Tenet (2020)

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rhinohelix

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My attempts at answers inline.
Not arguing, you clearly understood the movie, I was hungover and had trouble following a lot of it:

How did they go backwards through time? Was it bc they were inverted? Why didn’t they need oxygen when Kat killed her husband at the end? How did they uninvert themselves?
They are on a ship that has a Mobile Hypercenter/Turnstile. They inverted to reposition themselves in time and then started moving forward again; you only need oxygen when you presently inverted, like The Protagonist in the Saab in the car chase. Only when you are moving against the standard flow of time, i.e. would your lungs not process regular oxygen. I assume they traveled back to the mobile Hypercenter on the ship where all of the soldiers were departing from where she was in the cube.

Was that robert Pattinson that was shot in the head at the end? If so, so he dies after they had their little goodbye at the end?
He does; that is why they have the goodbye and he convinces Ives not to kill everyone.

In the inverted/normal action sequences, the people were never really running backwards right? That was just the perspective from normal time?
Exactly!
What was happening when Sator was interrogating The Protagonist by threatening to shoot Kat in the room with the inverted turn stile thing?
As I understand it, IIRC fully caveat and provisos on this one, as now the movie is further away, In the fake swap, they didn't get the part, so he was threatening to shoot Kat to get the real location of the item from the Protagonist but as he was Inverted, it was playing essentially translating the speech for someone who was in their future. Basically they went back in time and had the Protagonist tell them where he was "going" to leave it after he had already left it there.

What was the whole plot with the painting about?
This was the blackmail piece Sator was using to keep Kat with him; if she left him, he would have her prosecuted for assisting the forger in defrauding her husband and she would lose Max. Getting this piece was the leverage that was key to getting her cooperation. Michael Caine and she explain this part at those first two dinners ("Brooks Bros. won't cut it" and Cheese Grater Fight.)

Also, what was the whole opening sequence about? There was an inverted round in the opera right? Who were they saving? Is that why he asked “do you like opera” to the bad guy?
It was Sator getting a piece of the algorithm "disguised" as Pu-241; there was, used by the guy with the red string, who turns out to be Neil. That is why the Protagonist used that line to get in with Sator later.

Was Robert Pattison Kat's son grown up?
That's the implication, its left ambiguous, although the red string has a coin that looks like it could be from Vietnam on it. and people have SS of Max watching the woman dive off the yacht with opened mouthed amazement on his face. I lean to think that he is but just my opinion.

When Protaganist is learning about Tenet, the bullets are shot in the stone, and he sucks them back up bc they are inverted. Didn't someone shoot them initially into the stone? So you could shoot them, then unshoot them??
As I understand it, No: The items may have their Entropy reverse forever but the impact on the world isn't seen for that long into "the future". At some point, as they describe it in the movie, (When they are first looking at the bullets in the Research Center, he describes the effect as "pissing in the wind") at some point the inversion effect will come into being and objects will be affected. Such as when they got close the Hallway fight again taking Kat back to other Turnstile/Hypercenter at the Oslo Airport and the Protagonist's arm started the bleed where he had stabbed himself in the first run through. So, close in our time to the bullet being fired, the impact will appear on the wall, and then the shoot will "catch" the inverted bullet.
Another example is the mirror on the BMW in the Tallinn scene where they are trying to get the "241" with the large vehicles. There is a shot of the BMWs mirror being cracked for no reason, because in a few minutes, (I think The Protagonist's Inverted Saab) will crash into them. Reading about the movie, it is described as the "Throwing a tennis ball into a strong wind": the point at which the tennis ball turns around and starts the go with the wind, that is when the effects of inverted objects will show up in the normal flow of time. Bullet holes will appear, people will pop into or out of view, etc. In the Research Center at the start of the movie again, you see them "pick up" inverted objects, but then they show the video played backwards and it looks like they are being dropped. It's very much like Inception and our limited perspective on the timestream.
You can't unshoot a shot bullet because events don't "unhappen" and you can't change causality in Tenet; you can't bring people back from the dead, etc. Mirrors still break, All that is changing is the flow of entropy i.e. time. Now, from a philosophical point some will say this (a 100% deterministic POV unchangeable timeline breaks freewill but not from the perspective that what you are going to do has already happened in the sense that all times are happening simultaneously and we are only limited by our 3D/linear flow of time perspective. Knowing what we are going to choose doesn't limit our choices, it only makes us predictable assuming an unknowable future.


