The more I think and read about it, the more I like this film. I think that a blue ray / digital release will be able to clean up some of the audio issues and I imagine I'll watch the crap out of this movie in about six months time.

I liked it.

towards the beginning, when the protagonist is on the ship, and the guy is first talking to him about tenet, he comments something like "not everyone passes the test". what is he talking about there? himself? the protagonist's fellow officer that got tortured at the train yard? it wasn't clear to me.

Rick Dalton said:

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Saw it for a fifth time tonight and I can say that I've officially reached Tenet nirvana. Thanks to everyone in this thread who've helped me talk through some things and pointed me in directions I wasn't looking. I know that this will be an unpopular opinion around here, but I really think this is one of Nolan's best films and look forward to seeing it again and again.

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5 times in the theater??? If not, how is the bootleg quality?

schmendeler said:

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towards the beginning, when the protagonist is on the ship, and the guy is first talking to him about tenet, he comments something like "not everyone passes the test". what is he talking about there? himself? the protagonist's fellow officer that got tortured at the train yard? it wasn't clear to me.

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I think he meant the test the Protag passed at the train yard, taking the cyanide and "dying".

dave94 said:

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schmendeler said:

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towards the beginning, when the protagonist is on the ship, and the guy is first talking to him about tenet, he comments something like "not everyone passes the test". what is he talking about there? himself? the protagonist's fellow officer that got tortured at the train yard? it wasn't clear to me.

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I think he meant the test the Protag passed at the train yard, taking the cyanide and "dying".

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well i guess the timing of the statement was weird to me because i think it came right after the protagonist asked him about himself.

i know the test that the protagonist went through, but who are the other people?

Chase McGuire said:

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I assumed he was talking about himself. The Protagonist asks for more info, and that guy says he doesn't know any more. Then he says not everyone passes the test. I assumed he meant that he wasn't trusted at that level because he hadn't passed it himself. Just my read on it though.

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that was my suspicion, but then it seemed weird that he was able to be involved at all, you know?

Finally got to see this one last night. Thanks Rick for the tip on the Captiview. Overall I think I might have been ok without it, but I can think of a few scenes where it was a must (Sator shooting Kat with the inverted bullet scene for one).

I think as long as you're getting most of the dialogue, the movie is easy enough to follow without getting into the weeds. But if you start trying to trace back scenes and figure how certain events happened, it spirals from there and you can't stop trying to solve every little detail, which is what makes it complicated. But I think the average movie goer (there were a few in my group) can enjoy this as a time travel/mind bending action movie.

For me, I've done enough thinking and reading (some in this thread even) to get my head around most of it. Still stuck on how exactly Neil gets in and unlocks the door. I know he inverts and goes back but I need to see it play out again on screen I think.

Anyway I loved it. Somewhere below his classics like Inception and TDK and somewhere above Dunkirk and Interstellar I think. I'll admit to being a bit of a Nolan fanboy though. Plot details and the massive puzzle that it is aside, the music by Ludwig is fantastic. Something familiar to Nolan movies while still being it's own unique thing. Love the visuals in Nolan movies. Not just setting and the practical effects, but the "look" itself that you just don't see from anybody else. I really hate that so many people had issues with the dialogue. I'll probably be seeing it again sometime.

Good discussion from every one here.

Rick Dalton said:

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I've also been thinking about this scene:

There's a CIA challenge/response that pops up in the opening scene: "We live in a twilight world" is answered with something about "no friends at dusk." (This is by itself pretty funny considering Pattinson is in the movie).

When the Protagonist is caught by Volkov on the yacht watching Sator receive the inverted gold, he implies to Sator that he's been recruited by the CIA. Sator then issues the challenge but the Protagonist doesn't give the proper response. I'm not sure what his motivation would be for implying he's CIA and then not confirming it which makes me think that's a different Protagonist than the one we saw at the Opera.

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The protagonist doesn't give the proper response because his team from the beginning of the film was compromised and tortured by the Russians. He probably believes that that challenge phrase was found out by Sator.

TexAgs91 said:

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Rick Dalton said:

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I've also been thinking about this scene:

There's a CIA challenge/response that pops up in the opening scene: "We live in a twilight world" is answered with something about "no friends at dusk." (This is by itself pretty funny considering Pattinson is in the movie).

When the Protagonist is caught by Volkov on the yacht watching Sator receive the inverted gold, he implies to Sator that he's been recruited by the CIA. Sator then issues the challenge but the Protagonist doesn't give the proper response. I'm not sure what his motivation would be for implying he's CIA and then not confirming it which makes me think that's a different Protagonist than the one we saw at the Opera.

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The protagonist doesn't give the proper response because his team from the beginning of the film was compromised and tortured by the Russians. He probably believes that that challenge phrase was found out by Sator.

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That is an interesting idea. I thought he didn't give the countersign because if he claimed to be from the CIA, that would give Sator an avenue to check his story.

Finally saw it so time to resurrect this thread.

Thanks to everyone for making themselves insane so I could read this thread, watch 5 youtube videos, and have most of the head-spinning parts figured out already.

A couple things I wanted to mention. One was the Mumbai scene. You expected it to be reversed from the trailers, but it was actually just a misdirect and they really did just leap up the side of the building. Genius bit of playing with expectations.
One thing nobody mentioned is having a dude take an OxO Good Grips Cheese Grater to the face. AWESOME.

Some discussion:
This movie says that time moves forward due to the way entropy works, and then by doing some magic thing it's inverted now. In honesty I don't buy that. Like sure, if you figured out a way to reverse entropy you could do some cool things, but that doesn't mean you've reversed time. It's like walking east and walking west are two opposite behaviors, but just because you walk east doesn't mean you go back in time by walking west. You're just undoing the thing that you did, and are now at a later time having done it.

