I’m not a fan of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi action film Tenet (2021), but for the past year it’s been my most requested movie for analysis. So this piece will serve as both a walkthrough of the plot of Tenet, as well as a debunking and criticism of various aspects of the movie.
The central premise of Tenet is that some time in the future, scientists discover a way to irradiate objects or people in such a way that their progression through time is “inverted,” meaning they go backward through time instead of forward (or back to forward again, if they’re irradiated once more). This phenomenon is explained to a new agent known as “the Protagonist” (John David Washington), who’s recruited by an organization called Tenet that uses this technology to stop those from the future who aim to use it maliciously.
The Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates how bullets and other apparently inverted objects don’t appear to follow standard laws of physics, because, unlike us, they’re experiencing time in reverse. As an example, the Protagonist is made to aim an empty gun at a target with bullet holes—and miraculously, the inverted bullets zip out of the target and into the gun.
Now, let me interject immediately to say that right from this opening premise, there are myriad problems and inconsistencies. One that immediately comes to mind is: if, as Protagonist’s training officer demonstrates, there are random objects and weaponry out in the world traveling backward through time, because they’ve been inverted by future combat forces, then why weren’t inverted bullets and AK-47s discovered by ancient civilizations? Why did early paleontologists not dig up skeletons and artifacts from the future? After all, we managed to find dinosaur bones from 65 million years ago—how did we miss the inverted futuristic bazookas that had been going backward through time for only decades?
Another enormous problem: if an empty gun can “catch” inverted bullets out of bullet holes, then…when did the bullet holes get there? Who shot them into the target in the first place, and how was that possible if they were inverted?
I’m waiting…
Tenet moves extremely quickly, to the extent that it feels like a significant portion of the film has been ungraciously cut. Since it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Warner Brothers imposed a hard cap of exactly this runtime length on Nolan, who’s known for long films. Whatever the reason, Tenet‘s jam-packed pace makes it virtually impossible to properly digest what we’re being fed. The Protagonist’s trainer says of the time shift phenomenon, “Don’t try to understand it”—a convenient request given issues like the ones I mentioned above—but even if we wanted to understand it, there’s no time to do so during the film itself. Thus, to it’s necessary to meditate on what we’ve seen after the fact; hence this essay.
Tenet’s story eventually comes to focus on a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), whom the Protagonist suspects is up to no good. Indeed, we soon learn that Sator is acting insidiously on behalf of the leaders of a future generation. (To recruit him, his bosses from the future simply inverted his instructions for the job and buried them in the obscure Russian town where he grew up, knowing that decades earlier he would volunteer to dig there for plutonium and find the instructions.)
In return for Sator’s cooperation, his bosses from the future have bestowed on him massive wealth. This is another simple operation, performed like so: Sator descends a box into the ocean and saves the coordinates electronically (“for posterity”), so that in the future his bosses can obtain this saved information, locate the box in their time, and place inverted gold bars inside. The bars then travel back through time to Sator in the present, where he simply hoists up the box to find his payday inside.
Sator’s mission is to assemble a nine-piece “algorithm” that was invented by an unnamed future scientist. This algorithm, as explained by Protagonist’s comrade Neil (Robert Pattinson), is an equation that, if activated, would effectively reverse the entropic time flow of the entire world. If this were accomplished, Neil assures us, all living things in the present day would be obliterated, as well as all living things that ever existed in the past.
The reason the future folks want to enact this ghastly plan is that Earth in their time has become uninhabitable, and reversing the flow of time—and obliterating all previous life—would allow their civilization to continue, but with environmental conditions improving over time, not worsening. Essentially, the human race of the future, in a state of desperation, wants to bulldoze the past to make way for itself to turn around and retreat backward into time.
Sator’s involvement is necessary because the inventor of the algorithm got cold feet at the last minute and decided not to use it, killing herself for good measure so that it couldn’t be reproduced. She became worried, like Robert Oppenheimer before the first testing of the atomic bomb, that her creation might do more damage than intended. Specifically, she worried that the algorithm might not only have destroyed the past as planned, but potentially her own generation as well (we’ll get to her concerns in more detail later).
Before committing suicide, this scientist divided the algorithm into nine sections and inverted them all into the past, splitting them amongst the nine nuclear powers. (How this was accomplished is very unclear to me.) Sator, growing up in Russia in the midst of high nuclear tensions, was therefore an ideal candidate to acquire the pieces. (I can’t quite follow the reasoning here, either.) He’s collected eight of the nine segments and therefore only needs one more, which Tenet tries to prevent him from acquiring throughout the movie.
Making matters worse, Sator has inoperable pancreatic cancer, and, selfish bastard that he is, he’s perfectly happy to annihilate the world as he departs it. Tenet deduces that once Sator obtains the final piece of the algorithm, he’ll kill himself rather than let the cancer do its work. When he dies, his fitness monitor will sense the stopping of his heart and automatically trigger a bomb located right where he’s buried the assembled algorithm. This will in turn trigger the algorithm and destroy the present and past—making way for the future to do a 180 and forge backward to pre-global warming times.
