Time flowing backwards, changing the past, and stopping World War 3.
How can a secret agent do all 3, when terrorists from the future are doing everything to stop
him?
I’ll be explaining the story and diving into the possibilities of time travel.. and
THIS... is how to beat the Time Inversions in TENET.
We start off in an Opera House in the Ukraine, following a CIA agent whose mission is to
extract an asset.
The character has no name so I'll be calling him John.
Terrorists have stormed the Opera house, taking everyone hostage and planting bombs.
John finds himself trying to disarm a bomb and nearly gets killed by a terrorist, but
is saved when a masked man kills the terrorist by firing a bullet in reverse.
What the hell is going on?
The masked man disappears, as John is able to destroy the bombs, save the hostages, but
gets kidnapped and tortured by the terrorists.
To protect state secrets, he kills himself with a cyanide pill, only to find himself
waking up on a boat.
Where his superior tells him he is now part of a top secret mission, involving the mysterious
code word: Tenet.
Landing in Scandinavia, he meets a scientist who is studying objects from the future, which
have somehow had their time reversed or ‘inverted’.
These Inverted objects will always move backwards in time, for example bullets will go back
into the gun instead of coming out of it.
Now the implications behind this are freaking awesome.
There are so many ways for someone to take advantage of this, not just firing a bullet
in reverse.
For example, I’d go full Walter White here and combine sodium and chlorine gas to make
salt, because when that process is inverted, it makes a timed gas bomb.
You could do the same thing with hydrogen and oxygen to make water, which in reverse,
will blow up.
Cool right?
These objects are believed to be debris from World War 3 in the far off future which John
has to stop.
He decides he must get to the bottom of who is making the inverted bullets, and why.
He goes to Mumbai and teams up with a British agent named Neil who seems like he knows more
than he’s letting on.
Together they break into the home of an arms dealer, whose wife tells them that the inverted
bullets are being made by Andrei Sator, a rich Russian arms dealer.
John finds out that Sator has a wife named Kat and gets into contact with her.
She tells him about Sator’s import/export facility in Freeport.
Neil and John tour the facility, discover there is a secret vault and make a plan to
break in.
Later, we see their plan in action as Neil and John are in the facility at the exact
same time that a plane crashes into Freeport.
Triggering the facilities factory reset causing it to go under lockdown.
They are able to break into the vault, entering this room that’s split with a divider with
these two machines at the end.
This room houses a ‘turnstile’: a machine that inverts the time of anything that comes
through it.
They notice that there are holes in the glass divider made by bullets from the future that
haven’t been fired yet, then a man in a SWAT uniform jumps out and attacks John except
he’s moving… backwards - he’s inverted!
At the same time, his normal time counterpart runs past Neil who chases after him.
If I was going to fight an inverted person, I’d ALWAYS check if they are hurt: cuts,
bruises, limps, if they are not: Get Out.
And Run Away.
Why?
Because you can tell if you won or lost a future fight depending on how injured they
appear.
if they’re in reverse, you’ve already hurt them in the fight that’s about to happen.
This might be the start of the fight for you, but it’s the end of the fight for them.
They learn that the metal box John saw in the opera house is full of plutonium and heading
to Italy.
Which leads him to Sator who he meets on his yacht and talks to him about the plutonium.
He tells Sator the plutonium will be passing through Tallinn.
Why he wants it isn’t clear but it’s linked to a metal drum filled with gold bars and
papers with his name on them.
Papers and gold that had been sent into the past.
John leaves the boat and reunites with Neil and a team of agents in Tallinn.
They steal the case of plutonium from a convoy, and suddenly Sator and his men drive by to
take the plutonium, inverted and wearing masks.The reason why they need the masks is because
their breathing is reversed, breathing out oxygen instead of in.
If they breathe in normal air, they’ll suffocate.
An obvious weakness in inverted people is their dependency for the masks.
The first thing I would try to do is rip them off or break them.
Sator threatens to kill Kat if John doesn’t give up the case of plutonium, so John tosses
it over to Sator, as a mysterious silver car crashes and inverts itself.
Sator escapes, Neil and his team get caught in a shootout, while Kat and John get taken
by Sator’s men.
Inverted people are in the future, so they know what you are going to do.
Therefore, negotiating with them is risky since they know you’re every move.
But you still have one advantage.
Keeping a spy satellite overhead can help you track when and where someone has been
inverted.
You can set up traps ‘ahead of time’ like diverting traffic, spike strips, or even sabotage
the supply of masks and oxygen tanks if you know where they are.
Sator’s men drag John to a warehouse where he talks to an inverted Sator inside the turnstile’s
divided rooms.
