Rick Dalton said:
lazuras_dc said:
The first scene is a test by cia/Tenet. So was Stephen (the Russian guy from limitless) in on it? Or the fake cianide pill made JDW appear dead to the Russian who just left him there and the cia later recovered his body ? So JDW actually was tortured and missing his teeth/a tooth or whatever they did to him whole film?
There's a lot going on in that siege but I think I've figured it out. The Protagonist believes that the CIA is faking the siege as cover for extracting their undercover agent (who for some reason, had left what the CIA thought was plutonium 241 at the coatcheck). The CIA waits for the Ukrainians to show up and goes in with them. The first thing the Ukrainians do is flood the opera with gas to knock everybody out. This surprises the Protagonist but is something that the Russians did years ago. That and the synchronized explosives to kill all of the innocent people make me think those Ukrainians were actually Sator's men there trying to get the 241. We know Tenet is also there because we see Neil. When the Protagonist meets up with his team at the rally point in the opera house, he hands off the 241 and says he's changing the plan and goes to collect the explosives. At this point he goes from playing a supporting role to a leading one.
The Protagonist is later tortured by one of Sator's men who leaves him for dead after he takes the cyanide pill. Sator's man doesn't believe the pill is fake because he gives it to Sator who plans to use it to commit suicide at the end of the movie on his yacht in Vietnam. Tenet knew it was fake since they setup the siege and went and retrieved the Protagonist after he was left for dead.
Priya says later that Tenet wants Sator to get the final piece of the algorithm so that he'll bring them all together in one location and Tenet can then capture the competed algorithm before it's activated. I don't think Tenet intended the opera siege to be a test for the Protagonist, I think they were using the undercover agent as an unwitting protagonist to put the 241 in position for Sator to capture it. When the Protagonist changed the plan and the 241 wound up with the Ukrainian Security Service Tenet needed another "fresh-faced protagonist" that they could nudge along to get the 241 into Sator's hands. Since the Protagonist changed their original plan, he became their new guy.
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Also can someone explain the freeway heist. So Sator let's JDW steal the algorithm part waits until they're clear and driving away... inverts himself. Grabs Kat and his henchmen (is anyone else inverted? Can't remember) and intercepts JDW in order to steal it back and later we find inverted JDW also is in the mix.
Sator and the Protagonist had a deal, he would steal the 241 in exchange for him letting his wife go. Kat isn't inverted when Sator gets the case from the Protagonist because she isn't wearing an oxygen mask, only Sator is.
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Lastly the scene on the yacht. Young Sator is away for the day but "old" reverted kat kills old reverted Sator in the boat. How did she know old Sator was going to be there there. And in the timeline what happens to young Sator, presumably goes on about his timeline ? But then why did he "disappear" after that day as explained earlier in the movie?
Kat said Sator disappeared for a few days while they were in Vietnam and I suspect that he went to Kiev to try to retrieve the last piece of the algorithm at the opera. They deduce that Sator is going back to the 24th because that was the day of the explosion in Stalsk-12 that Sir Michael mentioned as well as the day that Kat said she tried to make him feel loved. So in the finale it's "old" Sator who went there to feel loved by "young" Kat. After she gives him the speech about despair and vengeance and shows him the scar where he shot her he knows he's been tricked and she kills him. It's worth mentioning that he takes the best fall off of a boat since that dude hit the propeller on his way down in Titanic.
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Also I guess this is a big part of the narrative I don't think I caught. how does sator communicate with the future ? Future people leave him gold in time capsules to assemble the algorithm/build the time turnstile? But wasn't Sators death supposed to trigger the algorithm why does it need to be dropped down that hatch? I'm assuming since it wasn't in that hatch when sator was shot, it never activated?
In the flashback where Sator is telling the Protagonist about his first job recovering exploded plutonium in Stalsk-12, we see him unearth a capsule. When he and his coworker open it there's a laminated letter addressed to Andrei Sator along with some gold bars. That letter probably outlines the partnership they want to form with him and he immediately accepts by murdering his coworker. The Protagonist tells Neil when they get to Tallinn that Sator buries empty boxes in places that won't be disturbed for generations and then immediately digs them up and retrieves whatever the future is sending him, so to Sator the dead drops are instantaneous. Sator wants to drop the algorithm down the hypocenter so that nobody else can get it until his partners in the future go retrieve it. The only answer for why the algorithm didn't activate when Sator was shot is that he didn't die immediately from the gunshot wound or being shoved off into the water.
That's certainly an interesting theory for the prologue. I like it.
Lastly Is it Sators death that triggers the algorithm? Or the explosion that buried the algorithm for his future partners ?
- I assumed it was the latter.
Also I find it hard to trust the future of my evil plans to my Fitbit. What if it runs out of battery, comes off, wife steals it???
