“Try not to comprehend it. Sense it.” The intricate plot of Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which he refers to as a “temporal pincer movement,” may have been sufficiently explained by hearing that statement for certain viewers, those who were “feeling it,” to follow along.
As most of the characters in “Tenet” are at best underdeveloped and at worst mere cyphers, plot with a capital “P” and sheer blockbuster spectacle do take precedence here. Despite this, there are some emotional beats between them, and if you can connect with those, you might be able to get the gist of “Tenet” without having to make diagrams or get bogged down in the finer points.
Of course, there’s a strong probability that if you’re here, you still have some unanswered doubts concerning “Tenet’s” conclusion. The first half of Nolan’s movie is a rather simple affair. Then, a room is revealed, divided by a “proving window,” with characters speaking simultaneously in both the forward and backward directions on either side of the glass. It’s quite psychedelic.
After that, some viewers might be utterly perplexed (or even before that). You might wonder, “Who are those folks battling in gas masks?” How come they are fighting? In addition, why does John David Washington’s anonymous protagonist battle himself?
Naturally, the good men are engaged in battle to defend the world. The protagonist battles himself since he is unaware of his opponent in the present, while the time-inverted protagonist in the future is merely attempting to reach the Turnstile device in order to travel even further back in time.
Already perplexed? It might be best if we just go through the Turnstile at this point and return to “Tenet” and its conclusion (with spoilers, of course).
An Expression of Faith in the Mechanics
In reality, the Protagonist recruited him, as Neil reveals. He responds, “You have a future in the past. The Protagonist and Ives are able to seize the Algorithm and flee before the required ticking time bomb (because: Hollywood?) blasts them sky high thanks to Neil’s future/past sacrifice in the cage and the current lifeline he gives from a car outside the tunnel.
Neil’s past and present deaths bring to mind what he stated to us when we first met him: “The issue is not with time. The challenge is making it out alive.” When his present self and the protagonist part ways, Neil comments, “For me, this is the end of a beautiful friendship,” in an apt inversion of the famous “Casablanca” line.
Ives departs with his share of the disassembled algorithm, knowing that he will eliminate Neil and the protagonist if he ever catches up with them in order to prevent the world-threatening information contained in the algorithm’s code from ever being discovered. He concludes the movie by declaring, “This whole operation’s a temporal pincer,” as he walks away. It’s a nod from screenwriter Nolan, whose name is a palindrome with just one extra letter.
In a sense, “Tenet” rhymes similarly or in a slant. Even though it may make sense in its own head, not all of it completely aligns with what viewers in the “cheap seats” of the opera house may aspire for in a clear film storyline.
At the very end, the protagonist—who now recognises himself as the operation’s leader—answers Kat’s call and protects her from Priya, an arms dealer and renegade Tenet organisation member (Dimple Kapadia). We’ve both been working for me, the protagonist says to Priya before leaving.
In keeping with Nolan’s style, “Tenet” layers puzzlement inside of entertainment and pincers within of puzzles, much like “Inception” did with dreams inside of dreams. What’s happened, happened, according to Neil, is “an expression of trust in the mechanics of the world.” Whether or if the spectator is willing to just sit back, roll with the Freeport jumbo plane catastrophe, and turn their brain off before it gets fried may determine whether or not they have faith in the mechanics of Nolan’s plot.
Bungee-Jumpable Caverns of Exposition
Does “Tenet” have any story gaps? If so, can you “bungee jump” over them? Ask Robert Pattinson if you want an answer. That word is used by his character, Neil, and, like the protagonist, we’re not even sure it’s a legitimate word. Neil, on the other hand, is rather knowledgeable about some things, such as the Protagonist’s inability to consume alcohol while working, which is how he knows to get him a Diet Coke when they first meet. Later, Neil’s foresight is brought up once more.
While “Tenet” does stick to the disguised-and-muffled conceit of earlier Nolan movies from the 2010s, it also makes an effort to explain its time inversion principles to the audience through intelligent dialogue. The actual bungee jumping, so to speak, takes place in exposition caverns. The protagonist and Neil can be seen walking and conversing on several occasions, as well as clutching strap handles on public transportation and expressing themselves more.
