Q & A for Tenet
*Warning – major
spoilers: do not read if you haven’t seen Tenet yet*
There are total of 18
questions with answers provided for each of them. Brace yourselves.
1.
What’s
Tenet?
The word “tenet” itself is a palindrome (spelt the same way
forwards as it is backwards), with a definition that says “a principle or
belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy”.
It’s also the title that refers to ten minutes forward and
ten minutes backwards that happens in the climactic battle of the film. It’s
also the name of the secret organisation that was founded by the Protagonist in
the future, which also recruits the Protagonist in the past.
Hence the reason why Tenet has been described earlier in the
film with a hand movement in which all fingers merge together to combine into
one whole – a closed loop.
2.
What's time inversion?
The most important misconception to be clarified is that
time inversion is not time travelling. Time travelling is the capability to
jump to a specific point in time of the past. In Tenet, if you want to travel
back to 40 years ago, you have to live those 40 years in reverse.
The scientific basis of time inversion differentiates it
from time travel. Hence the reason why we see characters in the film inverted
and having to live in reverse in order to reach a different point in the timeline
of their story, meaning they cannot jump back to a week in the past, they have
to live that week in reverse to reach that point.
In the
future, a technology has been developed by an unknown female scientist that can reverse the entropy of people
and objects to move backward through time. Time inversion is being used by
the people of the future to start a temporal war (hidden World War III) with
the people of the past, Tenet is the secret organisation founded to stop it.
In Tenet we see time inversion as though we are watching the
inverted objects on rewind while the rest of the scene plays in a linear
motion. This means that boats appear to be sailing backwards, cars motoring and
guns firing in reverse from the eyes of the person who’s inverted. As
Washington’s trainer Laura explains to him as he fires an inverted bullet:
“You’re not shooting the bullet, you’re catching it.”
3.
What’s
entropy?
As Nolan puts it in the film's production notes: “Every law
of physics is symmetrical – it can run forwards or backwards in time and be the
same – except for entropy."
Entropy, is the degree of disorder in a system. The entropy
of an object is a measure of the amount of energy which is unavailable to do
work. Entropy is also a measure of the number of possible arrangements the
atoms in a system can have. In other words, entropy is a measure of uncertainty
or randomness of a system.
According to the second law of thermodynamics (universal law of increasing entropy), as time moves
forward, entropy can never decrease – it either increases, or remains the same.
Which could mean that what we think of as time is, in fact, merely a perception
governed by our observations of entropy. If we see disorder decreasing, we
think we're seeing something moving backwards in time.
Ice
melting, salt or sugar dissolving, making popcorn and boiling water for tea are
processes with increasing entropy in your kitchen. By reversing the entropy,
ice doesn’t melt, salt or sugar doesn’t dissolve, popcorn will never be made, and
water for tea doesn’t boil.
“The theory being that if you could invert the flow of
entropy for an object, you could reverse the flow of time for that object, so
the story is grounded in credible physics," Nolan says. "I did have
(Nobel Prize-theoretical physicist and consultant on Interstellar) Kip Thorne
read the script and he helped me out with some of the concepts, though we’re
not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate. But it is
based roughly on actual science.”
Entropy is like Murphy's Law applied to the entire universe as there are more things that can go wrong than right. The difficulties of life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is conspiring against you. It is simply entropy at work.
4.
How does the characters in Tenet
perform time inversion?
People become inverted by passing though large metal
turnstiles which look like a giant revolving door, which are created at some
point in future. After going through them, you can move backwards in time from
the point you entered. From this point, once you enter another one, you shall
move forward from the point in time you have travelled back to. Characters must
wear a face mask so their bodies can work - regular air doesn't go through inverted lungs, it goes out.
Tenet presents a number of these machines, with the majority
of the action focusing on one vault in an art storage facility in Oslo, and another
in a warehouse in Tallinn. The reason why objects can move backwards in present
time is because these things have manually had their entropy reversed at some
point in the future.
5.
Who
reversed the objects?
It is suggested that Russian billionaire Sator and his men
have done so after inverting themselves through the turnstiles. One theory is
that, when these people fired their weapons at different points in time, the
bullets would remain there until “caught” by the weapon that fired them.
6.
When
entropy is reversed, how does it affects everything around us?
In this palindromic world, everything plays in reverse,
including all bodily reactions. Oxygen moves from your lungs out into the air.
When you're engulfed in flames, heat was drawn out from your body so rather
than burn, you freeze (absence of heat, or rather the entropy or the flow of energy of the flames was
reversed). The Protagonist is
shown a bullet with inverted entropy that returns to its gun.
If you
contact your “forward” self, it will cause “self-annihilation,” as both forward
and reverse entropies of the same object clash each other, meaning you kill
yourself. Protective gear is worn in an attempt to prevent this from
happening.
7.
What was Sator's plan?
