So after doing my first explained video for TENET with an analysis of the plot and ending,
I thought it would be a good idea to follow up that video by looking at
some of the other talking points and questions which I didn't originally cover. These were
questions that you guys raised and also ones which were put forward by a
subscriber named jay who suggested some great talking points to tackle. In particular, I'm
going to be explaining how time inversion works with certain plot points in
Christopher Nolan's TENET. This analysis will contain spoilers, so if you do happen to be
someone who hasn't seen the film, then I would recommend watching this video
after you've seen it. If you want to see more on the film in the future alongside other
movie releases in the coming year, then don't forget to subscribe to the
channel and turn on your notifications. Also, if you enjoy this video remember to give it
a like rating. Without further a do, lets dive into the use of time
inversion in the plot and storytelling of Christopher Nolan's TENET.
Now in my original explained video which was focussed on the overall plot of Tenet, I discussed
that I wasn't necessarily going to tackle the quantum and theoretical
science, because I believe that the plot uses a combination of real science but also many
original ideas, which for some people can become overwhelming when
comprehending what happens in the film in a straightforward way. However, when it comes
to focussing on what happened in specific moments and clarifying certain
complications that viewers had, I think it is interesting to explore how time travel
and more specifically inversion, works from a plot and storytelling perspective.
There are a few scientific concepts that need to be brought up when discussing these elements,
but they will only be ones that are prominent in the film. When
looking at certain scenes in Tenet, we want to grasp the bigger picture so that we can
truly understand how everything fits together and ultimately impacts us through
character and story. On rewatch, the smaller details become evident and the whole experience
is heightened because of this.
The first question that I want to tackle involves whether Tenet has both time travel and inversion,
alongside how it's accomplished. This is a question that some
viewers have after watching the film once and it's key to be able to address the later
points. Well, rather than the relatively more straightforward idea of
time travel seen in similar movies, where the characters actually jump backwards or
forwards through time to fixed points and the audience follows them on that
journey, Tenet uses time reversal, or what we know as time inversion. This is a rather
different approach and an important distinction, because time travel still
adheres to the general rules of physics, at least in so far as there remains a cause and
effect to every action. Time inversion, however, as the name of the film
makes clear, inverts or reverses this, with events, motions, and people moving backwards
rather than forwards. There is still cause and effect, but Tenet protects
the threat of paradox by having cause and effect permanent. What happens has happened,
to borrow from the film's dialogue. The palindrome name Tenet also tells
audiences that what's being used here is the idea of a time reversal invariance, which
is where events can play out the same way forwards or backwards, and it
can be difficult to tell which one you're watching. The question of how time is progressing
and which order events are happening and have happened is a huge part of
the film's storytelling approach as Nolan plays with what the hero and audience's positions
relative to story really mean. In terms of how inversion is accomplished,
well that is down to the turnstille machines seen throughout the film. During the gun sequence
with Clemence poesy's character we learn more about how inversion works
and where it's come from. This all ties into how Washington and his team, including Pattinson,
use the technology to travel backwards through time to prevent the
reversal of the world's entropy. We see these turnstille machines in the film at the freeport
sequence, the red room/blue room scene, the reversing boat and in the
final battle on stalsk 12.
In terms of how these inverted chambers came from the future and arrived at the past, we
learn that at some point in Tenet's future, a scientist discovered a means of
inverting the entropy of objects using nuclear fission. This technology was used to create
a machine called a turnstile, which inverts the entropy of anything (or
anyone) placed inside it. That person or object then begins to move backwards through time
instead of forwards. By inverting objects using the turnstiles, people in
the future can start a war on the past - for example, by burying inverted time capsules
that send gold and instructions to Andrei Sator. Because they are working with
the benefit of hindsight, the people of the future have a major tactical advantage over
the present day. However, time inversion also has its weaknesses - especially
when what you're inverting is not an object, but a human being. A person who has gone through
the turnstile is effectively swimming upstream. They might be moving
backwards, but everything else is still moving forwards, making the world a disorienting
and dangerous place for them to navigate in. Even the air is unbreathable,
because it cannot pass through the membrane of their inverted lungs and the only way they
could "breathe" normal air would be to suck oxygen out of their blood and
back into their lungs to reform as unfiltered air and then be exhaled. This is why inverted
characters in certain scenes such as The Protagonist and Sator during the
reversed Car Chase sequence, wear the breathing masks that they do. The heat transfer of fire
and ice is also inverted, which is why the Protagonist being engulfed in
flames during this scene causes him to suffer hypothermia instead of burns. The turnstiles
that cause the moments of inversion in Tenet are also based on a hypothesis
in theoretical physics that was proposed by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler. To recap
a little, an electron is a particle that holds a negative charge, and
a positron is its antimatter counterpart: a particle with the same mass as the electron
that holds an equal-but-opposite positive charge. Electrons and positrons are
mirror images of each other, and it's traditionally understood that they're two different types
of subatomic particle. However, Feynman and Wheeler theorized that
what we perceive as positrons are actually just electrons that have reached a point in
time where they turned around, and are now coming back the other way with
their charge inverted. This could explain why electrons and positrons have the exact
same mass, which is that they are essentially the same object.
But applying this inversion to some scenes like one of the final ones with Kat and Sator
on the Yaght, we can clear up some confusion. Many people have asked me in
the comments of other tenet videos why Kat was not seen in reverse and not wearing a
breathing mask at the end of the film. Well on rewatch, you start to see that in
the case of this scene, certain characters in certain moments of the film are not inverted.