The Protagonist is briefed by a lab worker (Clémence Poésy) on catching a bullet versus shooting it and informed that the inverted objects they are gathering are “the wreckage of a coming battle,” among other humourless info dumps. However, the film maintains a drip-feed of lucidity so that we can understand the stakes of the Protagonist’s goal despite its thick dialogue, backward fights and vehicle chases, and mind-bending causal loops.
In terrifying words, he is “working to prevent World War III.” In the meantime, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), the resident Bond villain, is assembling the nine pieces of the Algorithm that would enable him to “invert the entropy of the world.” “Everyone and everything that has ever lived will be suddenly obliterated” if Sator is successful.
Even my son?” queries Kat, Sator’s resentful wife (Elizabeth Debicki).
Yes, ma’am, and your son too.
If He Can’t Have It, No One Can
Warner Bros. Sator is essentially a solipsist who is genocidally selfish. We discover that he has spoken with future inhabitants, who, like those in “Interstellar,” are mentioned but never seen and serve the same dubious role as movie gods.
The grandfather paradox, according to which a time traveller may theoretically prevent their own birth by assassinating their own grandpa, is not accepted by these unseen individuals and participants in the palindromic game “Tenet.” However, they do seem to think that by destroying the past, they may stop the disastrous repercussions of climate change from happening in the future. One of the characters in the future is a scientist who the film compares to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic bomb and, ironically enough, is the subject of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film “Oppenheimer,” starring Cillian Murphy. This scientist allegedly created the algorithm before committing suicide.
Sator, who is already terminally ill from cancer, intends to follow suit. In one scene, he threatens Kat while pronouncing the worst Sweethearts candy slogan ever, “If I can’t have you, no one else can,” with his trademark Russian accent. This is true for both Kat and the entire world, which will be destroyed the moment Sator passes away because he has equipped himself with a dead man’s switch. The fitness tracker he has on his wrist connects it to the Algorithm.
The protagonist’s first attempt to invert himself to reach one of the relics ends with him upside-down in a burning car, suffering from the opposite of hypothermia. The protagonist, Neil, and Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), come up with a new strategy to reverse themselves a full 10 days because Sator now possesses all nine parts of the algorithm.
Where Ten Meets neT
It’s no accident that the word “ten” sounds like it’s been smushed together in two distinct directions in the title of “Tenet.” Kat recalls watching an unidentified woman dive off her husband’s yacht early in the film. It turns out that this was a past version of herself who had travelled through time to stop Sator before he could commit himself. The need for inverted people to wear oxygen masks is established by “Tenet” because “normal air won’t pass through the membrane of inverted lungs,” which creates a potential plot hole.
Because she isn’t wearing a mask, the Kat who delays Sator before shooting him herself doesn’t pass for her previous self. To give her more time to return to the yacht in Vietnam, the protagonist reveals that Kat is staying back an extra day. She most likely entered the Turnstile to the past, exited it again, remained there, and then entered it once more, this time travelling forward.
The protagonist, Neil, and Ives lead an attack on Sator’s deserted hometown in Russia while Kat is present on the yacht. When two color-coded teams—the red team moving ahead and the blue team travelling backward—converge on the town, it creates a temporal pincer movement. While the protagonist and Ives split apart and enter an underground tunnel to retrieve the algorithm, bazooka-blasted buildings reconstruct themselves among the commotion of the battlefield.
They come to Sator’s goon and a disguised body with a red thread protruding from its pocket at the end of the tunnel. According to Looper, the string may be a reference to the Chinese Red Thread of Fate, which connects those who are meant to cross paths.
We quickly discover that Neil’s corpse is in the lockout cage of the tunnel because he conducted (and will do) a smaller one-man temporal pincer movement inside the larger one that occurred on the battlefield. Neil is a character with numerous incarnations, and he was the enigmatic ally in a mask who rescued the protagonist in the opera house at the beginning of the film.
