Christopher Nolan's 2020 sci-fi action thriller Tenet is absolutely packed with exciting plot
twists and complex concepts, so you probably didn't pick up on everything in your first,
or even fifth, viewing. Keep watching to discover some of the small details you may have missed.
If you've watched Tenet, then you have a basic understanding of time inversion. You know there
are turnstiles that can reverse an object's entropy, allowing that object to move backwards
through time. But processing who is and isn't inverted can be a tedious task. Lucky for us,
the makers of Tenet laced the film with color theory to help us figure everything out.
In the final battle, soldiers are given arm bands that are either blue or red to indicate whether or
not they're inverted. Red signifies an object that's not inverted and moving with the usual
flow of time, while blue signifies an object that's inverted and moving against the flow of
time. These identifiers are actually scattered throughout the film. When Sator is tormenting
his wife Kat, she's sporting a bright red dress. And when the Protagonist and Neil find the first
turnstiles at Freeport, the doors they walk through are labeled with red and blue signs.
The most notable color-rich moment comes when Sator interrogates the Protagonist
and shoots Kat with an inverted round. The room is bathed in blue light on one side,
while the other side of the glass is lit with red. Paying attention to the reds
and blues will make another viewing of Tenet a completely different experience.
After the Protagonist wakes up from his pill that put him in a coma, he's greeted by an official
who informs him of the existence of Tenet, an organization fighting an onslaught from the
future. The Protagonist is informed that using the word will launch him further down the rabbit hole.
You might think that the word is used this way only once, when he meets with scientists to learn
the mechanics of time inversion. But it's actually dropped in conversation by other people in subtle
ways. When the Protagonist executes the reverse bungee jump with Neil, he then meets Priya,
the supplier of an inverted bullet found earlier, and she tells him something very important.
"To say anything about a client would violate the tenets he lives by."
From Priya's perspective, she's already met the Protagonist, though he hasn't met her yet.
This is a sneaky way for her to check which version of the Protagonist she's talking to.
Her dialogue also tells us that she's viewing the conceptual core with a "many worlds" mentality,
which is incorrect. She alludes to this during an ominous conversation when she states:
"If that universe can exist, we don't live in it."
Her inability to correctly process cause and effect as non-linear
results in a bullet from the Protagonist.
The most hard-hitting scene in Tenet is undoubtedly when we discover that the inverted man
the Protagonist battled at Freeport is actually himself. After Kat is hit with an inverted round,
the crew invert themselves in order for the wound to properly take its course without killing her.
In order to flip back around again, they venture back to Freeport to jump
into the turnstiles that they found the week before. Their plan is to sneak in during the
panic after the plane crash from their earlier heist. A hypnotic sequence then takes place in
which they are running through the crash site while the world moves in reverse around them.
It's after this shot that the Protagonist is thrust into his altercation with himself.
The fight likely distracted you from some neat little details, like the Protagonist's view of
running out to tell Neil that it's all clear, which cuts to Neil's perspective as he watches
the Protagonist run by in reverse. The group hijacks an ambulance and are able to escape the
scene unharmed, for the most part. A clever detail emerges as they are driving off in the ambulance,
as you can see the inverted version of the characters moving backwards away from the
plane crash with Kat on the gurney. This is just one of several moments when Tenet's characters
are completely unaware that they're passing by different inverted versions of themselves.
Tenet isn't a time travel movie in the typical sense. Consider Neil and the Protagonist's
discussion of the "grandfather paradox," which posits that if you were to go back in time and
kill your own grandfather, you would cease to exist, thereby resulting in a logical loop.
"What's the answer?"
"There's no answer. It's a paradox."
Supposedly, the people of the future believe that if they harm their own grandfather,
there won't be consequences. Or at least, none more severe than the planetary doom
they're already marching towards. If their line of thinking is correct,
then the fact that everything is taking place means that they failed. Had they
succeeded in triggering the algorithm, then time wouldn't be flowing in our direction.
This could also be true according to some of the film's other events, like Kat killing Sator in
the past. This would mean that the past can be affected without consequence, because there's
a version of Sator running amok long after his demise. This is actually left ambiguous,
as some of the dialogue tells us that there is the possibility that this is a future version
of Sator. This would mean that Sator and Kat both inverted and came back to the same moment.
So in reality, we still don't know which take on the grandfather paradox is true
within the world of Tenet. That feels about right for a Christopher Nolan mind-bender.
An early step on the Protagonist's path to getting close to Sator is their sailboat adventure.
Kat is also on board, and she takes the opportunity to unhook Sator's harness
and send him tumbling into the water, nearly killing him. The Protagonist's rescue helps
him move closer within Sator's circle, but this scene has even more meaning to it than that.
