Well Ives and then agreed to end their lives at the end, so I’d imagine she would have a target on them as well. As far as Kat goes I think it’s because of her relationship to Sator, and Prius might see it as a risk keeping her alive
Suicide’s sort of mentioned a few times, and with Ives kinda jokingly playing it off in a very “yeah we’ll do it... one day” way at the very end made me think how serious they were. Like, what about the scientist we meet in the beginning of film? Mahir? He’s obviously not in the middle of all events, and doesn’t actually come to close contact with inversion turnstiles, but seemed to be in the know enough. Or the random bystanders in Tallinn who may or may not have noticed odd shit happening in the streets. I was just sitting the other day and caught myself thinking how far would the organization theoretically go to conceal the events, even within themselves.
Btw none of these are plot holes or even questions Nolan owes us an answer to. Just little things interesting enough to ponder on imo
So (obviously) the turnstiles aren't really "time machines," they just reverse one's direction in time. So to travel back in time, you have to actually spend the days/weeks/months/years getting back to the point in time you want to reach. Hypothetically, you could do this for decades, right? So, once you exit a turnstile, it takes an equal amount of time to return to the day you originally went into the "inversion" timestream.
Where this gets fuzzy for me is just how far into the future are we assuming The Protagonist creates Tenet and starts pulling the strings of the present? However far into the future that is, Neil had to travel the equivalent time back knowing he could never go back to the future.
Is it days, months, years? I got the impression it was years. So... does that mean future protagonist sent Neil traveling years and years back to the present? If that is too far in the future, his age stops making sense. It's an odd concept I wish the movie made clearer.
am i missing anything here?
EDIT: maybe that's why Neil is out of breath and sweaty and acting odd when we first meet him.. hmm
i keep seeing that theory, and while i love the concept i see no reason why nolan would leave such a dramatically and thematically infused story idea as guesswork for the audience. but then, that goes for the entire movie imo.
-Vader
I watched this with 4 other people and I was the only one in the group who didn't interpret it this way. The other three all thought this theory to be true while watching. I do very much like this idea and the little lines of dialogue that could possibly set it up. Like you though it seems to be something Nolan would have given its moment. However his approach is hard to pinpoint in this film it and very much different than before. For better and worse.
assuming everyone is right about this, i guess my issue becomes why did Nolan leave this as information and not emotion. on first viewing anyway, there's no catharsis there, or emotional culmination, or even a melancholic morally ambiguous moment or regret that's dramatized within the actual plot and text of Tenet.
we don't have the protagonist realizing Max is Neil and what that means, it's not treated as a final "aha" or something for him to deal with. It's a piece of guesswork the viewer has to then project back onto the movie. It's theory, not drama.
and that plays into part of why tenet is such a bizarre movie and has so much left in this negative space around the narrative
So (obviously) the turnstiles aren't really "time machines," they just reverse one's direction in time. So to travel back in time, you have to actually spend the days/weeks/months/years getting back to the point in time you want to reach. Hypothetically, you could do this for decades, right? So, once you exit a turnstile, it takes an equal amount of time to return to the day you originally went into the "inversion" timestream.
Where this gets fuzzy for me is just how far into the future are we assuming The Protagonist creates Tenet and starts pulling the strings of the present? However far into the future that is, Neil had to travel the equivalent time back knowing he could never go back to the future.
Is it days, months, years? I got the impression it was years. So... does that mean future protagonist sent Neil traveling years and years back to the present? If that is too far in the future, his age stops making sense. It's an odd concept I wish the movie made clearer.
am i missing anything here?
You got it all right and it is confusing.
So either “the future” isn’t so far away, which idk anything about, I was under the impression it was at least a couple of decades, esp considering Neil and the Protagonist are supposed to have a long friendship. I’d say even a decade doesn’t really make much sense, because how old would Neil have been when he was first recruited into Tenet? A teenager? Early 20s? In the film, he is very obviously in his mid 30s at oldest. Late 30s would be pushing it, but still believable, I guess, but it’s not like a couple of years here and there suddenly add tons of sense.
One of the things that in my mind made some shred of sense was inversion actually inverting aging, since the entire movie is spent within a matter of a week or two, we wouldn’t have seen that idea either materialize or be rejected. But I’m pretty sure people have either disputed it or just don’t buy it in general.
That, or I guess, Neil is Max after all, and the protagonist spends his childhood grooming him as a future to be spy, so he goes back young enough to be... still young by the time then kino starts. But that sounds pretty nutty to me
Well, Neil did say he had known him for “years”. So either way you put it if The Protagonist goes back to the past and recruits Neil (Neil != Max) he still would spend years going back. And if Neil is from the future (Neil = Max) he’d travel years to the past too.
My theory is in the future, they will further develop the turnstiles and the inversion technology to maybe speed up the process of inversion but obviously that is just my own way of trying to make sense of it. Traveling back for a week or two? Possible. But years? You need so many resources and so much inverted air.
So (obviously) the turnstiles aren't really "time machines," they just reverse one's direction in time. So to travel back in time, you have to actually spend the days/weeks/months/years getting back to the point in time you want to reach. Hypothetically, you could do this for decades, right? So, once you exit a turnstile, it takes an equal amount of time to return to the day you originally went into the "inversion" timestream.
