TENET Explained! Full Movie Timeline & Final Scene Breakdown (Spoilers)

Welcome back to new rockstars I'm Erik Voss and Tenet is Christopher Nolan's latest most mind-bending film exactly the kind of palindromic timeline puzzle to take your mind off the fact that the people in the cinema city 2 rows down from you are logically the kind of people who care the least about how their public behavior affects others and thus more likely to be on their phones or talking or general mass lowering assholes yeah i'm using this snob rant to stall because yes spoilers ahead i will be explaining the complex plot and timeline of tenant in this video i know many of you might not have seen the film yet some of you might not be able to depending on where you live or maybe you're electing to wait until it is safer all of that is fine this video will be here waiting for you whenever you're able to see the movie and then in doing so injuring your brain or hopefully not injuring your you know lungs or other people you're in the vicinity with okay here we go tenet uses a timeline structure that i recently categorized as type 4 this always happened time travel that means that all the events of the story including the act of time travel itself are all fixed and predestined on a loop they always happened the time travel is what sets the events of the story in motion usually it features a character suddenly realizing whoa this always happened however unlike other predestined loop time travel stories like the terminator the time travel of tenant is not an instantaneous jump to the past it is time inversion you have to continue to live and age in real time while the world reverses around you until you get back to your return point you can also just invert objects and then invert them back in time so that those objects continue to exist further and further into the past for others or for your younger self to find bullets gold doomsday device chunks with this in mind let's give an overview of this story in the future a scientist creates an algorithm to invert all of time but like j robert oppenheimer who lived with guilt over his work in the manhattan project this scientist encoded this algorithm into nine physical artifacts scattering each artifact around the world inverting them buried in radioactive hot spots hoping that no one would ever go near those spots and she took her own life to keep this secret but when the soviet union collapsed a man named andre sater took a job digging up plutonium from a test site and he dug up a container with gold and instructions to amass his resources and track down all pieces of this algorithm seder works on behalf of others in the distant future who want this man in the past to compile the algorithm artifacts and bury them in a tunnel caved in by an underground detonation in the soviet secret city of stalsk12 where that algorithm would stay buried and undisturbed for 200 years so those future bad guys could dig it up use that algorithm to continue that scientist's work in the worst possible way inverting all of time to counteract the effects of things like global warming saving their future by destroying our present in the past and stater planned to signal these future partners that the artifacts were in place by simultaneously killing himself john david washington only ever named the protagonist in this movie and his organization tenet used this logic of inverted timelines to prevent this fate from happening and tie off all the loose ends so no one is none the wiser so let's look at how each key player's timeline fits into this starting with a character whose perspective we stay with the protagonist he begins on a cia extraction operation at the kiev opera house but he's saved by a mystery man who inverts a bullet from the floor through a guy trying to kill him and that mystery savior runs off with a key chain dangling from his pack the protagonist is then awakened and recruited to join an organization called tenant and he learns that certain objects have been inverted through time from the future he tracks down the unique bullet casings to mumbai where he meets neil and learns from priya about a russian oligarch andre sater and then he meets michael caine in london and briefs him about accessing satyr through seder's wife cat using forged goya art that she got from an affair with a man named areppo it's a bit complicated but sader is now using this forged art as blackmail keeping cat from seeing her son so they plan to steal this art from its secure vault at the oslo airport rotus security by crashing a big ol plane into it here things get tricky see deep in the vault protagonist and neil enter this two-sided turnstile room and then they scuffle with this mystery man the protagonist fights him as the figure moves inverted in time and blocking all the protagonists move as if a step ahead of him and then seemingly gets sucked out of a room by a jet engine no kicks meanwhile neil chases the mystery man on the other side who moves directionally forward he unmasks him but then lets him go protagonists joins cat and satyr on the amalfi coast and he offers to steal for satyr the ninth piece of the algorithm plutonium-241 that he briefly had but he lost in kiev while that artifact is being transported in talon but in the middle of this epic heist an inverted version of seder uses hostage cat to intercept that artifact from the protagonist they all end up in another turnstile chamber where satyr shoots cat and then heads off inverted to intercept that artifact we just saw him take but then team tenet commando ives explains that seder was using what's called a temporal pincer in which seder's team inverts themselves from the future to know the end result of the mission and then invert back through that mission to intercept the prize the protagonist decides to go after seder inverting all of them and he chases him down on the freeway but he