A: Russian billionaire
Andrei Sator is in contact with people of the future. Sator plans to set off a
doomsday device, also known as the Algorithm that will reverse the entropy of
the entire planet. He's dying from inoperable pancreatic cancer and believes if
he can't live, no one can. Sator travels back to the holiday with Kat in
Vietnam when they were both happiest, planning to die there peacefully and set
off the doomsday device with a dead man's switch linked to his heartbeat.
8.
What's the Algorithm?
A: Nine
objects, hidden in nuclear facilities, form a doomsday device called the Algorithm
that reverses the entropy of the Earth. Setting off the Algorithm ends all life
as we know it.
9.
Why is the future working with
Sator?
A: In the
future, everything is destroyed. An unknown agency is working with Sator to
kill everyone in the past, because they're responsible for the damage happened
in the future. At some point in the film, the Protagonist asked Neil if they're
willing to destroy their ancestors, it should threaten their own existence as
well (the grandfather paradox). However, both Neil and Sator replied that it’s
the desperation of survival that triggers the decision. They have no other
choice. The people in the future believe that reversing the entropy of the
Earth will induce change and provide a different better future than the doomed
one that they live in.
10.
Why Sator, a madman with a God
complex is chosen instead?
A: Sator grew
up in the Soviet Union in a closed city with secret facilities - Stalsk-12, such as nuclear
research sites with a plutonium production plant. Sator was in the right place
at the right time as a teenager, when he dug up a piece of the Algorithm in the
rubble of his home in Siberia. The female scientist in the future who created the
Algorithm has been hiding the pieces back in time, realizing no one should have
the technology. The unknown agency charges Sator with recovering the pieces and
dropping the finished Algorithm into the "dead drop" (“leaving it
somewhere for someone to find later”) in his nuked home town, where they'll
find it centuries from now. The agency buries time-reversed gold bars that
Sator digs up for payment.
11.
Oppenheimer and The Manhattan
Project was briefly mentioned in the film. Who is he?
The first detonation of a nuclear device, conducted on July
16, 1945 was a result of the Manhattan Project which Oppenheimer led. As he
witnessed the first detonation, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind
of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
Oppenheimer died at the age of sixty-two in Princeton, New
Jersey on February 18, 1967. As wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the
birthplace of the Manhattan Project, he is rightly seen as the “father” of the
atomic bomb.
12.
Who saved the Protagonist at the
opera siege in Kiev?
A: While
foiling the terrorist siege at the Kiev opera house, the CIA secures an
unidentified object (which later turns out to be a piece of the Algorithm).
After retrieving the object, the Protagonist, a CIA agent, is saved by a masked
gunman. We see the gunman wearing a red string on his back -- the same red
string Neil wears on his backpack at the end of the movie. So it was Neil who
saved the Protagonist in the opening gunfight.
13.
How did Kat survive after being
shot?
Because normal Kat was shot in the abdomen when inverted Sator reverts a bullet. Inverted bullets are fatal as her wound won't heal as the wound (as a result of the bullet shot) keeps ‘reverting’ backwards in time. So the Protagonist and Neil take her backward
in time before transporting her to the Oslo freeport art storage facility, where they enter another temporal
turnstile to allow her to move forward through time again to allow her body to
heal.
14.
Why is Kat under Sator’s control?
A: Kat accidentally sold Sator a forged Goya painting for millions. Sator knows it's fake and blackmailed his
wife to stay with him (prison otherwise), and is keeping her
child away from her as a kind of emotional hostage. Sator also is using the fake Goya painting as a means to access the freeport at Oslo airport, where he also build a temporal turnstile machine in the building for him to access when in need. To gain her trust, the Protagonist and
Neil try to steal the painting from the freeport in Oslo Airport.
15.
What
is the Temporal Pincer Movement? How does it work?
At one point in the film, this term is mentioned by Ives. It
is a tactic used by people who move through the turnstiles to help you receive
knowledge you learned in the future – it’s how Sator has been devising his plan
the entire time. Once the information has been learnt, the idea is to then
invert yourself (so you’re travelling backwards), so you can brief either past
self or someone else. This, in turn, creates a loop of information.
It is worth remembering throughout:
“Blue” with oxygen
masks = inverted
“Red” and no oxygen
masks = not inverted
(If inverted and
outside, you can’t breathe regular air).
The movement occurs four times in the film:
1)
During the highway chase scene when Sator threatens
to shoot his wife Kat if The Protagonist doesn’t tell him where the plutonium (actually
it’s 9th part of the Algorithm) is hidden
The turnstile in Tallinn has two sections, which are separated by a glass
pane – one side is “blue” and depicts an inverted Sator, the other is “red” and
depicts The Protagonist in the present. This means that Sator in the preceding
highway sequence had been moving back in time after going through the turnstile
(we know this, because he is wearing an oxygen mask). Half of Sator’s men enter
through a temporal turnstile, allowing them to move backward through time,
while the other half move forward. Sator makes off with the piece of the
Algorithm with the benefit of knowledge shared between the two teams. A few
scenes later, The Protagonist goes through the same turnstiles and returns to
this scene – he is now inverted. In fact, we learn he was the one behind the wheel
of the car driving the opposite way in the previous highway sequence, so his
past and future self almost collided.
