Tenet of Tenet

  Blender Dumbass
December 08, 2024

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!!!Hacking Happy

It is better not to know nothing about Tenet, for otherwise it will ruin everything. I will be continuing this review with an assumption that you have seen the film. Spoilers ahead!

The protagonist is the protagonist! Like literally, the credits list the character played by John David Washington as simply "The Protagonist". Christopher Nolan is challenging the conventional wisdom of story-telling. He refuses to give the character a relatable backstory, or anything that could identify him. There is no name. The movie is even playing with that: In one scene where Elizabeth Debicki's character is trying to ask him what's his name, he says a name of somebody related to their conversation instead, as to change the subject. Everybody, including himself, calls him plain and square "The Protagonist". The movie calls the character by the description of the character in the out-of-movie world.

Yet the movie works. Nolan is trying his best to pump the film with so much ADHD inducing espionage, tense puzzles and riddles, that you have no time to think about the backstory of The Protagonist. It moves so fast that you have no time to take a breath!

The core concept of the film is inversion of time. Some scientists in the future found a way to invert entropy of objects, making them move backwards in time. This in turn caused an arms race similar to the one Nolan later portrays in Oppenheimer. Where apparently a device capable of destroying time itself, by inverting the world, has been created. And The Protagonist is tasked by "Tenet" a shady organization trying to prevent the apocalypse, so stop this device from working.

SATOR

To stop the world from ending the protagonist is tasked with defeating a Russian Oligarch, Andrey Sator. Who is apparently a broker of sorts between the current day and the future. Sator is played by Sir Kenneth Branagh of all people. I as somebody who speaks Russian from birth, was somewhat impressed by the way Branagh approached the role. The accent was flawless. He avoided actually speaking Russian in the film, for it will be a dead giveaway of that he is not good in it. But I liked his performance.

AREPO

To get to Sator, The Protagonist is using Sator's wife, played by Elizabeth Debicki, who is an art gallery fraud-detector, that failed to identify a fraudulent recreation of an art piece by Francisco de Goya, by a copy-artist named Arepo. Which gives leverage on her by both Sator and The Protagonist.

TENET

Tenet is a shady spy organization trying to prevent Sator from detonating the Algorithm, a device capable to reverse time itself, ending the world.

OPERA

The film begins with a military operation in an Opera in Kiev Ukraine. Where The Protagonist is introduced with the time inversion concept for the first time. As he is almost hit by an inverted round. At that point in the story the protagonist doesn't yet know about Tenet, or the time inversion or anything. He thinks he is there to retrieve some package. Which later gets him captured and tested for the proper story to begin.

ROTAS

Finding about Tenet, yet not finding everything about it so far, as knowledge about the organization or the future could cause the protagonist to act in an unexpected way, gives the protagonist a need to investigate this technology. Through Sator's wife, he learns about a secure facility Sator uses for storing something that could give the protagonist a lead. There he finds ROTAS, a mysterious device, which supposedly can revert object's entropy.

If you paid attention to what I just did, the words: SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA and ROTAS can be combined into what's called a Sator Square. This is a riddle within a riddle that Nolan probably enjoyed putting into the movie. The Sator Square has conflicting meanings. And has been found in many ancient places, making the origin and the meaning as mysterious as the Tenet organization itself.

Christopher Nolan is known to play with philosophical ideas a lot. He is obsessed not only with time, but also with epistemology. A science of limits of knowledge. And perhaps he wasn't just trying to challenge himself with debunking storytelling conventions, but also debunking philosophical and epistemological conventions.

The film is in a way in conversation with 1984 by George Orwell, as everything that the characters do, can be known by the antagonists, since the antagonist can talk with the future. But unlike 1984, Tenet does a ROTAS! It explores the possibility of ignorance being actually a sort of strength. A proposition that is in opposition to 1984.

In the OPERA in the beginning of the film The Protagonist is clueless about the whole Tenet thing. He is there on a normal secret operation. But then as everything goes to shit and he is forced to take a cyanide pill, which is later explained to be a test for him to join Tenet, he learns about Tenet, but only the bare minimum.

The knowledge he gets is enough to get him to a point where he learns about time inversion from the scientist lady played by Clémence Poésy which gets him on the hunt to find about SATOR and to get to him about AREPO and through him about ROTAS and thus piecing slowly the puzzle of TENET.

But in a such a way that he learns to appreciate the fact that he himself doesn't know everything. Because if he did, the operation would have failed. Everything he knows, the future knows and therefor the antagonist Sator, also knows. So he needs to be careful about what he knows. Ignorance, to some extent, is strength.

All of this mind bending stuff is so well executed that I cannot praise this movie enough. Nolan goes all in to bring the energy of the film to the absolute maximum level he can. In a way Nolan was lucky that Hanz Zimmer was doing Dune. Ludwig Göransson's music is perfect with Nolan's direction in this movie.

The stunts are amazing. Needless to say they drove and destroyed a lot of machinery for this film. There is an epic war sequence, with regular and inverted protagonists and other paradoxical things that break logic enough, to go beyond silly and back into fascinating. And of course they crashed a plane into a building, for real. I mean. Epic through and through!

And in the end, the protagonist learns something valuable. He learns that apparently the organization of Tenet was not founded, but will be founded. Founded by him. By The Protagonist. He hired himself and made sure he himself knows nothing about the operation. The protagonist is the protagonist!

And as I told you that I was going spoil the entire movie, we can conclude: It is better to know nothing about Tenet, for otherwise it will ruin everything.

Happy Hacking!!!

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