r/tenet • • 1d ago

The role of Sator's mobile device in the Tallinn TPM Spoiler

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4 Upvotes

Sator "always had instincts about the future" and his mobile device must be his good assistant in this regard. At least he holds it in his hand while saying that phrase to Kat on the boat and looks at it two more times in Tallinn when he is inverted: just after running from the turnstile (more notably) and after grabbing Kat from a chair (at a glance). Since every scene in Tenet is meticulously crafted, this device must be something very important to Sator. He managed to move the painting from the Oslo freeport to a safe place before the TP and Neil compromised the building. And while saying this to Kat, he holds the device in his hand. Why is it so important in launching a TPM in Tallinn? Volkov revealed all the information to him from the highway, but was Sator looking for some hints on the matter from the future?


r/tenet • • 1d ago

HUMOR Christopher Nolan when you start digging into the mechanics of inversion in Tenet

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147 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 1d ago

HUMOR I was recruited into TENET as a kid

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284 Upvotes

Found this old childhood photo of myself from 2016 doing the TENET gesture, I was MINDBLOWN as TENET is now one of my favorite movies OAT.


r/tenet • • 1d ago

HUMOR Why doesn't Neil become Stand when time is inverted?

23 Upvotes

Riddle me that.


r/tenet • • 2d ago

BTS photos from "The Secrets of Tenet: Inside Christopher Nolan's Quantum Cold War" by James Mottram

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217 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 3d ago

A few people seem to spend a lot of time…

18 Upvotes

trying to find fault in films; this one especially. trawling through scene by scene to announce on the internet that there’s a flaw, is a kinda ridiculous way to spend your life.


r/tenet • • 3d ago

Question about something that isnt making sense. SPOILER Spoiler

14 Upvotes

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?


r/tenet • • 4d ago

A slip-up in the Protag being chased by Neil scene Spoiler

35 Upvotes

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.


r/tenet • • 7d ago

HUMOR Reverse entropy captured on camera IRL!!!

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3 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 7d ago

for the posterity (Tenet ref)

14 Upvotes

I was here.


r/tenet • • 10d ago

Made a Live Visual Timeline of Tenet

431 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 13d ago

Tenet is mid asf

0 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 13d ago

HUMOR How you know that the antagonists in the future lost

17 Upvotes

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.


r/tenet • • 13d ago

META Tenet’s answer to the Grandfather Paradox

156 Upvotes

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.


r/tenet • • 14d ago

Is it accurate to say eventually, an "object will lose its entropy when it is reversed and will decay into moving forwards in time..."

7 Upvotes

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?"


r/tenet • • 14d ago

Me while watching tenet intro scene

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1.3k Upvotes

Especially when TP starts running wheeeeww


r/tenet • • 18d ago

Tenet and Nolan's Expression of Friendship Spoiler

37 Upvotes

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.


r/tenet • • 19d ago

META Heat transfer between heteroentropic generators

9 Upvotes

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.


r/tenet • • 19d ago

FAN THEORY Sator Does Not Work For Future Bad Guys Spoiler

37 Upvotes

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?


r/tenet • • 19d ago

FAN THEORY Neil is Antinous Spoiler

28 Upvotes

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)


r/tenet • • 21d ago

By the end of the fight TP learns how to fight in the reverse and catches the gun with his leg

157 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 22d ago

How do we all feel about removing the Spoiler Rule? Spoiler

14 Upvotes

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


r/tenet • • 22d ago

Just been to this pretty cool spot

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158 Upvotes

r/tenet • • 22d ago

FAN THEORY Does Tenet basically presume that consciousness is independent from time and matters?

1 Upvotes

Title


r/tenet • • 22d ago

NEWS Casey Affleck: “I was driving back from school with my son. We were talking about ‘Tenet’ and disagreeing. I said: ‘Let’s settle that’. We got Christopher Nolan on the phone and asked him something we could've easily looked up on Reddit. Once he said it, it sounded so obvious I felt embarrassed."

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745 Upvotes

“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