Different parts of this sequence are presented as a visual metaphor for the
movie's time mechanics. Consider the color of the sailboat, for example:
it's blue. It's so blue, in fact, that it feels intentional. With this in mind,
it's worth noting the shot of the sailboat turning around against the current.
This is a nod to how time inversion works: it moves upstream, against the usual flow of time.
After the Protagonist is told about Tenet, he's dropped off at sea among a scattering
of windmills. You probably assumed at this point that he's waiting for another boat to take him
further to his next destination. While he's waiting, he climbs a ladder inside the windmill
and does some pull-ups. During a first watch, this routine probably seems to exist only to
display his level of discipline. But this scene comes back into play in a brief moment later on.
In that subsequent scene, the Protagonist is inverted, and he travels back to the day an
explosion occurs in Stalsk-12, which happens at the same time as the opera siege in the
opening scene. While working his way back, there's a shot of him on a big yellow barge,
doing pull-ups as the ship moves in reverse. This area of the ocean is actually the same
windmill-filled area seen earlier. Thus, this scene shows the Protagonist moving by his
past self. Also, when his earlier version leaves the windmill, it's on a blue boat,
while all other boats on the water are red. In the later scene on the yellow barge, you can see a
blue boat moving backwards next to a couple of red boats. Remember: the entire movie is a palindrome.
There are a slew of confusing moments all throughout Tenet, and wrapping your brain
around each one of them can cause a bit of a headache. But one thing we're pretty sure we can
say with certainty is that Neil is marching towards his doom the last time we see him.
While the Protagonist is down in the cavern trying to procure the algorithm, he spots a piece of red
string on the backpack of the inverted soldier who's lying dead on the other side of the locked
gate. As Neil is walking away, we see that same piece of red string on his backpack.
This isn't the first time in Tenet that we see that key piece of string. In the opening scene,
the Protagonist is a player in the opera heist. There's a moment when
he's rescued by what appears to be a man wielding an inverted bullet.
As the man turns to run off, the Protagonist spots that same piece of string on his backpack.
This means that the Protagonist was being saved by Neil before they ever actually met.
Some Tenet theories make the assumption that the pill the Protagonist takes at
the beginning of the film successfully killed him. They claim that we are witnessing his end
and that the movie is moving towards how it all started. But the dialogue when he wakes
up makes it clear that that is not the case, although that pill does come back into play
later on. When Sator is contemplating his eventual suicide, he holds up that same pill and reveals
that he borrowed it from the CIA. He goes on to describe it as the way that the world ends:
"Not with a bang, but a whimper."
This means that Sator is unaware of the fact that the pill is a fake,
and it also means that if Kat doesn't kill Sator, he will still fail to set off the
algorithm by killing himself. This is basically indicating that Sator was always going to lose,
no matter what course of action he takes. Whatever's happened, happened.
A common complaint about Christopher Nolan films is their incredibly loud soundtracks.
Sometimes they can overwhelm the dialogue, and in a movie like Tenet, the dialogue is
extremely important. It's a situation that can be easily remedied with subtitles,
at least. We can then be content with the sound levels, because you can't deny how
effective the score is in setting the mood. Moreover, there are several key moments in
which Tenet's music is particularly creative, and dramatically important.
Composer Ludwig Göransson used a creative approach to ensure that Tenet's score
mirrors the film's themes. At various moments, such as the interrogation scene,
the music is playing backwards. This detail is so intricate and important that Göransson
didn't just reverse the soundtrack; he actually had his musicians play the music backwards.
It's not the only time he played with the music this way. During the final battle,
there are two different scores playing over each other so as to match a battlefield featuring
inverted and non-inverted soldiers. Göransson went even further in some scenes. When the Protagonist
is on a boat with both inverted and non-inverted soldiers training behind him, the music has
its rhythm and percussion playing forward, while the orchestra is playing in reverse.
As Neil marches off to rejoin the battle once again, he declares:
"This whole operation's a temporal pincer."
That statement helps us better understand the movie as a whole, like how the ending
occurs at the same time as the opening. During the conclusion, the Protagonist is part of a battle in
Stalsk-12, where everyone is fighting over the algorithm. The soldiers we see are performing a
"temporal pincer." In the traditional military sense, a "pincer" involves attacking your enemy
from two different directions. If you take that concept and correlate it with time,
it means that the soldiers are attacking from two different directions in time.
The window of time that the soldiers work with is ten minutes on either side of the event.
Everything that Christopher Nolan does when making his films is intentional,
and this chosen amount of time is no exception. The word "Tenet" spells "ten" both forwards and
backwards. Thus, the title of the movie itself hints to what is going to happen.
Compared to the other details covered on this list, this particular one is rather simple.
But it's nevertheless dizzyingly cool when you actually notice it.
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