Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, is a mind-bending sci-fi thriller that follows a secret agent on a mission to prevent the end of the world. It stars John David Washington (son of Denzel Washington), who is known only as the “Protagonist,” and Robert Pattinson as his ally, Neil. The film’s plot is full of twists and turns, as Nolan masterfully weaves together multiple timelines and perspectives to create a story that is at once deeply complex and endlessly captivating. The action sequences, which were filmed across seven countries, are expertly choreographed and noteworthy for the ways in which they use forward and backward motion within the same scene. In short, there’s a lot to love about Tenet. It explores complex themes of fate, free will, and the consequences of time manipulation, making it more than just an action-packed blockbuster. It’s a thought-provoking and intelligent movie that keeps viewers discussing its story long after the credits roll. You may even want to watch it again in order to catch new details.
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But viewers may also leave the film confused, frustrated, and wondering whether they really “got it.” As is the case with other Christopher Nolan films, like Interstellar and Inception, Tenet asks a lot of its audience. With plenty of characters, twists, and timeline trickery to keep track of, it’s a challenging work of film art. To help sort it all out, here’s a detailed explanation of the story of Tenet, with special attention paid to its ending. Beware: there are spoilers ahead.
The Protagonist and His Mission
Warner Bros. Pictures
The film begins with the Protagonist being recruited by a mysterious organization known as Tenet, which is tasked with preventing a catastrophic future. The Protagonist is sent on a series of missions, where he encounters a technology that allows objects to be manipulated in reverse, effectively allowing people to move backwards through time. Throughout the film, the Protagonist and his partner, Neil, are pursued by a powerful arms dealer named Andrei Sator, (Kenneth Branagh). Sator is determined to use time inversion technology for his own gain, and the Protagonist must race against time to stop him.
That’s enough in the way of a broad summary, so let’s talk in detail about the future that Tenet and the Protagonist are working to prevent. Much of the plot revolves around an object called the Algorithm, which is capable of reversing the flow of time for the entire world rather than just individual objects or people. We don’t learn how time inversion was weaponized to become the Algorithm, but the inventor of inversion technology broke the Algorithm into nine separate pieces in order to prevent its use. If reassembled, the results would be apocalyptic. As GQ has it, “The inversion of the Earth itself is said to cause a catastrophic event that would destroy everything that ever lived.” The Protagonist must find the final piece of the Algorithm before Sator does just this. To put it lightly, the stakes are very high.
Time Inversion
In order to understand Tenet, you have to understand time inversion. Within the film, time inversion (or just inversion) is both a major plot device and a way of thinking about time and our experience of it. Put as simply as possible, the process of inversion allows characters to manipulate the flow of time in various ways. In practice, it allows characters to move backwards or forwards through time, depending on the direction in which they are facing. For example, if a character moving forward in time walks through a time inversion portal, or “turnstile,” they will then move backwards in time. If an inverted character moving backwards walks through a time inversion portal, they will then move forwards in time. Each time you pass through a turnstile, the direction reverses.
The film introduces the concept of “inverted” objects and people, who are essentially moving backwards through time and therefore appear to be moving in reverse to those moving forwards through time. This is why we see characters throughout the film moving in what appears to be retrograde motion, though an inverted person would experience their own motion as normal.
Now, here’s where it gets heavy on the science (and science-fiction). Nolan makes use of the concept of entropy as a way to explain the mechanism behind time inversion. As Observer puts it, “entropy is a concept that dictates the movement of energy between objects. Assuming one moves “forward” in time, entropy always increases and is unable to decrease.” So, if you were able to reverse entropy, you would essentially be moving backwards in time. The technology that makes reversing entropy possible is what leads to the strange blend of backwards and forward motion throughout the film. Tricky? Yes, but we hope this rundown makes it a bit easier to digest.
The Ending
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Here’s where things get especially confusing. In the final act of Tenet, Sator’s crew is on the verge of assembling the Algorithm in a Soviet-era town called Stalask-12. To stop them, the Protagonist and Neil split up into two teams, Red Team and Blue Team. Neil leads the Blue Team, who are inverted, while the Protagonist and his Red Team remain in normal, forward-moving time. These two teams advance on Sator’s forces using what’s called a “temporal pincer movement,” but when they arrive at the underground bunker where the Algorithm is being assembled, they find that Sator’s crew has already put all nine pieces together behind a locked gate. Too late? Not quite. The Protagonist and Ives find a dead soldier who surprisingly comes back to life, stops a bullet meant for the Protagonist, and unlocks the gate. It turns out that this soldier is (or was) Neil, who has been working for the Protagonist in the future the entire time.
It’s a tricky revelation, but one that explains how Neil seems to know the Protagonist when they first meet. Anyway, Neil follows Sator’s henchmen through a turnstile and uninverts himself. He then commandeers a truck and uses a rope to pull the Protagonist and Ives (another soldier on Red Team) out of the bunker before it explodes. Meanwhile, Sator is killed by his wife, Kat. The Protagonist escapes from the bunker, and soon comes to understand that he actually founded the Tenet organization in the future. This is how he recruits and befriends Neil before he has even met him, as they have already become familiar with one another in the future. These timelines may be difficult to track, but it’s enough to say that the events of the future have an impact on the past - and vice versa. In a final scene, the film shows the Protagonist tying up a loose end by killing a woman who is about to kill Kat. In doing so, he ensures the existence of Tenet in the future.