Also, the scene on the boat where Kat is sitting, and you see the pole behind her move right to left and back multiple times, why was it so rapidly reversing time?
I didn't notice this at all; I got nothing. I will need to either wait for another viewing or find a copy sooner that video release, which someone said is December? ugh.

I also need to check the yacht dates in my answer earlier, because despite my memory of them they don't make sense in the context of the movie. Formatted for readability and I like intrinsic's use of Bold better than my highlighting inline answers.
 
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kegkilla

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Yeah, that's the expected mindfuck from Nolan with this movie. Nothing anyone does in the movie changes anything, it all just slots into place like clockwork. What makes it so impressive from a technical standpoint is that it doesn't feel like this at any point. Even though lots of people theoretically know what's happening in the future, everything they do still seems to make sense from their perspective in the current direction they are traveling.

Like with Kat, when she first describes the yacht scene, she mentions that he disappears off the boat while she is on-shore, and she sees another woman diving off the boat. As it turns out, the other woman was her, and he disappeared because she killed him and took him with her. Ironically, the idea that he was banging another woman while toying with her was part of what turned her against him.
Yeah the more I dig into the plot line and inversion stuff it really seems like it was meticulously constructed and fairly air tight (playing by the rules the movie creates for itself).

Unfortunately, it also feels like a movie that was engineered around achieving that technical feat, rather than telling a story. The plot itself is not particularly compelling and seems to be more of a device to move back and forth to different set pieces to showcase the impressive technical aspects of the film (or to get Chris Nolan’s friends a paycheck in the case of Michael Kaine). All of the characters are fairly flat and one dimensional, and their motivations are often pretty suspect (for example, there is no good explanation for the Protagonist to go as far as he does to help Kat unless we are to assume that her son is Neal. But the Protagonist shouldn’t have enough information to infer that until the end of the film).
 
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rhinohelix

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Your somewhat wrong.

Sator relived the highway sequence over and over, using the temporal pincer to ultimately achieve his goal, but the reason being, he was attempting to gain an advantage by understanding exactly when and how specific events unfold in order to have an edge. I do understand what you are saying about specific entropy and pissing in the wind, flow of time etc, but my point still stands. Ultimately, inversion boils down to how the inverted interact with the non inverted, and how those interactions can have an influence on the "global" timeline.

A big part of all of this too is the turnstiles. They kind of go overlooked but its a very convenient way to "get inverted".
It's not "over and over" again: It's just once. When you see Sator in the SUV, he already knows that The Protagonist passes him an empty case. He isn't counting down, he is counting up. We just don't know about the Turnstiles/Hypercenter yet and from our linear perspective, it looks like he is threatening Kat. The Protagonist only crashes the Saab into both vehicles once. It only happens the one time. The temporal pincer movement involves sending data back and forth in time, not "reliving' or re-experiencing anything. As I just read quoted somewhere "As Neil says in the movie "What happened happened."
Also, I don't think John David Washington can carry a movie.
I thought he was great; I really enjoyed him on screen. I won't necessarily be looking for his next movie but he will be a plus for any movie that has him. As to why would he be drawn to help:
elizabeth-debicki-fo-gthumb-gwdata1200-ghdata1200-gfitdatamax (Phone).jpg
 
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Jozu

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Well, maybe he didnt relive it again and again, but he has had more than one go. The point is the same, going back in order to have an influence by understanding the order of things, how to control entropy through inversion.
 
