We go to Christopher Nolan movies for specific things: head-spinning twists, bombastic visual
effects, and big questions about the nature of reality. All of these come to the fore
in Tenet, and the result is naturally confusing.
Time, relativity, and perception of reality are concepts explored in many of Christopher
Nolan's films. Tenet is, in part, assembled from many little pieces of those previous
works, filtered through a new perspective like a kind of greatest hits reel.
It has the same sense of social responsibility and civic duty featured in his Batman trilogy.
It shares some reverse chronology elements with Memento. It at times evokes Dunkirk,
a war drama about the indomitable human spirit tested by unprecedented conflict. Interstellar
and Inception both involve time manipulation, though the effects in those movies are more
about relative acceleration of time into the future, where Tenet portrays time as being
flexible in both directions.
The plot of Tenet, as you might expect at this point, has a whole lot going on.
The basic idea is this: The nameless Protagonist, played by John David Washington, has been
recruited into a shadowy collective of people that can identify themselves by a hand sign
of interlaced fingers and the word "tenet."
Pieces of broken detritus are coming back through time, implying mass destruction from
some future global conflict. The Protagonist has proven himself trustworthy enough to assist
this loose conglomeration of insiders who are trying to understand and prevent... whatever
it is that's happening in the future.
We learn with the Protagonist that all the items arriving in the past are "inverted,"
meaning their entropy — the scientific concept of energy — is progressing thermodynamically
backwards relative to the past, which is of course itself moving toward the future. If
the balance of inverted objects ever becomes equal with the amount of forward-moving objects,
spacetime will be annihilated. No pressure, right?
The Protagonist secures the assistance of a CIA attache named Neil to get him to exotic
locales, meet people suspected of knowing more about "tenet," and ultimately follow
that chain back to the apparent source of the inverted items: Andrei Sator, who is said
to have a mysterious ability to communicate with the future. He's also able to grant the
quality of inversion through devices called "turnstiles" — machines that may or may
not be quantum-entangled, and that essentially let people and objects move backward through
time.
The Protagonist ultimately discovers that the main item they're chasing is the Algorithm,
nine physically connectable objects that encapsulate the mathematical concept by which inversion
is possible. The unnamed inventor of the Algorithm is said to have made these objects and scattered
them, video game-style, in the past, to keep the Algorithm's secret safe — and then she
killed herself.
Confused yet?
"Well, we'll try and keep up."
During the climax, which takes place in a former Soviet closed city, we are shown that
Neil and the Protagonist are placed on opposite sides of the so-called temporal pincer movement:
two combat teams, one inverted and one not, operating simultaneously in time to assist
each other in acquiring the Algorithm.
During the mission briefing, a military commander named Ives mentions there is also a turnstile
on site — another machine with which one can invert themselves in time. This fact is
not lost on Neil.
After Neil sees one of Sator's henchmen lay a tripwire on the battlefield, he tries to
warn the Protagonist before it's too late. When he fails, and the tripwire is set off,
he sneaks his way into the facility and passes through the enemy's turnstile just as the
Protagonist and Ives arrive underneath it to try and gain control of the Algorithm.
That's why he's able to get back in the Humvee and get to the top of the hill to pull Ives,
the Protagonist, and the Algorithm out from the pit.
The body on the other side of the locked gate in the pit is Neil, but another Neil — we
know because of the red string with a washer on the end, which we've been seeing throughout
the movie, and can only assume is a reference to the Chinese concept of the red string of
fate. The presence of that string, which the Protagonist sees on Neil's back when they
part ways, proves that Neil is also the man who saved the Protagonist with the inverted
bullet in the opening scene at the opera.
However, we never see how that Neil ends up at the gate. This is a sacrificial move on
Neil's part that occurs after we see his last scene — that's why the Protagonist tries
to stop him from getting on the helicarrier, and why Neil tells him that "what's happened,
happened," and that it's the "end" of their friendship for him.
The movie reveals Neil in pieces: acquaintance, ally, confidante, and ultimately a very old
friend to the Protagonist.
Looking back on the rest of the movie once you realize Neil's entire deal, it's suddenly
a more emotional film — Neil appears to struggle in some scenes not to be quite too
friendly, though he clearly wants to be. He knows the Protagonist loves Diet Coke, but
he'll pretend to be classy by claiming he likes club soda more — knowledge that isn't
the product of a dossier, but a long friendship whiled away at bars, post-mission.
Neil appears literally everywhere there are gaps in the Protagonist's plan — a place
he can't be, chasing an object he cannot reach, fighting an enemy that he cannot see or is
overpowered by. Knowing as we do from the end of the film that Neil has been operating
backwards through the Protagonist's life at this critical point in his history, that can
only mean that these two are the very best of friends, and it takes a massive amount
of trust and confidence to give someone you care about that mission, and even more courage
to be the person in charge of keeping someone safe.
"You've got something?" "You're not going to like it."
That's why the Protagonist is brought to tears realizing it — and why Neil doesn't mourn
walking away to what he can probably guess is his death. The Protagonist tried to stop
him from going because he cares about Neil, and that's all the reassurance Neil needed
in the universe that his effort was worth it.
When you learn that John David Washington's character is known only as the Protagonist,
it might sound like a gimmick at first. But like so many things in Nolan's films, the
choice is a deliberate one — and it makes a point about who the character is and where
he's going in his story.