Tenet’s operations to thwart Sator are highly convoluted and, in my view, unnecessarily concentrated on Sator’s attractive wife, Kat (Elizabeth Gebicki). To gain Kat’s cooperation as an informant, which is apparently of the utmost importance, the Protagonist and Neil endeavor to steal and destroy a painting that Kat, an art dealer, incorrectly evaluated for her husband as genuine and that he is therefore able to use as blackmail to control her in various ways. The painting is under ungodly heavy security, such that one wonders whether there was perhaps an easier way to solicit Kat’s help. And this notion would only seem to be strengthened when, after the mission ultimately fails due to Sator having already removed the painting, Kat begins working with Tenet anyway, for nothing.
There’s a sense that the Protagonist may have a thing for Kat, but he never makes a move, and nothing comes of it. So Tenet’s laser focus on Kat is, in my opinion, very difficult to understand.
The quixotic episode of the art heist, though, does serve one memorable purpose: it sets the stage for an action sequence in which the Protagonist fights a masked inverted soldier. Later, it’s revealed that this soldier is actually the Protagonist himself, moving backward in time at a different point in the film while on a different mission (to save…yup…Kat).
Like most hand-to-hand combat scenes nowadays, this faceoff is loud and chaotic with quick cuts, so it’s hard to follow what’s happening. This, however, is fortunate, because given the proper scrutiny, what we’re watching makes no sense whatsoever.
Think about it. If I punch someone in the arm, they’ll feel pain. If the other person were to somehow experience that sequence backwards, they’d be feeling the pain at the start, then the impact would happen in reverse and the pain would go away.
But in Tenet, we see a regular and an inverted person in actual combat as though they’re landing blows on one another. This can’t be! What we should see is the forward Protagonist feeling beat up at the start of the fight (and well before), only to have any injuries alleviated by the blows happening in reverse. When we later see the fight a second time, from the view of the inverted Protagonist, he should likewise feel progressively better throughout the fight as the hits come backwards.
Nolan has thought about this much more than I have, and he knows that I’m right. This is why he goes out of his way to accurately show the inverted Protagonist with a knife wound on his arm before engaging in the fight with his previous self. The inverted Protagonist then receives the wound in reverse during the fight, and it goes away. A similarly correct depiction occurs much later, when a dead inverted soldier (soon revealed to be Neil) reanimates upon receiving his fatal wound.
But because filming the fight this way wouldn’t be as dramatic, Nolan won’t take the idea to its logical conclusions, still presenting us with something barely different from a Jason Bourne set piece, with both of the combatants, for example, grunting after being hit, whereas the sting should occur before the impact, because from the opponent’s perspective, that’s after the impact, and he’s the one who landed the punch. Other scenes in the movie confirm that the wound’s direction is determined by the orientation of what caused it; for example, Kat is wounded by an inverted bullet and needs to be inverted herself so that the wound can heal in the right direction.
There’s even one portion of the fight where the inverted protagonist is seen to parry blows from his counterpart. How can he block something that’s going in reverse? How can he block what he has no way of reacting to, because it’s already happened (in his opponent’s direction of time)? This can be argued for both combatants: they’re both inexplicably trying and succeeding to block or dodge attacks that their opponent has already made.
Yet another problem with the fight is that the visuals don’t compute. If the fight were a plausible occurrence, the person moving in our direction of time would appear to have totally normal physics, while the one going backward would, of course, be noticeably off. But in this fight, you’ll notice that several times the non-inverted fighter also displays apparently impossible physics upon being hit by his opponent, as if the two were taking turns obeying each other’s time orientations.
In these instances it looks like the character following our direction of time is being “sucked” into a hit, as from a vacuum cleaner, or levitating up from the floor. You’ll also notice that Nolan spends a large portion of the fight with the two combatants simply grabbing each other at a deadlock; this is because such a position is the only type of combat that can be plausibly played off as mutually occurring in both directions of time.
Having sufficiently picked apart this fight sequence, I’ll spare you similar analyses of even more egregious sequences, such as an inverted Sator somehow conducting a properly ordered conversation with a non-inverted Protagonist and shooting a non-inverted Kat when he doesn’t get the answers he wants (this means, from his viewpoint, Sator shot her before the interrogation even began!). Let’s also mention for, ahem, posterity’s sake, the poorly executed car chase sequence in which inverted characters are somehow driving non-inverted cars, even though they can’t so much as breathe non-inverted air.
Go ahead, accuse me of overthinking. Relax, you say. It’s only supposed to be entertainment!
The problem is that for the reasons I’ve just detailed, it’s not entertaining. We can’t be entertained when we can’t understand what’s happening on the screen. The only entertainment available to us watching situations like these, really, is the amusing realization that we’re incredibly lost. And it’s not our fault. We’re lost because what we’re watching is totally ridiculous.
Plus, many of Tenet‘s biggest fans are its biggest overthinkers: this film was made for Redditors, as proved by fan work like this. So I’m not engaging on a level that’s alien to those who love the film.
