Tenet is a complicated movie, with many answers hiding behind complex layers of time travel
logic. But even still, not everything gets wrapped up so nicely. Here are the biggest
questions Tenet left hanging, and what these apparent gaps in the story might mean.
The climax of Tenet is a complicated combat operation during which two teams move in on
the city where Andrei Sator grew up. He's hidden the Algorithm there, with intentions
to destroy it, and our heroes' mission is to secure the Algorithm in a temporal pincer
move, which turns out to be precisely as cool as it sounds like it would be.
Robert Pattinson's Neil is a part of the attack team that is inverted for the operation, while
the Protagonist is not, handling his part of the assault while moving forward through
time with the military commander Ives. But as the operation begins to fall apart due
to countermeasures presented by the enemy, Neil breaks off from the team to work on his
own, sprinting toward an enemy turnstyle, sneaking inside, and inverting himself in
time. The operation successfully ends with him using a Humvee to haul the Protagonist,
Ives, and the Algorithm out of the pit in the closed city before the coveted device
can be buried by the explosion Sator has arranged to keep the Algorithm out of everyone's hands.
We see that Neil is above ground throughout the entire scenario, but the red string and
washer he keeps attached to his kit reveals the movie's final gut-punch of an emotional
twist: turns out, Neil is also underground, masked in a balaclava and seemingly dead on
the floor when the Protagonist is trying to get through a locked door. Just when things
start to appear hopeless, this other Neil's body, obviously inverted in time, springs
to life and saves the Protagonist, opening the door for him at exactly the right time
before sprinting away backwards.
But if Neil has to get the Humvee up above, too, that means that there are two Neils operating
simultaneously, both having arrived from different timelines. When did that happen, and how?
We can certainly respect Neil's dedication to the cause, and his buddy the Protagonist.
It's clear that Neil's ultimate fate after the last moment the audience sees him is to
die for the sake of the mission. Still, a little bit of a hint as to how Neil swings
that after getting on the helicarrier would provide a little bit of closure, which neither
the Protagonist nor the audience gets to have.
One huge unanswered question about Sator's nihilistic plan is: who in the future was
Andrei Sator getting his intel and technology from?
It could be the Protagonist in a future we don't see; it's the first natural assumption
to make, since he's directly or indirectly responsible for a whole lot of what happens
in the movie's story. But if he was responsible for stringing Sator along as a very, very
long con, it seems like an awfully risky scheme to secure the Algorithm. It also runs contrary
to his established morals of empathy and having an interest in keeping the Algorithm in separate
pieces, not together. The movie still needs that antagonist, so it's probably not the
Protagonist y'know what we're saying?
, "Oh! Fanciful wordplay."
"Indeed!"
The arms dealer Priya is a heck of a conundrum. Her character is extremely important, as she
establishes the contrasting interests in pursuing the Algorithm. She is ultimately an antagonist,
but she thinks she is operating in conjunction with Tenet's ideals.
At the end of the movie, the Protagonist shares with her his revelation that she and everyone
else is somehow working for a future version of him. If that's the case, then her purpose
as a temporal chess piece appears to be as a vector of deliberately incorrect information
maybe.
Tenet's true purpose is to find people who would gather the Algorithm, rather than keep
it separated. How could Priya end up being wrong about that ideal, when she spends most
of the movie in a place of relative status and knowledge? Was that the effort of people
acting against the Protagonist, or the downstream effect of something the future Protagonist
created himself? How many people like her are out there who are aware of Tenet but not
allied with the Protagonist?
None of these questions can be answered without knowing where Priya came from and how she
came to learn about Tenet. The husband she uses as an avatar for her business as an arms
dealer clearly doesn't know what Tenet is, since the Protagonist is very careful to only
use the hand sign and word in a clandestine way, and Priya talks to him about it with
the husband well out of earshot. Basically, what's her story, and how did she end up in
the unique position that she's in?
The first act of the movie involves the Protagonist being recruited for Tenet by his boss, Victor.
Victor describes the Kiev operation that resulted in the Protagonist's attempted death-by-cyanide
pill as "a test," which he passes. But beyond that, Victor doesn't know a lot about what
Tenet actually is and seems to conceive of the Protagonist's objective as a shadow op
to learn more about Tenet on behalf of the CIA. How can Victor test the Protagonist for
entry to a collective that he doesn't understand?
"Welcome to the afterlife."
When the Protagonist calls him in Mumbai, he refers to him as though he's no longer
beholden to the CIA, and the Protagonist treats the relationship the same way, asking for
a favor from "old allies." How did Victor learn about any of this, if he simultaneously
is aware of Tenet and yet is requesting someone else go out on missions to learn more, and
with an authority separate from the CIA at that?
Because of the ending, we can appreciate well enough that the future Protagonist is essentially
recruiting himself through a proxy, and that's really all that matters for the story. But
what was Victor's place in that long, long chain of events?
According to the general conceit of inversion and how Tenet actually works as revealed by
the ending, cluing the Protagonist in on Tenet is an end result that we don't see the process
of. All we get to know about Victor's involvement is through his most important action: telling
the Protagonist that he qualifies to learn about Tenet because of his sense of self-sacrifice.
Basically, we don't quite understand where he truly came from, and he would have to have
had some kind of journey himself to learn about Tenet at all that we never see.
The Grandfather Paradox is kicked around in philosophical discussion multiple times throughout
Tenet, and at the end of all things in this complex temporal labyrinth, it's worth asking
again: did all of what happened happen, once they're all done? Like, overall. It happened
to some of them, sure, but does it all still exist in the collective world?
Neil's ultimate answer to the Protagonist when he asks about the paradox is a big fat
"I dunno," and that's probably the authorial intent of the question. We can't know, and
we won't.
Metaphysics aside, Kat has a scar no matter what, Sator ends up dead, and the items drifting
back through time are still doing so exactly as introduced in the moment they are seen
in the movie. These things must occur for the ending to happen, after all. It's heavily
implied that the Protagonist and his allies will have to continue performing missions
like this in their lives, relative past and present alike, to maintain the series of events
as we see them in Tenet to keep them true for themselves. It must continue happening,
constantly, lest some misstep mean it does, indeed, become un-happened. Or something.
Our brains hurt, too. It's okay.
, "Don't try to understand it. Feel it."
A big, weird-looking stick that represents math: that's what the Algorithm is, but its
fate is somewhat murky when you stop to consider the totality of the situation.
Tenet ends in a manner that feels unambiguously happy: our heroes have won, and space-time
has been saved. But that victory can only be accomplished by successfully secreting
the pieces of the Algorithm away like Harry Potter Horcruxes between the Protagonist,
Neil, and Ives, who each got three parts. Where, exactly, would that be? People who
know of Tenet are everywhere, and as far as we can tell, at all points in time, too and
they aren't necessarily aligned with the heroes' belief that the pieces should be kept apart.
It's a tall order all on its own, made more complicated by knowing Neil eventually dies
in a way we don't see in the Soviet city they just claimed the Algorithm from. Did Neil
get a chance to hide all three of his pieces before he goes back to put himself there?
Or is his place there, making sure he's on the other side of that locked gate to save
the Protagonist at just the right second, meant to make up for a mistake on his part?
Tenet, as the Protagonist intends to use it, is a very elaborate game of keep-away with
the Algorithm. It's heavily implied that the good ending we see is something that has to
be actively maintained through time by the Protagonist and his allies. After all, the
Algorithm's creator who also is a big unanswered question herself originally hid the pieces,
and that clearly didn't do any permanent good. The conflict of the day, encapsulated in Sator's
world-destroying death wish, is over but the greater conflict isn't.
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