After the release of Christopher Nolan's TENET, many of the general audiences including myself,
have come out of their screenings baffled by what they saw. I think
most of us are in agreeance when I say that this is one of Christopher Nolan's most complex
films and it will take many of us multiple watches to fully unravel a
clearer perspective. I have seen the film multiple times and now that I've started
to piece together a greater picture of the full puzzle, I thought it would be
interesting to present it in a video. To put it more simply, I'm going to be explaining the plot
and ending for Christopher Nolan's TENET, in the aim to help you guys
gather a greater sense of what actually happened. This analysis will also contain spoilers,
so if you do happen to be someone who hasn't seen the film, then I
recommend watching this video after you've seen it. If you want to see more on the
film including video essays in the coming weeks, 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 Christopher Nolan's TENET explained.
So we knew going in that Christopher Nolan's latest film would be centred
on John David Washington's The Protagonist and that he's drawn into a battle for the entire
world's survival, involving something called time inversion. Nolan has made no secret of
the fact that TENET is his own take on a James Bond movie so, fittingly, the
plot essentially boils down to a classic Bond movie setup. A villain wants to destroy the
world for his own selfish reasons and our hero needs to stop him, ideally
with minutes to spare for full dramatic outcome. This is indeed TENET, but the world
in which that mission takes place is more complex and unique than any you've seen
in the Bond films and maybe any other film altogether. Now I won't pretend to be an
expect on how Nolan uses physics, so this video won't be a concise deep-dive into
the science of the film. However, I will outline the plot and the general science of time
inversion, as we the audience ideally need to understand itto a basic degree.
It's important to note that like the viewer, the Protagonist does not have all the
information about his assignment, or indeed the situation he finds himself in at the
start of the film. TENET means a principle or a belief, which suggests that the Protagonist
has to simply believe in what he is doing and his duty, without the full
facts. Time inversion is a key theme in this film, which means that time can run backwards.
People and objects can be inverted, causing confusing scenes such as a
bullet shooting back up into a gun, while an inverted person in the film can
move backwards through time and while the rest of the world is running forwards.
We see some of this take place in the opening prologue scene which unfolds
at a national Opera house in ukraine during a symphony concert, where terrorists infiltrate
the hall and place everyone hostage. During this, A SWAT team subsequently
invades the place and releases sleeping gas, putting the concert attendees asleep.
Within this SWAT team, another small gang has been watching and waiting for them to invade.
This team, led by John David Washington’s character, dresses up as the
fake SWAT team and blends in, placing fake badges over their
arms. As the scene progresses, Washington tries to sneak out bombs that have been placed around the
concert hall until he is held at gunpoint by a SWAT member. This is when a form of
time inversion happens that results in the SWAT member being killed and one more
fake member making an appearance. This one apparently is not from Washington’s squad
and has a red string attached to his bag. But as Washington rushes out with
a hostage to the van after somewhat stopping a syncronised explosion,
the duo are accosted by someone who is not meant to be apart of their team.
The prologue ends and The Protagonist is taken to a set of train tracks where he is tortuned,
which includes all of his teeth being pulled out and in a brief moment of
bravery he decides to kill himself by taking a suicide pill instead of giving
up his team. Turns out this was just a test and a mysterious individual played by Martin
Donovan welcomes him "to the afterlife" and arms him with a single word: TENET.
This leads him into a new world which lays out a conversation with Clémence Poésy's
scientist. She shows him that there are things that, instead of moving naturally forward in time,
are moving backwards in time, including bullets. The fear is
that an "inverted weapon" from the future could affect their past,
say a nuclear weapon. The Protagonist eventually tracks these bullets to Andrei Sator (played by
Kenneth Branagh) and uses Sator's abused wife Kat (who is played by Elizabeth Debicki) to
engineer a meeting, in order to find out who Sator is working with. He
promises Kat that he'll get back some fake art that Sator is using
to control Kat and her son, and at this point she delivers a monologue about seeing a woman dive
off the yacht as she returned, envying her freedom. The woman diving of the yaught is
something that needs to be remembered and later on in the film this is
revealed. It's also key to point out that Nolan makes Kat and her son the driving emotion behind
the film. Now although this isn't as emotional as some of his other
projects, what the relationship provides is the idea of duty
clouding the emotion and connection to family. The final shot in the movie can be a key piece of
symbolism towards this and I will relate to it at the end of this video.
