First of all, I LOVE Tenet, I think it may be Nolan's best movie.

However lets talk about the car scene that we are all aware of, I have broken it down many times and the protagonist makes sense to me but not Sator.

When he threatens to shoot Kat before jumping out the moving car and the protagonist jumps in the car, hits the break and saves Kat.

Now from Sators inverted perspective he would have had to jump into an already moving car with Kat in it, so how did the car start moving forward with Kat in it when all of Sators men in the car are inverted? Who puts Kat in the car?

Here's a small goof specifically in the second Oslo freeport scene when the reverted TP is running from Neil. The vault pentagon has five sides and according to the scheme the entry to the turnstile room is at one of the tops. The reverted TP should run through two sides while being chased by Neil (as is correctly shown in the first scene). But he runs three before Neil stops him, then he runs through two sides alone and here remains one more where the TP fights himself, six sides.

I was here.

Especially when TP starts running wheeeeww

I was thinking about some of the questions around why the Future doesn’t do this or that, why they don’t enlist another Sator, change the pickup point etc.

“What’s happened happened” sums it up, but there is a deeper message: the past actively fights back.

Ergo…

If you go back in time to kill your own grandfather, grandpa will fight back and win. Every time. The future doesn’t stand a chance.

Because there isn't an inverted duplicate of the planet Earth orbiting around the sun in the opposite direction. I'm pretty sure astronomers would have noticed that. "Oh yeah, that's just Bizarro world where time runs backwards" would be a pretty dead giveaway that TP was doomed to lose.

If only he and Neil had put their heads together and borrowed a telescope for an hour they might have worked this out, and then they could have relaxed a bit.

Kind of a shame though, in a way. It probably would be pretty cool to see the two planets enter a giant turnstile and disappear.

I randomly came across a shittymoviedetails post about Tenet and saw where someone that liked the film was explaining some key aspects of the way the inversion physics work and a major thing he said confused me. I don't think it's accurate but I'm not sure- he said that eventually an "object will lose its entropy when it is reversed and will decay into moving forwards in time" when asked "does Neil's body just magically materialize in the tunnel before waking up and running backwards?"

I know movies hit everyone differently, but have any of you thought about the friendship between John David Washington's The Protagonist and Robert Pattenson's Neil? I don't know if I've come across a friendship more powerful in film, save possibly Sam and Frodo. The ending I find powerfully bittersweet, specifically the moment when The Protagonist realizes what the shape and color of that friendship is near the end of the film.

I'm truly curious if anyone else has thought about this, and what your thoughts are.

I've watched Tenet 10+ times at this point, 3 in the last month after the CinemaWins video.

Looking at the Sator square, every word has an inverted significance. Opera <-> Arepo, Sator <-> Rotas, and then Tenet <-> Tenet. Maybe I had too much whiskey, but there is some significance here. Part of the confusion of the movie, and even part of the plot is whether there is actually free will. But "What's happened, happened". Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It's not an excuse to do nothing.

If future "Bad Guys" can communicate with Sator to send him gold and materials, why wouldn't they tell him about Red Team and Blue Team running a temporal pincer? Or tell him that Volkov would fail to seal the algorithm? Or that Vietnam Kat is actually future Kat that he's already shot?

Because the "Bad Guys" are actually Tenet in disguise. The point of the movie playing out how it does is for TP, Ives, and Neil to split the algorithm up and hide it so that it's never available for the future to reassemble. For that to happen the plot has to play out exactly how it does, meaning TENET and not the ostensible future bad guys are the ones who want Sator to do everything as seen. The ostensible future bad guys would give him a different plan that would succeed.

Thoughts?

Unsure how to tag this

Imagine: uninverted object A generates and emits heat. Uninverted object B also generates and emits heat. How this occurs does not matter, whether it is by radioactive decay, battery operated resistive heating, etc. Suppose B is inverted. From the uninverted A perspective, B is now un-generating and un-emitting heat. From the inverted B perspective, the same is true of A.

Now what happens when the two touch?

A wants to transmit heat into B, since it is hot. This adds energy to B in the forwards direction of time, allowing A to cool towards the future. From B's perspective, A is ripping heat away from it. This means that B cools towards the past. B cooling towards the past means it is heating towards the future.

Given that B will appear cold to the univerted world, this means that the two objects will approach an equilibrium temperature (towards the future) despite both being heat generating objects. Which generator is stronger will affect the equilibrium temperature; the sun emits far more heat than a human. Thus, an inverted human will heat up towards the future, and the sun will effectively not cool. To the inverted human, it would thus feel like the sunlight is cooling them, as is accepted by some.