That said, it's magic. So okay let's go movie.

Then they said that something like an explosion didn't hurt because he was inverted and that the amount of entropy going backwards was very small compared to the normal kind, which was like "pissing in the wind".

But if time reverses like that, then causality should reverse too, no? So for instance they can pick up reversed bullets by "just feeling it" and here it comes into your hand.

So then by their own rules, I'm trying to figure out how a reversed person interacts with anything.

Like when a reversed and forward person interact, they're at odds with each other and can't both be affecting things. A reversed bullet and a normal person is the same as a normal bullet and reversed person, right? So then the reversed person is influencing things to happen?

So how would a normal car work for a reversed person? You'd have to put the car in reverse to go forward, or put the car in drive and look backwards. Was that how it was going? And then like someone mentioned, the car itself wasn't reversed, so how did it freeze instead of exploding? Was the gas reversed?

I'm losing sleep here so maybe I'm missing something. Actually I'm sure I am. Anyway I'll revisit this after I've had a day to ruminate.

I slept on it and then had a two-hour drive this morning (which frankly isn't a great idea after watching this movie because you're still thinking about reverse-driving...)

Anyway it struck me that the same rule for the bullet applies to the car and everything else.

So the rule is - if you're normal and the bullet is reversed, you use some sort of dropping "intuition" and because you meant to drop it, you're picking it up. So to pick it up, you have to drop it.

So you're reversed. You want to pick up a normal bullet. Same deal I'd assume. You have to drop it to pick it up.

Now you want to drive a car. You don't put it in gear and hit gas, or even put it in reverse and gun it. You have to get in the car, put it in reverse, and hit the brakes.

Basically you have to reverse everything right? You hit the brakes because the car, if not reversed, would have been driving and you need to stop it. So that's how you inverse-go it. You can now drive around normal-ish, keeping in mind that the normal flow of time has a car driving around in the R gear with the driver not even looking where he's going.

So when the Protagonist walks out of the inverter into the backward world, there's a car there. But that's the car that he crashes so that car has to be inverted as well. They don't explain how or why, but just the facts are that the only way you have an undamaged non-frozen exploded whatever car sitting there means that it went backwards in time as well.

It's a cheat (there's like, no way to put a reverse car in that chamber. Maybe take the parts of a car and build it but again, they don't show anything like that going on) but that's okay. At least it explains how that scene could have worked.

So now I have to mentally put together that scene. He's showing up at the end and doing it backwards, using a tracker to find the box, then he puts a tracker in the box? Then using that tracker he follows the box back to when the Algorithm Piece was in there and tries to steal it back from himself and Sator but fails, somehow. That whole scene is just a blur in my mind. Then he crashes. Then Sator blows him up and he freezes. Or did he get the piece at that point but then Sator takes it before he blows him up?

So his car is the one that's lying in the road when Sator is counting down with his fingers. He inverse-crashes back to driving, the box swap happens with some weird stuff about how it bounces in the back? Is that when he gets it even though the box doesn't open in the forward path?

Awesome, thanks. I need a drink, what time is it? Or does that even matter?

See that's how this movie works. I should have known that was coming and I walked right into it. Or maybe I did and walked anyway? Wtf movie

Just watched it a second time last night. I enjoyed much more being able to relax and not try to figure what was going on.

Tonyperkis said:

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Just watched it a second time last night. I enjoyed much more being able to relax and not try to figure what was going on.

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Did you bring earplugs?

I'm honestly thinking about doing that when I rewatch. And bringing Rick's notepad.

I didn't but I don't blame someone who does. I've never really been sensitive to loudness (movies, music, etc...). I saw it on IMAX the second time and it was crazy loud. So good though. The soundtrack had me moving my legs to the beat.

Watched it again this weekend and it gets better with multiple viewings. Best track from the film IMO

Going to hit this again this weekend after going through this thread. My mind was absolutely blown the first time, but I cannot say I fully understood what was going on. Love Nolan movies for their originality.

Finally got to watch last night. Need to read this thread to sort out some details and rewatch. But really enjoyed it.

I definitely preferred Interstellar.

I really wish this movie was edited better or explained things a little better. I felt we were rushed through to certain scenes that nolan had in his head and really wanted to show on screen. They were cool, but I just felt lost so often in this movie.

I would call it a good movie, but didn't displace any of the movies I had at the top of my Nolan list. My Nolan rankings on the movies I have seen would be (Off the top of my head):

TDK - 10/10
Inception - 9.5/10
Interstellar - 9/10
Memento - 9/10
Insomnia - 8.5/10
Batman begins- 8.5/10
Tenet - 8/10
The Prestige - 7.5/10
TDKR - 7/10
Dunkirk - 6/10

After watching this several times and loving it the more and more I watch it. There is some advice early on in the movie that I feel Nolan is speaking to his audience. Barbara the tenant scientist at the beginning says to Protagonist " don't try and figure it out, it will just confuse you more" or something to that effect. Meaning stop trying to understand this tenet world and enjoy the ride. The action, sets, score, and actors are all worth the price of admission. This is at the heart a badass action flick and I think it should be viewed as that.

Finally got to see this last night. Haven't read the thread yet, but it made me want to watch Futurama's Roswell That Ends Well episode.

Some theories:

1) Sators dead switch was a ruse. It was used to get him to assemble the algorithm by Tenet. There was no way for Sator to destroy the world. The protagonist / Tenet just wants the algorithm, and lied to Sator to get him to put them together.

2) Niel is recruited by the protagonist in the not so distant future. Maybe when he was 15 to 20. Niel (and maybe the protagonist) then inverts to several years before the beginning of the film. This makes the comment that "you have a future in the past" more interesting.

3) Niel and /or protagonist inverted back to the past and discovered the algorithm prior to the movie.