Kat had inverted back to that point in time with the The protagonist,
Neil, Ives and the future soldiers on the boat before going onto the yaght where she
eventually kills Sator. The Kat and Sator we see on the Yaught are both the
future versions of themselves at this particular moment in time, with Sator not realising that
this is the same Kat who he shot with an inverted bullet earlier on in
the film. As future Kat dives off the boat after killing Sator, the present Kat and her
son in that particular timeline see a woman jump off, not knowing at the time
that it's actually a Kat from a near future scenario.
One of the many dangers of inverting that we learn in the film is the risk of accidentally
encountering your past self. This is a common feature of time travel
movies, and characters are typically warned against it because they could end up changing
the future. In Tenet, however, the danger comes down to a single word:
"annihilation." In physics, annihilation refers to a reaction where a particle (like an electron)
collides with its antiparticle (a positron). When this happens,
both the particle and its antiparticle disappear and energy is released. Therefore, an inverted
person interacting with their past self could cause both versions of
that person to be annihilated. This is why Tenet's inverted agents have to wear protective
gear. This principle of annihilation is also what makes the Algorithm the
ultimate doomsday weapon. The current state of affairs in Tenet is that the vast majority
of the world is experiencing time as normal, and only a few objects and
people in it are inverted. As long as those inverted objects and people don't interact
with the forward-moving versions of themselves, they are safe. However, the
Algorithm would invert the entropy of the entire world. Every particle would be converted
into its antiparticle and start to move backwards in time. The moment that
happened, those particles and antiparticles would collide, resulting in total annihilation.
Not only would everything in the world cease to exist, the ripple effect
through time would mean that it never existed in the first place. This, of course, leads
to the grandfather paradox. The grandfather paradox is one of the most
famous logical problems associated with time travel, and it boils down to this: is it possible
to go back into the past and kill your own grandfather? It creates a
paradox which Neil claims that future decendents may know how to execute. However, Neil's mantra
at the end of the film of "what's happened, happened" is a concluding
expression of faith and another answer to the grandfather paradox. This in turn means
that the existence of a grandfather in the first place means the plan to kill
the grandfather must have somehow failed. Sure enough, Neil and the Protagonist end
up successfully averting the future antagonists' plan to kill their ancestors.
Tenet's concept of a time war also means introducing battle tactics unique to fighting across time
as well as space, and one tactic that's used several times is the
"temporal pincer movement." In a traditional pincer movement, an army is split in order
to attack the enemy on multiple fronts. The goal is to envelop the enemy,
putting them in a vulnerable position with no way to retreat. A temporal pincer movement
also attacks on two fronts, but in time rather than space. One team
experiences the battle in normal time, reporting everything that happens to a second team that's
on standby. The second team then inverts via a turnstile and attacks
from the opposite direction with the benefit of the first team's knowledge. Sator uses
a temporal pincer movement during the Tallinn heist, which is why the
Protagonist's attempt to trick him with an empty case fails. The Sator that he sees holding
Kat hostage in the car is inverted, while the forward-moving Sator is
waiting by the turnstile with a radio, listening to reports about everything happening on the
highway. That's why Sator counts down (or counts up, from his
perspective) using his fingers rather than by speaking: anything he said would come out
backwards. When the Protagonist throws the case over, Sator already knows
that it's empty. Tenet's soldiers use another temporal pincer movement in their assault
on Stalask-12 at the end of the movie. They are divided into two teams: Red
Team, who are moving forwards, and Blue Team, who are inverted. The entire battle takes
place across the span of 10 minutes, and both teams have the benefit of the
other team's knowledge of what happens. This is how, for example, they are able to synchronize
the destruction of a building precisely halfway through the fight. The
effectiveness of Tenet's temporal pincer movement is neutralized by the fact that Sator's men
also have access to a turnstile, and therefore have both normal and
inverted soldiers in the field. However, Tenet's goal isn't actually to win the fight, but
to make it look like they've failed while Ives and the Protagonist use the
battle as cover to secretly remove the Algorithm from its tomb before it's buried by the explosion.
Sator will die thinking he's won, but the future antagonists
won't get their hands on the Algorithm. After the battle - as Neil decides to invert again
so that he can go back, unlock the gate for the Protagonist and sacrifice
his life to save him - he reveals that he's actually known the Protagonist for years.
The Protagonist created Tenet in the future, recruited Neil, and set up what is
actually a far greater temporal pincer movement designed to stop the Algorithm from going
off. As Neil explains, the end of Tenet isn't actually the end of the war,
but the middle of it. With the crucial battle won, the Protagonist now has to use his knowledge
of how things played out to set in motion all the things that enabled
them to win: from founding Tenet, to sending Neil back to help his past self.
But that was my video explaining some of the main questions surrounding how time inversion
works in the plot of Christopher Nolan's TENET. I hope this did help some
of you guys understand some of the more difficult events and narrative beats a bit better and
I'm looking forward to hearing what else you picked out, so don't forget
to let me know down below in the comments section. You can also check out my full series
of Tenet videos including my original explained upload in a playlist on my
channel if you haven't seen them already.
But for more content on films like TENET, then don't forget to subscribe to the channel
and turn on your notifications. Also if you enjoyed this video remember to
leave a like rating. I will be coming back to uploading videos on Tenet later on this
year, but for now, I will be mainly focusing on other films that are releasing
soon and also beginning my road to dune series in the coming weeks. Let me know what other
types of films you want to see covered on the channel as I will be
considering what you suggest. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex
and as always make some noise.