re: "Tenet" Official SPOILERS Thread

Just got out, came here hoping for answers

When Kat and The Protagonist were at the restaurant, was it Sator that Kat was referring to when she said he couldn’t walk or talk any longer?

I need to see this again. A lot of dialogue was definitely washed out in the Dolby theater I was in.

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What was the device at the end that they split into 3 parts? Was That the 9 piece bomb? Was it sent back from the future? What did it actually do?

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That was the Algorithm which was capable of inverting the entire world. Yes, it was sent back from the future and was originally in 9 parts. People in the future placed the pieces in nuclear storage facilities since they were considered the most secure.

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Where did all the manpower snd soldiers come from? Did Washington organize all of it in the future? Where did all the funding of this stuff come from?

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Presumably, JDW was behind all of that and he set it up in his future. My guess is he used some of the same gold sent back to Branagh from the future to fund it.

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How and why did Washington know the Whitman poem lines at the very beginning before he had "died"? Was he CIA black ops to begin with?

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I think this was CIA code to identify operatives to each other. Branagh uses the line on JDW at one point to see if JDW will out himself as CIA, but JDW didn’t take the bait.

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What was the significance of the Goya drawing? It was fake anyway.

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Nothing other than it gave Branagh leverage over his wife.

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Who contacted Brannaugh to begin the whole cycle? The far future people seemingly can't come back to the past?

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It’s not made clear exactly who contacted Branagh, but it was the group who wanted to invert the whole world. They first contacted him when he was digging through the remains of his town as a young man. He was in the right place at the right time since it was the site of one of the pieces of the Algorithm. There was a piece of paper (instructions, presumably) with his name on it. Theoretically, the future folks could travel to the past by inverting themselves, but maybe not far enough (given that you could only travel back as far as your lifespan).

Answering questions posed in the review thread -

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So the protagonist was CIA?

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Yes.

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Were all of those other people in their side in the battle CIA? Or tenet?

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These aren't mutually exclusive. Some were CIA (like Ives), but all were a part of Tenet, either knowingly or unknowingly. They were recruited by JDW and informed of the situation on a need to know basis (ie, the drivers in Tallinn knew nothing about what was being stolen).

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Also who were on the opposing side. Who would willingly fight to end the world so explicitly like that. We’re they all devoted religious fanatics?

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Sator's PMC that had no idea what they were doing, they just did it because they were hired to do so.

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What stops that object Once he receives it from continuing backwards through time though?

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Nothing. It would need to be re-inverted again.

It's the same thing when JDW visits the scientist early in the film (who may be the scientist that discovers the algorithm years in the future) - all of those bullets, items, and detritus were inverted and traveling backwards through time.

But since those objects are inverted, from the perspective of the object, everything occurring around them is inverted. So from the bullet's point of view, it is being shot from the gun, or dropped onto the table. From a non-inverted perspective (like JDW at the time), it appeared like his gun was "catching" the bullet or that the bullet was floating up into his hand.

The way you perceive things is relative to your entropic directionality.

Nolan needs someone else to write dialogue because holy moly were the non-action parts bad. Just a ton of heavy exposition and characters with zero chemistry talking like NPCs in a video game.

Almost felt like I was watching a later Clint Eastwood movie

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Nolan needs someone else to write dialogue because holy moly were the non-action parts bad. Just a ton of heavy exposition and characters with zero chemistry talking like NPCs in a video game.

Almost felt like I was watching a later Clint Eastwood movie

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I noticed the same thing. The characters felt clunky while they were casually interacting.

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Nolan needs someone else to write dialogue because holy moly were the non-action parts bad. Just a ton of heavy exposition and characters with zero chemistry talking like NPCs in a video game.

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That’s interesting you say that, because when I saw the end credit where Christopher wrote it himself, I immediately thought it would have been better with Jonathan’s writing it. Perhaps I’m biased, though, because I not only think The Prestige is Christopher’s masterpiece, but that it’s one of the greatest American films of all time. But at the same time, Jonathan really shite the bed with seasons 2 and 3 of Westworld, so I don’t know.

But it wasn’t the dialogue I had a problem with—I think the exposition was not just critical for the audience, but really unavoidable due to the incredibly creative and ambitious story. And I thought it made sense to present it as answers to questions by The Protagonist and Kat because who wouldn’t be confused as all frick when told about all that. If anything, they accepted everything a little too quickly. Actually, probably a lot.

My criticism of the writing weren’t the words the characters were saying, but the rapid fire way in which they were said, especially considering the extreme complexity of what was going on. I think it was clearly a choice for the pace of the dialogue to match the fast pace of the action, but it didn’t allow the audience enough time to wrap our heads around and comprehend what we were being presented, especially considering the complicatedness of what we were being asked to. I pretty much had no idea wtf was going on for the first 20-30 minutes and kept wishing we had subtitles. I see a few others mentioned the same, but they were blaming the sound mix. And maybe that was mostly it, but in the moment, I just wanted to both hear and read what was happening in hopes of making more sense of it.

I also thought relationships were advanced at ridiculous paces. He has a 2-minute conversation with Michael Caine’s character (I still don’t know who he was), mainly about the subparness of his Brooks Brothers suits, then the next thing we know he is having a one-on-one audience with a billionaire’s wife, who is all too eager to believe what he’s selling and starts telling him all kinds of things that no wife and mother would be telling someone she just met, no matter how much she hated her husband. And she knew how maniacal her husband is, The Protagonist could have easily been sent by her husband to test her. Then he’s invited to what looks like a pretty exclusive dinner party, pulls up a chair, stays for about 30 seconds, then excuses himself like no big deal. Next day he’s hanging out on their $100 million yacht, sailing what I can only assume is a multi-million dollar boat, etc...

And somewhere in there he utters some magic words and is talking to a brilliant Indian physicist (?), only I think she was the brains behind the scenes and her husband was the front who got the credit (?). And after knowing each other about 5 minutes, she tells him about the greatest invention in human history, something someone from that timeline could barely even conceive of, and the convoluted plan of a madman trying to end the world. Maybe I’m slower than most viewers, I just a lot of that was unearned.

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Unfortunately the Dolby at AMC O’Neil audio was distorted and most of the dialogue was a chore to understand. We’ll see it again this weekend in a regular theater.

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I had been reading about how the sound mix for the dialogue made everything sound muffled, so it wasn't the theatre you were in. I just saw it and had the same issue. Sentences would be spoken and I had no idea what they just said.

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The Drinker does not recommend Tenet

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Just watched that, and I agree with a lot of it. Mainly the idea that instead of using a concept to serve the story and developing characters we are emotionally invested in, Nolan works backwards here. He has this cool concept and tried to develop the story around that and wound up with characters that we really don’t give a shite about.

Speaking of, and this is my last criticism—I found Branagh’s character too cliched and James Bond villain-y, to the point of almost Austin Powers cartoonish. He literally wants to destroy the world. And not even for some warped means to an end like Thanos. He’s simply just pissed that he’s gonna die at 50 instead of 75. Cancer’s a tough beat man, it sucks. Though maybe it had something to do with all that plutonium you’ve been handling since you were a young man. But you’re gonna throw a hissy fit and take everybody out with you—including your son—because “if you can’t have it (life), no one can?” frick you, a-hole. And you somehow assuage your guilt (as much as a sociopath is capable of having) by simply acknowledging that your greatest sin was bringing a child into the world knowing you were going to end it? No, your greatest sin is knowing what your greatest sin is and committing it anyway, selfish cocksucker.