The Tenet, Explained

Christopher Nolan’s new movie: “The Tenet”, starring Robert Pattison, Elizabeth Dabekki, and John David Washington is a mind-boggling masterpiece that is sure to put you in disbelief by the sheer number of layers. The movie itself is a spy movie where a secret agent embarks on a dangerous, time-bending mission to stop the events that precede World War 3.

Much like “Inception” and “Memento”, “The Tenet” deals with time travel as you’ve never seen before. Instead of the regular shenanigans that go with time-travel, essentially just people moving back and forth, “The Tenet” deals with objects moving back in time while still being present in the present, and that’s just the beginning of it.

The timeline of this movie is funky, but simply put it, all of the time is fixed on a predestined loop in which the very act of time travel itself sets the events of the story into motion. Nevertheless, time travel in The Tenet is still different, bring that time travel is not instantaneous such as in The Terminator, but time inversion; meaning you would live and age as the world reverses in time around you. Like I said, pretty funky. Furthermore, you can do the same thing with objects, inverting them, and then inverting them once more back in time to increase its life span.

Characters in this movie do this with a slew of things, inverting gold, guns, and even doomsday devices.

With this in mind, the story follows as a scientist in the future creates an algorithm to invert all of the time. However, through guilt, he locked this algorithm into nine physical artifacts scattered around the world. Flipping to the past, when the Soviet Union collapsed, a man named Andre Seder took up a job mining uranium when he dug up a container with gold and instructions to amass his wealth and track down the nine algorithms.

Seder works on behalf of those in the future, who want him to take these artifacts to an underground location in the secret Soviet city of Stalsk-12, where the algorithm would stay hidden to only be dug up 200 years by those in the future. These people in the future would continue the work of the original scientists, working to counter-act time to save their future, but by destroying our present and past.

The Protagonist and his company, Tenet, then use this logic of inverted timelines to prevent this fate from happening and tie up all the loose ends.

The Tenet is a hard watch, it really boggles your mind and makes you think. But that’s the reason we watch, not for knowledge or information to be hand-fed, however for messages to be given and represented through context; which is exactly what happens in The Tenet. The movie carries the modern-day entertainment scene, which brings light to new movies that would follow in its footsteps, to preserve the legacy of once-great movies, and to sprout new ones.

By Christoph Deckert