Beyond Two Worlds: The Breakdown of Tenet

 

Tenet. A Christopher Nolan film that takes all the scientific ideas of his previous films in the genre, and mixes them together until you get this work of art that is unlike anything else. When crafting this film, he needed actors who could not only handle the material but can make reality out of something that could never scientifically happen. That is why he found his frequent collaborators Sir Kenneth Branagh and Sir Michael Caine and paired them with rising stars John David Washington, Elisabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson, Himesh Patel, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Tenet is a film that unless you are really into science, you will not understand at first glance. It is a movie that takes multiple watches. That brings me to a major question. What is Tenet?

The main point that many people who have watched Tenet have is that it is a time-travel movie. That is false. It is a time manipulation movie which is very different. The film deals with time inversion. The Protagonist, the unnamed character played by John David Washington is explained the idea of inversion by a scientist named Barbara played by Clémence Poésy. About 15 minutes into the film, Barbara makes loose bullets jump off of a table and into her hands. The bullets moved backward in time as Barbara herself was stable at that moment. To better understand inversion let's look at the film's bad guy. Andrei Sator, played by Sir Kenneth Branagh, created these temporal turnstiles that are housed in large spaces and are color coded to know how time works for not only John David's character but other characters who pass through them. Red is for someone going forwards in time and blue is for those going backward in time. John David partners up with Neil, played by Robert Pattinson to get close to Sator's wife Kat played by Elisabeth Debicki. Sator, an arms dealer is blackmailing his wife over a fake painting and is working with an arms dealer named Priya played by Bollywood actress Dimple Kapadia, who is the one who got John David involved with the Tenet organization in the first place.

Tenet is a movie where the present is at war with the future over climate change. Time in this film works of the "closed-loop" theory which in essence means that everything in the past has already happened. The reason why the humans of the future are at war with the humans of the present is that the present humans have destroyed the planet, making it nearly uninhabitable for future generations of humans. Sator is there because the future people think he is the answer to the problem. They want him to assemble a device(an algorithm) and trigger the algorithm, causing the end of the world in the present time. The Tenet organization is a counter group whose sole mission is to ensure that the end of the world is averted. 

The Protagonist and Neil work with a character named Ives played by Aaron Taylor Johnson to disarm a bomb and the doomsday algorithm. Ives is a time traveler like the two of them. The future versions of all 3 men try to stop Sator's men with Neil dying after inverting himself as a sacrifice. The future version of the Protagonist sees a dead body with a backpack with a ring on it. The dead body belongs to the version of Neil that just inverted. By the end of the movie, Neil realizes he is going to die down in the tunnel where the algorithm is and so he bids farewell knowing that this is just the beginning of his relationship with The Protagonist. Only that will be years later for Neil. 

The end of the movie is where things come into focus but also where viewers are left scratching their heads. Tenet was founded by The Protagonist. He had already saved the world, he just needed to be inverted through time to make sure that Sator and those he worked for did not cause the end of the world successfully. The characters of Tenet are inverted meaning they go forward and backward in time at a constant pace and the same goes for inanimate objects. Neil works for Tenet as well but he was recruited by a much older version of the Protagonist. 

Tenet as a word is a palindrome, it is spelled the same forwards as it is backward. Time in the movie works the same way. Present and future events happen at the same time in two directions but are part of the exact same event. Where the real palindrome happens is the whole movie itself. The movie starts out at an opera house in Kviv on the 14th. The Protagonist is being inverted in the forward direction at this point. Sator later shoots his wife Kat, and the Protagonist inverts in the backward direction with the date still being the 14th. The beginning and end of Tenet are happening simultaneously. Backward or forwards, Tenet is telling the exact same story.