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Intrinsic

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Maybe over and over? I’m thinking of this much to much like Primer. Is there a rule in place that prevents one person from going back and overlapping the traveling backwards so that there can be 2, 3, 4 versions of yourself running around. Or is the future one always required to be the only one because he has to get to the spot in order to invert? There was a comment hinting towards that, I think, when they were wheeling Kat in to the Turnstile for the first time. Maybe?
 

rhinohelix

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Maybe over and over? I’m thinking of this much to much like Primer. Is there a rule in place that prevents one person from going back and overlapping the traveling backwards so that there can be 2, 3, 4 versions of yourself running around. Or is the future one always required to be the only one because he has to get to the spot in order to invert? There was a comment hinting towards that, I think, when they were wheeling Kat in to the Turnstile for the first time. Maybe?
We are only ever seeing an event one time. They very explicitly go over what a "Temporal Pincer Movement" is in the movie, which having one group going forward and one group going backward and Sator benefits from that knowledge. When Neil hears people on the radio speaking backwards Estonian, that is Sator's Inverted "Blue" Team for the capture attempt of the Pu 241 in Tallinn. They get information from Sator's Red team who give it to Sator, who uses it to extract the information from the Protagonist about where it is that Sator then use (he sends it by phone to his men) in the moment to capture it. It's all happening in real time at the same time, just time is flowing differently for each team.

The Tenet/The Protagonist can't use the Turnstile/HyperCenter in Tallinn because they just recaptured it and Sator controls it in the recent past; Ives says "We just gained control of this one a few minutes ago and she will need a week or more" or something to that effect. So they have to go to one that they know isn't controlled by enemy forces, i.e. the one in the Oslo Freeport, and they know what was going on with the one in Oslo a week ago: They were crashing a plane into it and fighting with *someone*/themselves as it turns out.

The comment I think you are referencing, Intrinsic, Is something to the effect if you don't see yourself coming out of the Turnstile you are lost forever. There can be multiple copies of you, I think someone said there were 4 Neils at one point? there were definitely 2 Kats and 2 Sators on/near the yacht during the finale and afterwards Kat would have 2 of herself until she went through the Turnstile/Hypercenter after being shot. If someone watches if again (I may try to go again to see if there are any details I missed while I was getting settled during the Kyiv raid or while I was paying my tab while they were on the boat/Kat was in the cube near the finale. I still don't have a good date for when the Vietnam Yacht trip took place. I thought Kat had said years ago and pulled 2015 out of somewhere but that doesn't make sense in the context of the story, because it would mean Sator would have to invert for years to get back there.
 
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Xexx

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I give the movie an 8/10 -

My brain gives the movie a 10/10 over creativity -

My mind is still pretty fucked atm
 

Big Phoenix

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Dunno if it was my theater but the audio was ...not good. A lot of the dailogue was pretty hard to hear.
 

Big Phoenix

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It's a very common complaint with this movie. Studio needs to get on Nolan's ass about this bullshit.
Yeah it made a confusing movie a bit more confusing. Seriously there where numerous parts I just could not understand wtf was being said because the dialogue was completely drowned out by whatever else was going on.
 

Mazim

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This movie sealed the deal. I will watch every Nolan movie going forward not in the theater. What a waste of money. Movie was decent, at least what I could follow. I'm sure it may even be good but it was difficult to understand a lot dialogue and hear over the "background" noise.
 
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Fight

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The sound mixing ruined this movie.

It is already an incredibly hard concept to follow. Then, you drown out all the dialogue and you are just left with explosions and people going back in time to do things.

Honestly, fucking frustrating as hell to watch. I would have paid $5.00 more just to have subtitles.
 

Aychamo BanBan

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The sound mixing ruined this movie.

It is already an incredibly hard concept to follow. Then, you drown out all the dialogue and you are just left with explosions and people going back in time to do things.

Honestly, fucking frustrating as hell to watch. I would have paid $5.00 more just to have subtitles.

Right??

Like the two dinner scenes early in the movie, it's Michael Caine mumbling over his dentures, they I couldn't tell if "repo" was a guys last name, or the art duplicator, or what, and then the subsequent scene with him and her at dinner, lol. Just bad.
 

Attog

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But...but...it's what the director intended... you guys must just be too dumb to know that Christopher Nolan can do no wrong. It is you who are wrong by wanting to hear the clear enunciation. How dare you question the director's intent.
 
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