. Leading to the events of Tenet.
- Some time inversion is used in food shortage conflicts, some is used in fights between Tenet and other organizations. This is where random bits of inverted material come from.
- Because time acts weirdly when the 5th dimension gets involved, it can be used in turnstiles. A turnstile in all dimensions just forms a loop when used, taking one time direction, rotating it 180 through the appropriate dimensions, and outputting reversed time objects. The machines are designed to appear normal to us, but in practice the inner cylinders/chambers are being sent through these dimensions. Airlocks and some shielding (including opaque walls) prevent people from seeing or feeling any extradimensional weirdness. A second set of cylinders is looped the opposite way, to make sure the turnstile always has some useful chambers ready to go.
- Tenet or equivalent gets to ride the transport ships like anyone else. Eventually, all the secret scientific work on 5 dimensions becomes more well known, and they develop the ability to make humans 5-dimensional. With time inversion plus the general weirdness of time, 5 dimensional humans are able to help their past selves.
- As for future movies? We'll see. More WW2 movies will be easy to incorporate, weird Sci-fi stuff might take more work.
If you want to incorporate Batman
- This world's geography is slightly different. Which results in New York City having somewhat different geography with different sets of islands, being called Gotham officially, annexing the full metro area, and having architecture more like Chicago. In this world, Batman uses existing military technology as shown, and the rest of the world still works more or less as normal. Gotham's events make the news, but aren't directly relevant to Leonard Shelby, Cobb, Dormer, or the other character's lives, if the batman events even took place before the events in those movies. Later characters, like interstellar or Tenet, consider batman a curiosity or interesting bit of history, but not one that effects their lives much. (New York Yankees in interstellar are named after the state, obviously. Probably play in Albany or such, but can draw on gotham money but present a cleaner image.)