The Russian man threatens to kill his own wife if John doesn’t tell him where the
case of plutonium went.
Kat gets shot and John lies about where he left it, but gets blindsided as a normal-time
Sator appears, asking the exact same questions.
Suddenly, a team of special forces raid the compound, led by Ives who rescues John in
the nick of time.
Sator was using a trick called the ‘temporal pincer maneuver’ where a team inverts themselves
and tell their normal time counterparts knowledge of the future for the upper hand.
Something Sator and his men did to find out more about the plutonium robbery.
I might try to go one step further, and use this method against someone, by pretending
to be one of the inverted soldiers and tell the normal-time soldier false information
that leads them into a pre-set trap.
This of course only would work if you knew they were planning a temporal pincer maneuver.
Man..
This is getting crazy..
John, Kat, and Neil invert themselves to reverse Kat’s gunshot wound which heals her, while
John goes back into the past to help himself out.
Driving the same mysterious silver car we saw before, going back to stop himself from
handing off the plutonium.
But we see that his past self pulled a trick, tossing an empty box to the inverted Sator
and the plutonium into the silver car.
The car crashes and Sator takes the plutonium and sets the car on fire causing an explosion.
But because John is inverted, he goes through hypothermia and has to go to the hospital.
When he wakes up, he realizes one very key thing: The past cannot be changed, it can
only be turned back.
This is a very important difference, but there is still a way you can beat it.
Defeating an outcome that has already happened will not work, but creating an outcome that
has yet to occur is possible.
I would try to make someone in normal time believe that things are destined to go one
way, tricking them into action for a specific outcome.
This kind of strategy needs careful planning, and some knowledge of the future from your
inverted self, but definitely a way to win.
Dressed in SWAT gear, John and Neil sneak Kat into Freeport to revert themselves to
normal time just as the plane crashes.
John gets blown away by an inverted explosion and dragged into a fist fight with his past
self.
Escaping, Kat, Neil, and John make it back to the turnstile where they are reverted back
to normal time.
John finds out that Sator plans on inverting the entire world by combining the 9 pieces
of inversion technology including the plutonium to create what they call ‘the algorithm’.
Hooking this inversion bomb up so that if he dies, the bomb blows up.
A bomb he’s keeping in the ruins of an old Soviet city.
The plan is for Kat to distract Sator before he kills himself long enough that Neil and
John can take out the algorithm from the bomb.
Making sure it won’t invert the world when it explodes.
The two field agents link up with Ives and his spec-ops team to perform a temporal pincer
maneuver: Neil inverts himself with the blue team and John goes in with the present-time
red team.
Something very crucial they bring up is when working with an inverted team mate: if you
plan on meeting up with them and they don’t show, it’s a clear sign that something bad
happened to them.
Remember, by the time the inverted team mate links up with you, they should’ve survived
and done their job so if they don’t show, they probably died.
It doesn’t mean mission abort!
But it does mean, be very careful.
The teams split up and enter the city where Sator is hiding the bomb.
John and Ives go inside the complex, but can’t reach the bomb to disarm it because the gate
is locked.
They get ambushed by one of Sator’s men who begins to put the algorithm into the bomb.
Kat kills Sator to avoid running into her past self and kick starts the dead-man’s
switch.
At the same time the dead inverted man accidentally gets shot by Sator’s man, and immediately
gets up, unlocks the gate, and runs out, because he’s closing it in reverse.
This dead guy coming back to life actually gives me an idea: you could pretend to be
a dead inverted soldier when you’re actually a normal one.
Since the guards are thinking you’re probably inverted, you could easily ambush them.
Or setup inverted distractions, like going through a door and locking it which would
draw the guards in seeing the door or gate suddenly fly open.
John and Ives make it through the gate, get the algorithm out of the bomb and escape just
before it blows up, as Neil comes to rescue them.
Ives, Neil and John agree to spread the pieces of the algorithm around the world but John
realizes that Sator will find these pieces in the past.
Not only that but he finds out he inverted himself way into the past to recruit Neil
for this mission, that Neil was the man in the opera house and who opened the gate, AND
that John was the one who started TENET.
This whole movie was one GIANT temporal pincer maneuver set up by himself and Neil to save
the world!
With the past set up, the last thing John does is assassinate Priya, letting Kat and
Max go on with their lives.
There you have it, ways you can beat someone using the time inversions and ways to use
them.
But what do you think?
What else could be done?
What crazy ways can inversions be used for?
Let me know in the comments down below.
With that said, thank you so much for watching, leave a like and subscribe and if you want
more videos like this, there’s already a playlist up on the channel where I’ve covered
how to beat child eating shapeshifters, masked serial killers, and survive death games.
Until next time, have a damn good day.¬¬¬