My initial assumption before working through the thought experiment was that the objects would both heat towards infinity in their respective directions, which may be the cause of annihilation (via burning, melting, or otherwise structurally failing). Alas, not meant to be.

I know this is unnecessarily technical and a waste of time, but I still think it is quite cool.

So to up the ante on Neil is Max claims, I'll say Neil is actually Antinous.

It couldn't be more obvious; literally the same actor and in the same franchise. The Odyssey so clearly links to Oppenheimer which was so clearly linked to Tenet and now they form a circle.

First, how? Just some more basic straight shot one way time travel at the end of Tenet though a means we weren't shown yet.

Second, why? To ensure Bronze Age collapse. Just as the present was at war with the future, we can be at war with the past. After all from the future's perspective they are at war with the past. In this sense we are in a pincer.

Antinous needs to goad the suitors in to terrible behaviour and in particular he needs to goad Odysseus into rage. Why? The ultimate end to this is bloodshed and violence that ends with Odysseus' exile.

Without Antinous, it is likely that the suitors wouldn't have been so riled up as to stand up to Odysseus after he won Penelope's challenge; furthermore Odysseus likely wouldn't have witnessed such cruel behaviour that would be worthy of his vengeance. It is likely he could have peacefully reclaimed the throne. From that position of strength and stability with his wisdom, Ithaca could have navigated challenges and sidestepped Bronze Age collapse. This massively shifts the x-axis on the exponential curve of human development, meaning the new timeline's Oppenheimer equivalent is some Greek dude from thousands of years ago.

Perhaps this leads to technology that directly destroys the present the way the future wanted to invert us away, or perhaps we just aren't as ready (not that we were) for nuclear power and we actually annihilate ourselves then.

Whatever it is, Neil had to cruelly throw a poor old dog on a dung heap to ensure we could live. It's the bomb that does not go off that changes the world.

What about him dying after unlocking the gate for The Protagonist? Probably a body double/twin/faked his death idk.

(also I'm not a schizio; I know this is a batshit idea but it was fun to write)

“I was driving back from school with my son. We were talking about ‘Tenet’ and disagreeing. I said: ‘Let’s settle that,’” said Affleck. He worked with Nolan on “Oppenheimer” and “Interstellar.”

“We got him on the phone and asked him something that we could have easily looked up on Reddit. Once he said it, it sounded so obvious I felt embarrassed. That was it. I haven’t called him again, and he hasn’t called me.”

He should've just posted the question here in r/TENET smh

Not going to sticky this so our filmmakers can continue to get views.

Title

Time Block

A video from Welby CoffeeSpill, this might help if you want to understand it

Its mostly the protaganist, but why do the inverted people give a death stare when they look back at themselves or when they look past the screen at you? Is it an editing side effect or? Did anyone else notice it or just me?

I see how the science of the specifics of Tenet's physics and whatnot can be confusing but I had a friendly back and forth the other day with someone on the UnpopularOpinion sub and I feel like I was very clear but he kept going back to "when does the inverted object appear to me if you place it on my desk." Not sure if posting screenshots is a no no for causing drama or something but they kept going back to:

I build the desk this afternoon. I sit at the desk all late afternoon and evening. You place the inverted object on my desk at 11pm. When do I first see it on my desk as I move forward through time? Paint a picture of my experience of first encountering the object.

So I said "Oh, I see. There's only one timeline so if you were there when they placed it you'd see them but if you left at 10:00PM and they placed it at 11:00PM then it would always be there from your perspective. It's there from 11:00PM backward, always- unless someone moves it."

Again, always? I only built the desk this afternoon? When do I first see it on the desk?

I think the issue I have raised is a reasonable one and I don't think we're getting anywhere at this point. Thanks for the chat.

And then I said "An inverted object has the same permanence as a regular object- it never appears or disappears. When you build the desk you'd have to move it or knock it off or whatnot. It's there in the same sense as a regular object is."

I felt like I was taking crazy pills so maybe there's something I'm not getting here because we were both very clear and articulate but then they kept thinking the object would "appear." Ohhh, maybe they're talking about coming in the next morning? And would it be there? Maybe? But that wouldn't be "appearing" either so not sure. I did say "It's there from 11:00PM backward, always- unless someone moves it."