But along with the extra help of Neil (played by Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist breaks
into a freeport in Oslo. Before he can do that though, he gets into a fight
with a mysterious inverted individual who eventually gets away. This is something we also
have to remember. The Protagonist still gets his meeting with Sator though,
by telling him he can help get the plutonium he wants. Sator doesn't trust him and cuts him out,
so the Protagonist and Neil work to steal the plutonium before Sator
can. A heist within a heist, if you will. Sator still comes out on top though
as he appears during the heist in an inverted car and threatens Kat's life to get the
Protagonist to give up the plutonium. It turns out that Sator's team have been
doing a "temporal pincer", moving forwards and backwards in time during the heist to
ensure they know exactly how it will all go down. They do this through the use of a "time stile"
(sent from the future, naturally) that allows Sator to invert himself,
but before he goes to get the plutonium from the past version of the Protagonist,
he shoots Kat with an inverted bullet. It's here when things get (even more) trippy.
We see in the red and blue room sequence (which is one of my favourite in the film),
that with characters moving back and forth through time, there is often more than
one of each person in existence. To make things a bit clearer for viewers,
those moving backwards through time must wear a face mask to be able to breathe, which is
one way to tell who is going backwards and who is going forwards in the film.
An example is when we see The Progonist with Kat on a stretcher enter one of the door
portals and come through the other side only to look acrost and see that side now in reverse,
because that's how it appears from the opposite perspective. But
coming back to the plot, we witness a military unit show up, led by Ives (who
is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and it's revealed that Neil has always known more
than the Protagonist and is part of the Tenet organisation. It's also revealed
that Sator wasn't after plutonium, it was actually part of an algorithm that will
change the world's entropy, effectively putting it in reverse. If Sator uses it,
it likely means the end of civilisation. It turns out that Sator is actually working
for people in the future where the world is so destroyed that they "have no choice but
to turn back". A scientist made this algorithm to reverse the flow of time,
but to stop it being used, she split it into nine pieces and hid them in the past. The
nefarious people in the future recruited Sator in his youth when his hometown was
destroyed by a nuclear blast, using him to find all nine pieces and bring them all back
together. To stop Sator and to save Kat's life, the Protagonist, Neil,
Ives and their team invert themselves and start moving back in time. The Protagonist
is warned that he can meet his past self and he needs special breathing equipment as he is
inverted, but "the world is not". He's unable to stop Sator as the
crashed car we saw earlier during the heist was actually his crashed car in his inverted pursuit.
So to give Kat time to heal, they make their way to Oslo, as they
know there's another one of the "time stile" machines there, knowing they can get in when they
originally created the diversion. This is when it's revealed that the person the Protagonist
fought was actually his future self.
Having gone through the machine at the free port, they're now in the past,
but moving forward through time normally. The problem is that Sator plans to activate the
algorithm in the past. He's buried it in his former hometown under several bombs. It seems
that when they explode, it'll activate the algorithm buried underneath them,
changing the entropy of the world. It's at this point where Kat also reveals that
Sator is dying of terminal cancer, so using his fitness tracker as essentially a dead
man's switch, he plans to kill himself on his luxurious yacht when he knows his past
self isn't there, activating the algorithm to destroy the world. This is where we
arrive at the climactic battle sequence in which The Protagonist and a team of special operatives,
including Neil and Ives, attempt to secure Sator’s world-ending
device. To do this, Ives concocts a Temporal Pincer Movement in which a “blue” team of
operatives will move through a turnstile to invert (AKA move backwards from that
point in time) to one hour before. They will experience what the “red” team will experience
an hour before they do, meaning that they will then be able to brief them
on what has happened or will happen. This is where the film lives up to it's title.
As explained in the film, in 50 minutes time, the red team will work in tandem to
prevent Sator’s algorithm from activating before the blue team have to move back through the portal
to return to a normal timeline. If it does activate, it will
reverse the entropy of the world, which means the future ceases to exist.