2)
During the climactic battle sequence involving
the “red” and “blue” team.
Sator plans to activate the Algorithm in the past. He’s buried it in his
former hometown, Stalsk-12, under several bombs. When they explode, it’ll activate the
algorithm buried underneath them, changing the entropy of the world. Sator is
dying of terminal cancer, he’s using his fitness tracker as a dead man's switch
to plan to kill himself on his luxurious yacht when he knows his past self
isn't there, activating the Algorithm to destroy the world.
The Protagonist, Neil and Ives set out on a mission to remove the Algorithm
before the bomb explodes, while Kat heads to the yacht to stop Sator killing
himself before they succeed in removing it from the bomb. The Protagonist goes forward in time with Ives as Red Team, Neil lives as the inverted Blue Team. The woman that past
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.
In the end with Neil's help, the Protagonist and Ives remove the Algorithm
in time, which is lucky as Kat decided to kill Sator just as they take it.
*A battle follows where one half of the team is working backwards to the
explosion and the other working forwards. “Blue” team of operatives move
through a temporal turnstile to invert backwards to one hour before. They will
experience what the “red” team will experience an hour before they do, meaning
they will then be able to brief them on what has happened/will happen.
To do this, they go back 10 minutes so they can then fill in the
non-inverted “red” team on what will happen. This means that, they 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. The teams 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 – “tenet”, where two tens merging
together.
3)
During the Oslo Freeport plane crashing incident
where the Protagonist tries to save Kat’s life
During the rescue operation, the protagonist and Neil in the
past are attacked by two masked men, who was, in fact, one person. That person
is The Protagonist himself, twice. First, we initially see the Protagonist and Neil live forwards in time normally to steal the painting and crash the plane at freeport. They later relive those events in reverse order to save Kat. Here we see the person who the protagonist fights actually is the inverted Protagonist himself, the person who bumps into Neil is actually the "inverted back to normal forward" Protagonist himself.
4) the entire movie is a temporal pincer movement itself
The protagonist was hired to work for a secret organisation named Tenet, who was actually founded by a future version of the Protagonist himself to stop the end of the World. In the end of the film, after killing Priya to save Kat, he inverts himself back into the past to guide past version of himself, Neil, Ives and Priya about what's to come in future.
16.
How did they set off 2 explosions in
that building?
A: In the
closed city where the Algorithm is stored, two teams participate in the
operation to stop the doomsday device's detonation. The red team is moving
forward in time, while the blue team is time-reversed. They're using the
"temporal pincer movement" over a 10-minute period, with the blue
team kept separate from the red up in helicopters. By setting a timer, the red
team (those moving forward in time), detonates a bomb in the bottom half of the
building at the 5-minute mark, while the blue team does the same in the top of
the building by counting backward from 10 minutes to the same moment.
17.
What happened at the end with Neil?
A: In the
Algorithm room, the Protagonist and Ives encounter a locked gate. On the other
side, they see the corpse of a masked soldier, who wears a red string on his
backpack. One of Sator's men tries to shoot the Protagonist, but the masked man
springs back to life, takes the bullet and unlocks the gate, allowing the
Protagonist to prevent doomsday. He then reverses out of the tunnel. We later
see the red string on Neil's backpack, when he reveals that he was recruited by
the Protagonist in the future. So the masked soldier who dies is Neil. This
is the reason why Neil was always one step ahead and knew what was coming, why
he knew that The Protagonist never drinks on the job.
As Neil explains, this is the end of the story for him as he
has to go back into the inverted side of the battle, so that he can open the
gate and step in front of the bullet meant for The Protagonist. Neil's loop is
closed, but for The Protagonist, this is the beginning of their story together.
18.
Everyone's working for the
Protagonist?
A: The
Protagonist travels to London to save Kat from arms dealer Priya, who believes
she must tie up loose ends. The Protagonist shoots Priya, realizing now he will
revert back in time and found the secret organization Tenet.
Note: Some answers
are modified according to my own understanding about the film. Answers with
‘A:’ are left unchanged from the sites.
Some Questions are
written by me and some are taken from the following sources:
https://www.cnet.com/news/tenet-the-ending-explained-and-all-your-questions-answered/
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/tenet-movie-title-meaning-scene-clue-robert-pattinson-time-travel-ending-explained-a9689046.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/tenet-time-inversion-meaning-explained-travel-temporal-pincer-move-theory-ending-a9687836.html
Tenet
is Nolan’s most confusing film, but thrilling to get lost in
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