Let’s get back to why the future inventor decided not to use the algorithm. It involves something called the “Grandfather Paradox,” which Neil explains for us. Essentially, this is the notorious puzzle of what would happen if you traveled back in time to kill your grandfather as a young man. After all, if your grandfather dies, you’ll never exist to carry out the murder, so the murder would be theoretically impossible. Something would have to stop you from successfully completing the hit.
The Protagonist, even though he’s new to the time travel game, perceives this immediately, wondering to Neil how the future could possibly kill off its own ancestors. But Neil more or less brushes this off:
Neil: But in the future, those in power clearly believe you can kick grandpa downstairs, gouge his eyes out, slit his throat, without consequence.
The Protagonist: Could they be right?
Neil: Doesn’t matter, they believe it. That’s why they’re willing to destroy us.
I’m not sure how this “doesn’t matter,” since the Protagonist is suggesting that, logically, the future leaders’ evil plan has no possibility of succeeding. Also, Neil’s response is odd considering that he himself is the film’s leading proponent of the Grandfather Paradox’s foundational logic: “What happened, happened.” This maxim means that it’s useless trying to change the past, because the events are already set in stone (since they created the circumstances that led you to travel back in the first place), and therefore any attempts to alter the past can only accidentally contribute to the things that happened anyway.
If “what happened, happened,” then people from the future can hardly annihilate everything that ever happened. They may indeed be “willing” to do it, but, for some reason or another, they won’t.
And Neil is proven right about his understanding of time travel on every occasion. The most direct evidence of “what happened, happened” is Kat’s story. Early in the movie she recounts how after a fight with Sator on a boat, she became jealous of the freedom of another woman, presumably a mistress, whom she saw from afar diving off the boat. But later on, Kat travels backward into time, kills Sator on the boat, and dives into the ocean, revealing that the “other woman” was actually herself all along, after killing Sator. This means that Sator was always defeated; Tenet always succeeded in thwarting him. The characters just didn’t know it yet. Time never screws up. What happened, happened.
(This also raises the question of why Sator’s bosses in the future continue to send him stacks of inverted gold bars. Why compensate him when he clearly did not succeed in what they wanted him to do? Time has not reversed by the time his bosses are alive—which means that it will not reverse, since Sator is much earlier in the timeline than they are. What are they hoping will happen?)
The problem with the Grandfather Paradox from the filmmaking point of view is that it negates the entire drama of the story, which is why blockbusters like Back to the Future (1985) and Terminator 2 (1991) have simply ignored it. As the Protagonist correctly suggests, the characters’ mere existence shows that the future won’t succeed in obliterating the past; after all, they’re in the past, and…it’s there. So despite Nolan’s attempts to scare us into caring about Tenet’s operations—for instance, Neil is made to briefly ponder whether “parallel universe theory” may refute his ideas, only to never mention the concept again—the stakes for the finale are minimal.
Even if the stakes for the finale were high, though, it’s doubtful that anyone could have a clue what’s happening while Tenet commences its “temporal pincer” operation to recover the algorithm before Sator detonates it. The temporal pincer idea is actually a pretty cool concept; it consists of an inverted squad being released into battle near the end of the regular squad’s mission, so that the inverted soldiers can experience the mission backwards and collect helpful information—which they can then brief to the forward squad before their mission begins. It’s trippy, but it checks out.
The problem is that visually, the resulting battle is hilariously unintelligible. Nolan has tried to help us by color-coding his soldiers in James Bond fashion, but even so, the spectacle of two teams of soldiers working together in opposite temporal directions can’t be followed by a human brain in real time. Buildings are exploded, un-exploded, re-exploded. People are dying—or are they coming back to life? Is the enemy even on the battlefield? Not only are there no stakes; there’s no graspable game.
Tenet’s forces do recover the algorithm in time, thanks to sacrificial heroics from Neil. This despite Kat deciding to kill Sator for her own satisfaction, even though her job was to keep him alive as long as possible—a curious move, given that all life on the planet was supposedly on the line.
It’s revealed that Neil has been mostly moving backward in time since joining Tenet, compared to the Protagonist’s moving forward, meaning that, essentially, the entire functioning of Tenet has been a temporal pincer operation, with Neil as the inverted information-gatherer, and the Protagonist as the eventual receiver of the intel from Neil. This transfer is the subject of the film, with Neil training the Protagonist with the experience he’s accumulated. Cool stuff.
But nuggets of cool don’t make a film. We come to the theater, first and foremost, for interesting stories, and Tenet, by any important measure, isn’t one. To the contrary, it’s a very cliché story with forgettable characters, and it makes little sense. But can anyone piece it together to discover that? The movie’s bland narrative, like the doomsday algorithm, has been sliced up and scattered every which way, so that its defects take tremendous effort to reconstruct and experience properly. And why would anyone (besides me) embark on such a task?
Nolan can do better. The maker of The Prestige (2006) and even Inception (2010) has shown himself capable of real, character-based drama, but at other times, such as with this effort and with his first major feature, Memento (2002), he’s simply used his powers of invention to obscure the inadequacy of his central story. It’s discouraging to see him repeating early artistic errors that he had seemed to move beyond.
Is he regressing? Or is his whole career…just one big temporal pincer operation??
—Jim Andersen
For more movies explained, check out my piece on Inception.