Because these two teams are working an hour apart, in 50 minutes, they will both have 10
minutes to pull off the mission: the blue team moving backwards to their point of entry,
the red team simply moving forwards to when the blue team entered. The two
teams essentially have 10 minutes each, 10 moving forwards and 10 moving backwards in time,
to complete a mission, which is reflected in the palindrome title, “Tenet”.
This is also something that Martin Donovan's character hints at with the gesture of merging
hands in one of the opening scenes of the film. But as we witness, the mind-
bending battle takes place with inverted explosions and visual perspectives
from both teams. The long and short of it is that with Neil's help, the Protagonist and
Ives lift the algorithm in time, which is also down to luck, because during this,
we continually cut to a tense scene between Kat and Sator. Kat has to head down to
the yacht to stop Sator killing himself before the crew succeed in their mission.
After some acting from Kat to seduce Sator into this moment she eventually decides to
kill him in a state of revenge for her character's physical and emotional
torture. As she does so, the teams suceed in the nick of time by collecting the algorithm.
It's also important to note that the woman that the past version of Kat saw jumping off the yacht
when she returned on that day was actually her future self after she
had killed the future version of Sator. You see this briefly in the film earlier on and
at the time, Kat believed that this was another woman that Sator was seeing.
But unfortunately, for the mission to succeed, the Protagonist realises that
Neil is killed when he goes backwards to help them. Once they've escaped with the
algorithm, he tries to persuade Neil to not go back, but as he puts it: "What's happened,
happened." Before he goes though, Neil reveals that it's actually the
Protagonist who recruited him for Tenet, teasing that "thay'll get up to stuff".
We don't know exactly what, but we do know that one of the events saw Neil save the
Protagonist back at the opera, due to the fact that we see Neil's red string
in the prologue. It's things that are in the Protagonist's future, but Neil's past as the
whole 'save the world' mission has been a "temporal pincer". Neil and others have
been working back towards it, while others like the Protagonist have been moving
forward to it. And it was all set up in the future by the Protagonist himself,
along with presumably the Tenet organisation. It's the central concept of Tenet. This
isn't a case of changing the past or future, everything has all been a part of the same loop.
Sator was never likely to succeed in his mission because he never did.
What we saw was 'in the moment' events with extreme action and tension that all
form. part of this loop. Just like the spinning Tenet logo from the early marketing.
Now whether it's a world in which things can be changed according to this loop,
it remains to be seen. But then we finally come
to the last scene. This takes place after they go back in time to Oslo
and the Protagonist tries to get Priya – the arms dealer who told his
past self about Sator and the 'plutonium', to not tell him about it, so that Sator would never
get his hands on the final algorithm piece. But then she refuses, so we
don't know if that could have changed the events. In the final moments of the movie,
the Protagonist stops Priya from killing Kat to clear up loose ends, but he's only
there because of something he told Kat in the past. Is that something that always happened?
Or did the Protagonist alter the future by getting Kat to phone him if she
ever thought she was in danger? It's certainly more straight forward for
it to be a world where everything happens as it always has, even if you're not entirely clear
about it at the time. As the Protagonist put it to Neil before they set off to stop Sator:
"Doesn't us being here now mean it never happened?". But we end the movie on
a shot of Kat and her son holding hands and walking off into the distance
as the protagonist watches from within the car where he killed Priya. I think this ending can
be a reference to duty versus family but also the idea of living life against becoming trapped
in a questionable reality. Kat and her child are basically moving on
away from the threat of time, while the Protagonist, being essentially the blank
canvas for the audience to project on, is left looking on at this very question. It
will be interesting to see how the audience reacts to this ending
over time but after a few watches, I must say the messages of it are growing on me.
But that was my video explaining the plot and ending of Christopher Nolan's TENET to
the best I currently can. As a film that benefits on rewatch, I think it's great
to do videos like this and see how everyone else experienced the film
and what they gathered from it. I hope this did help some of you guys understand the events 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. For more videos analysing TENET over the next
few weeks, 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 doing a video essay on TENET very soon along with an updated ranked list of
Christopher Nolan's movies. So make sure to keep a look out for whenever I post these
uploads. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.