Arms dealer Priya Singh makes the point to Washington's character that he
is a protagonist, not the protagonist, of this story. Her point seems correct in that
moment — there are indeed many people all working to either collect the Algorithm or
ensure it remains in separate pieces, and they all surely consider themselves to be
the heroes in their stories.
But the very end of the film upends everyone's expectations when our hero realizes that the
whole movie has, to some extent, been the product of his own grand design. When he meets
Priya in London for their final conversation, he tells her what he's realized. He hasn't
been working for Priya — they've both been working for a future version of him.
Washington becoming the Protagonist occurs in that moment, at the center of a practiced
spy's temporal pincer movement. He has the wisdom to recognize that he's in the middle
of a plot constructed by his own future self, executed with the help of people like Neil.
In achieving his task with the help of the people he trusts, he's ensured his own idealized
future, as well as a better outcome for the world he inhabits.
Tenet puts a ton of effort into its first half trying to convince the audience that
the Protagonist's failures are inevitable, and that Andrei Sator has all the cards in
his hands because of his connection across spacetime to the future.
We don't know who Sator was talking to. That's part of the point — all that matters is
that Sator has, and is obsessed with, maintaining control. His wife, his child, his money, his
business — and as it turns out, all of spacetime — can be under no one else's control but
his, all to do with it as he pleases.
Just before his death, Sator and the Protagonist have a heated exchange about his plan to die
and take the continuum with him, destroying all life. The Protagonist calls him selfish,
possessive, all kinds of names. Sator agrees, comparing himself to a god, and showing himself
to have no faith or belief in anyone or anything outside of himself.
According to what the future has told him, the Earth is a wreck, and the idea to assemble
the Algorithm is a plan to end the world as an act of mercy before it falls to what is
heavily implied will be a climate change disaster. Sator cannot conceive of a world beyond the
cruel one he sees coming. Rather than accept the idea that a global catastrophe may mar
his personal legacy, he's decided that when he dies, the whole of creation has got to
go with him.
Sator lucked into his position controlling the universe with a fitness tracker through
happenstance, and the very job that gave him this power — mucking with radioactive materials
— is likely the same one that gave him pancreatic cancer. His sense of control comes
from putting a gun to the head of everything that threatens him, so it's fitting that his
death is an ignoble and small one.
Kat, Sator's estranged wife, initially appears to be an accidental casualty brought into
the conflict as the Protagonist tries to worm his way closer to Sator and his operation.
As part of the overarching theme of control and self-actualization, her motivation is
seeing Sator dead.
She is kept as a gilded prisoner in the marriage because of the son she bore Sator; people,
especially his son, are possessions to him, and he tells Kat that she is free to leave
if she will agree to never see her son again.
As the climax arrives, her task is to keep Sator from triggering his dead man's switch
by schmoozing him on his yacht in Vietnam on the day he intends to end his life, thereby
undoing spacetime. Meanwhile the Protagonist, Neil, and a whole bunch of temporal soldiers
take the fight to a Soviet closed city to acquire the Algorithm. This is also the same
day Kat previously recalled seeing a woman, whom she assumed to be a mistress of Sator's,
dive from the yacht. That woman was, in fact, Kat herself after Sator was killed and the
Algorithm was secured; her past self saw her future self safe, sound, and free — the
way she desperately wanted to be.
The concept of time inversion was emphasized a lot in Tenet's marketing, but the movie's
not necessarily "about" time travel. It's a storytelling conceit used to underline a
much more basic idea: the future is uncertain for all of us, but if we want to maintain
a chance of it being a good one, we need to trust each other.
The Protagonist's mission only works because he trusts Kat and Neil and others acting in
good faith to do the best they can for the situation, themselves, and everything the
Protagonist hopes they will accomplish. They keep information from each other as an act
of love and respect — a relinquishing of control.
The Protagonist has the faith and belief Sator completely lacks — despite the fact that
Neil constantly says "what's happened, happened," that only goes as far as the individual experiencing
it. The collective future is always in play. The Protagonist attempts to kill himself with
cyanide at the beginning of the movie out of this exact obligation to others.
This selfless gesture is the act that qualifies him to learn about Tenet — the organization
he himself will establish in the far future, which works to secure the greatest good for
the greatest number of people. He's like a temporal Batman, basically, and while it's
an allegory so huge it comes close to falling in on itself, it's meant to apply to all of
us.
At the end of the movie, Ives is the one who presents the idea of splitting the Algorithm
into pieces with Neil and the Protagonist, in order to keep it safe and unassembled.
This clashes with the outlook of Priya Singh, who believed the assembled Algorithm would
empower the past against the future. To her, a war was inevitable, already being waged
against the past. And that is why she had to die.
By the end of the movie, we can understand that "tenet" is a secretive concept sent back
through time by the Protagonist to ferret out those who would misuse the power of inversion
and the Algorithm.
Tenet, as the Protagonist conceives of it, is a test, and the test is learning what you,
given the power, would do with the Algorithm if you had it assembled before you. If you're
motivated by control, as Priya and Sator were, you become a "loose end," and that's dangerous,
because loose ends and their motivations destroy reality. Defending reality — defined in
the movie by Neil as the uncertainty of existing in the moment — takes principled people,
whose central philosophy -- or tenet -- is to decentralize power. The ultimate lessons
of the movie are that no man is a god, and there is always hope for the future when people
work together.
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