Where this gets fuzzy for me is just how far into the future are we assuming The Protagonist creates Tenet and starts pulling the strings of the present? However far into the future that is, Neil had to travel the equivalent time back knowing he could never go back to the future.
Is it days, months, years? I got the impression it was years. So... does that mean future protagonist sent Neil traveling years and years back to the present? If that is too far in the future, his age stops making sense. It's an odd concept I wish the movie made clearer.
am i missing anything here?
EDIT: maybe that's why Neil is out of breath and sweaty and acting odd when we first meet him.. hmm
1. They never say he creates it in the future. It might be possible that JDW inverts back into the past and creates Tenet before the events of the film even happen. That way Neil wouldn't be inverting decades, it would be The Protagonist who does that. Which would make Neil final words make sense since he says that The Proganost has "a future in the past".
2. On the other hand, if we consider the theory that Neil is Max then yes, he would have to invert at least 10 years to get back to the events of the film.
3. Unless we consider the theory that once inverted you might age backwards which would basically mean the machine allows people to live forever and the protagonist could theoretically spend many lifetimes creating the organization.
It all depends on the unexplained intricacies of inversion, your perception of what the ending means and the open ended backstories of the main characters, which require the viewer to fill in the gaps.
Wouldn’t the protagonist find himself in a similar issue though? if you don’t age backwards, and the future jdw decides to go back to meet neil (so that the latter could age naturally into the events of the film) and create tenet in the past, how old would he even be in this supposed past? old protagonist vs a young neil? how does that work in terms of their friendship? is he more so a mentor then?
IF he ages backwards, and goes to the past, then he’d just likely end up being possibly too young to meet a still young neil to form a friendship? unless he inverted to travel back almost immediately at the end of the film.
althought neil does say something along the lines of “you have a future in the past” at the very end. so idk if you take it literally, maybe that’s a possibility too.
edit: re: neil being all sweaty and weird in india
i think it’s just because he’s kinda drunk. it’s not the “earliest” point we meet him in the film, he’s also in kiev, and probably... not drunk and sweaty as to save the protagonist’s ass during the siege
I don't understand the strategy of a temporal pincer. Since Tenet seems to take place on one timeline, how can the blue team "tell" the red team any useful intelligence since aren't they seeing what the red team is already doing (with the blue team's intel) from their POV? Isn't a temporal pincer always a closed loop?
PS, I wish the movie had better goal posts in the third act so we could see each team / army fight over specific goals to create both clarity and suspense. As is, it's fairly chaotic in a good and bad way.
I don't understand the strategy of a temporal pincer. Since Tenet seems to take place on one timeline, how can the blue team "tell" the red team any useful intelligence since aren't they seeing what the red team is already doing (with the blue team's intel) from their POV? Isn't a temporal pincer always a closed loop?
PS, I wish the movie had better goal posts in the third act so we could see each team / army fight over specific goals to create both clarity and suspense. As is, it's fairly chaotic in a good and bad way.
-Vader
They have to do the pincer because of the paradox (remember, the whole operation is set by The Protagonist who has already lived through this event and set everything up as happened. The red team can only get the intel because of the blue team being ten minutes into the future. If the blue team didn't do it, they wouldn't get the intel and the would fail.
I don't understand the strategy of a temporal pincer. Since Tenet seems to take place on one timeline, how can the blue team "tell" the red team any useful intelligence since aren't they seeing what the red team is already doing (with the blue team's intel) from their POV? Isn't a temporal pincer always a closed loop?
PS, I wish the movie had better goal posts in the third act so we could see each team / army fight over specific goals to create both clarity and suspense. As is, it's fairly chaotic in a good and bad way.
-Vader
They have to do the pincer because of the paradox (remember, the whole operation is set by The Protagonist who has already lived through this event and set everything up as happened. The red team can only get the intel because of the blue team being ten minutes into the future. If the blue team didn't do it, they wouldn't get the intel and the would fail.
so it's a hierarchy of closed loops, then? the protagonist in the future is only setting these things up because it was already the course of events he lived through that yielded this information? it's just odd, since the blue team is already watching red team live these events through with the info blue team had already give them from red team's POV.
Yeah. From the very beginning of the film, the mission is successful (since the Kiev opera siege happens on the 14th, so simultaneously as the Stalsk events and Vietnam, too). It’s signaled even earlier in the film by present Kat witnessing her own future self (ofc unknowingly) diving into the water. The Protagonist at some point says “doesn’t us being here now mean it [world destruction] never happened”, Neil gives him some sort of paradoxal explanation, but ofc he is ultimately right - it was all the correct path all along. Now the protagonist will just need to secure it remains that way by doing whatever he does (sending Neil back) at some point in the future. From the protagonist’s POV he’s not living in a loop, but overall i guess it makes sense to say the overall timeline of the events are?
So I assume the point of the temporal pincer attack is the same. The red team is already operating with the intel from the blue team, therefore blue team needs to invert back to not disturb any of this.
It’s likely way less fuzzy than we’re making it out to be, but the film doesn’t work in favor of making it seem easier to comprehend.
