This article is a massive spoiler for Tenet. Obviously.
"This whole operation is a temporal pincer."
So here we are, two hours into Tenet, receiving a briefing from Aaron Taylor-Johnson's military commander, Ives, which confuses things as much as it illuminates them. One thing's for sure, though: Christopher Nolan's new brain-bender is drawing to a close. Or, wait – is it just beginning?
Tenet is a confusing film, a gumbo of explosions, backwards car chases and theoretical physics in which it's often impossible to grasp any concept for more than a scene or two. By the time we reach its denouement, the audience is expected to keep track of doubled versions of every character, who are travelling in opposite directions through time. Alongside that, you need to know why Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) is trying to reverse the arrow of time, what happens if he does, and why the Tenet algorithm is the key to the whole thing. So, shall we unpack some of that together?
Let's start with that temporal pincer, a concept Ives mentions a few times. In your run-of-the-mill pincer movement, a force outflanks its opponent and attacks from two sides concurrently, stretching their defences. A temporal pincer, in the same way, involves troops attacking an enemy. However, they're reinforced by inverted versions of themselves, who travelling backwards through time, and armed with the knowledge of how the original attack went.
Does your head hurt yet?
Melinda Sue Gordon
This palindromic film is a temporal pincer, too. It takes the idea of a battle fought on two fronts and places us in the middle of a war between the past and the future.
As we learned from Clémence Poésy's scientist at the start of the film, at some point in the future, a technology is invented that can reverse the entropy of people and objects. What's entropy, you ask? For those who've forgotten their schoolboy physics, entropy is the amount of disorder in a system and it can only flow in one direction. Think of a fire. What starts as a piece of wood (very ordered) becomes ash, heat, flames, smoke and all kinds of other, extremely disordered particles. It's impossible to put those things back together into a piece of wood. That's entropy.
If you reverse entropy, then you reverse what we perceive as the flow of time (think of smoke pouring back into a fire, which slowly transforms into a solid branch). This is Sator's plan – to use the algorithm to reverse the arrow of time permanently, which means that rather than simply flowing backwards, the people in the future would be able to overwrite the past. Everyone in our version of time would cease to exist. The universe probably would, too.
Which brings us to our concluding firefight, in which the forces of the present (the good guys) have been split into two teams, blue and red. The red soldiers are travelling forward through time; their blue counterparts are the same soldiers, who start their attack ten minutes in the future, but are travelling backwards through time.
Tenet (a title that refers to ten minutes forward and ten minutes backwards, as per the pivotal battle at its climax) ends with a scene that closes the loop of the film, as Neil (Robert Pattinson) reveals that it was The Protagonist (John David Washington) who recruited him in the future. Which clears up why Neil was always one step ahead and knew what was coming. Also why he knew that The Protagonist never drinks on the job.
This is clarified as Neil walks away, when we see an orange string on his rucksack. This is the same signature that appeared on the bag of the man who saved The Protagonist from an inverted bullet during the opening Opera siege in Kiev, and later, during the temporal pincer movement, on the man who unlocks the gate to the bomb. As Neil explains, this is the end of the story for him – 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.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
How, you ask, rubbing your temples raw in confusion, does that work? Well, as The Protagonist explains in the epilogue, when sat in the passenger seat behind Priya, he was the one who started Tenet in the first place. He inverted himself in the future, set up the whole mission, then went on to recruit Neil and arm him with the information he needed to help. He also, it would appear recruited himself. Yeah, us too.
It's a neat way to wrap things up. But the physics and interlocking timelines in Tenet are so complicated that the film needs a loop-closing denouement to knot together all those loose threads. After all the bombast of the preceding 150 minutes, it's a conclusion that's less of a bang and more of a satisfying sigh, as you finally catch your breath.
Universal
As an ending, Tenet's is less ambiguous than the spinning top which closed out Inception, and less emotionally powerful than Tom Hardy setting his plane alight in the closing moments of Dunkirk. Instead, it feels a puzzle piece has been placed which allows us to see the full picture. In this way, it more closely resembles the ending of Memento – which is really the middle of the story.
For Nolan, who doesn't like to tell stories in a linear way, an ending is never quite a full stop, but more a trailing ellipsis.
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2020-08-27 13:32:00Z
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