TENET is actually Amazing
By: Anthony Repetto
Tags: Time Travel, Strategy, Christopher Nolan, Writing, Science Fiction

~ ONLY spoilers, from a math-geek who hates movies ~

Photo by Shaun Dakin on Unsplash

I don’t trumpet films; rarely do time-travel movies impress me. This is not an anthem to Chris Nolan. Yet, look carefully at this movie; it is a stunning, precise, and entirely unique sort of time-travel. The film executes the concepts and elaborates strategies flawlessly. So, I want to address everyone’s first complaint: “I can’t hear what they are saying!”

Yes. That is the *theme* of the movie, and, to put you in the Protagonist’s shoes, Nolan cruelly does it to you. When you are traveling forward through time, on your first weave-through, you are kept ignorant and confused. Then, when you go back again, you have that first-pass as your informant and collaborator — you know how things will go, but you have to play dumb, for their sake. TENET is meant to be watched at LEAST twice.

So, let’s keep moving — there’s a lot to see.

TENET isn’t just ‘cool’ for having scenes where actors must walk in reverse, so that reversing the footage makes everyone else seem backwards. It goes deeper than that: when the Protagonist first struggles with his future self, in the halls of ROTAS, he is completely stunned by the fight with a backwards foe; he fumbles and does little, after the first quick stab. Yet, the Protagonist steadily gets the hang-of things, at the same time that the foe begins to stumble and become confused. That’s because, from the perspective of his later backward self, he was starting the fight surprised, already wounded, he started on the ground, and he didn’t really want to hurt his earlier self! By the end of the fight, from the perspective of his backward self, he was in complete control — even waiting for his regular self to dodge the gun, before firing it! He won, both times, because his experience defeated his initial confusion.

More: The reason why SATOR’s goons didn’t shoot at the car with backward-Protagonist driving it was because that was one of SATOR’s own cars, taken from their own Turnstile. They were assuming it was part of their own backwards-mission, until SATOR saw that the Protagonist was driving. By then, SATOR was too late to command an attack… but the Protagonist was driving the car with 241 under the seat. Perfect! No need for SATOR to warn his forward-time henchmen, because he just turns the reverse-van around to light-you-on-ice. Not only do the timelines’ events form a coherent loop; ALL of the characters have rational (albeit imperfect) reasoning and motivations, from their point-in-time.

Check it: SATOR first walked into the hostage situation with a gun to the Protagonist’s head, because SATOR was hiding in another room, listening to his future-and-backward self in the blue room say “I believe you”; SATOR knew that he had to leave, to make it into the Turnstile in time, but he didn’t know that Ives would arrive at that moment. That’s why he was forced to hop into the turnstile and go backwards, without getting true confirmation from the Protagonist. SATOR was using backward-time as a sly negotiation tactic. You’re only meant to hear the Protagonist, the first time watching it through; it’s supposed to be confusing and disarming. That response in us is what proves we would have fallen for SATOR’s trick. We can empathize with the insane, surreal stresses of a war with our future selves. Which also proves that Nolan is kinda mean, i guess. :p

Now, we get to the core issue:

WHAT PURPOSE DOES TENET SERVE?

Survival. How? Look carefully at what a future-nuke does, as a metaphor, and then we’ll start to unpack the dueling chessboard from above, the way TENET sees things:

Folks in town have started getting cancer. And it’s happening more and more, as the years go on. Eventually, the town is abandoned. Decades pass. The nuclear hazard only grows WORSE. Then, in a flash, a boom, rubble flies together and forms a bomb, sitting there like a fresh cupcake. A man, walking backwards, arrives. He picks the bomb up, and a parachute launches him up into the sky, where miles above a plane grabs him. Got that? Now — think this next one through:

When the strike-force advances on the Algorithm, in the final battle, they ‘need a distraction’ — so, the forward-team decides to fire at a tower that is beginning to form from the rubble. They know which tower to shoot, because it’s the one their reverse-team shot, which is now re-assembling itself. Taken together, that tower was actually ONLY ever a complete structure for that fraction of a second. Earlier in our past, it was rubble, due to the backwards blast. And, as our time moves forward after our own blast, it is rubble again! It was never built by people. It existed as the thing between us, held together by our choices on either side, thrust into existence by both causes.

TENET is the photo-negative of that momentary building. SATOR whispers why it all happens this way, at the very end, on his yacht. Like a nuclear bomb, the damage we in our time have done to the ice, waters, wells, soil, was all being felt by that future-world. To stop their world from being destroyed, those people WANTED to flip time, knowing that doing so would kill them. SATOR’s attempt, his entire purpose, was to execute that time-flip BEFORE things on Earth got really-really-really BAD. If he had succeeded, the Earth would have dodged the worst of our destruction. Yet, if you let such a thing happen, who will stop them from going all the way, and taking all the time for themselves? A paradox. The only way to avoid a desert world is to switch dead-center; life on both sides, death in a tiny slice of the middle. A tower without any foundation. TENET is a turncoat REFEREE, ensuring that neither side wins it all… they are the only ones who ever really possess the Algorithm.

Yes. Far in the future, TENET must betray us. They succeed in reversing time. Right before the Earth dies.

“I might just be your second chance.”

“I don’t need redemption.”

“…at betrayal.”