fails that flipping wreck that he saw earlier was himself and still inverted they returned to the oslo airport protagonist uses the plane explosion to blast himself into the room and scuffles with his past self then he enters the vault turn style he runs from neal he gets an ambulance and a future neil wheels future cat through the vault turn style as well then all three are now moving forward in time in the past and are able to save cat from her gunshot wound protagonist meets with priya and learns of sader's plan so they end up forming a mission with ives to go back to the stalsk 12 detonation where they use another temporal pincer to stop the conjoined algorithm from getting buried for those future evil dudes though ives and the protagonist in red lead the team to fight satyr's troops and stalls 12 but then let that bomb explode so that no one will know anything was taken while the other team in blue with neil have inverted themselves from the future into this battle to extract that algorithm before it gets buried in the blast cave-in from the explosion protagonists and eyes make it to the algorithm with a bomb in the tunnel but hit a tripwire and are trapped inside and then there's a mysterious blue soldier dead on the ground we find out is inverted he has picked the lock on the gate and he takes a bullet for the protagonist and he has that same mysterious keychain on his backpack and then neil having reverted himself to move forward in the battle pulls protagonists and knives out of the tunnel with the algorithm and then the three decide to break up the algorithm into three parts and go their separate ways re-hide the pieces and then you know off themselves but then neil gives the protagonist his third and he reveals via the keychain on his backpack that he was the mystery man who took the bullet for him in the tunnel that he picked the lock and that he was also the mystery man who reversed the bullet in kiev and he says that the protagonist was the man who first recruited him that they have known each other for years this is the end of a beautiful friendship neil says paraphrasing the final line of casablanca but that friendship is just beginning for the protagonists who in the future will establish the tenant organization to close this loop and in the epilogue protagonist fulfills his destiny by killing off priya and watching as cat picks up her son max who is hinted to be a young version of neil which is nolan's way of saying this always happened and to explain how that all makes sense we gotta look at the timelines from the perspectives of the other characters seder kat neal surprisingly this movie's seder's timeline after discovering that inverted gold 30 years ago he established himself as a power broker in post-soviet russia and spends three decades tracking down all the artifacts and building turnstiles all over the world for him to use but his radioactive digging left him with inoperable pancreatic cancer and he goes insane he's abusive to cat and they fight on his boat in vietnam season that forged a repo to blackmail her and she'd never seen their son max but then later on the amalfi coast he meets the protagonist who saves him from cat trying to drown during a boat race so he lets the protagonist steal the last artifact for him but then of course he catches up to him uses that temporal pincer to invert himself back to intercept the artifact and he continues to invert himself back to that day in vietnam the day he intended to kill himself and let the world die with him and signalling his future partners that the algorithm was in place for them to find in the future but of course in stalls 12 team tenet foils those plans and he's shot and killed by cat slid off that deck and his body is towed away so everyone assumes he has just disappeared but how was cat able to get the drop on him like that well onto cat's timeline so when the protagonist first contacts cat in london she recalls the day of she and sader's fight in vietnam and she remembers seeing a mystery woman dive off the boat as she was returning to it then later in talon seder assaults her inverts himself drags her into his temporal pincer to snatch that artifact cat is left fatally wounded by satyr's inverted bullet so neil and the protagonist inverter with all three rewinding back to the oslo vault turn style where they revert back in normal time and they heal her wound but then they invert all the way back to the day of the battle and cat pretending to be a younger self gains sader's trust on the boat because he assumes the future version of her is dead this is just the one he would know from this time but she shows him her scar and shoots him slipping his body off the deck and diving off becoming the mystery diving woman that the younger version of herself saw now the most complicated timeline is neil's and his brings it all together so neil first appears the protagonist as a rookie operative in mumbai but he is actually much wiser than he lets on he knows what kind of drink the protagonist likes and when the protagonist tries to explain time inversion neil just kind of laughs it off with brainy references to positrons and entropy mentioning that he has a masters in physics this is because neil is actually max the son of cat recruited and mentored in the future by the protagonist when he establishes the tenant organization the two have known each other for years and max neal was likely to spend his adult years studying the physics of entropy and it's possible that the name neil was acquired by max taking the last four letters of his full name maximilian and inverting them to become neil now at some point in the future neil will invert himself to save the protagonist at the kiev opera house he then reverts himself moving forward normally and makes contact with the protagonist in mumbai he helps him find priya then he helps him break into oslo vault where neil chases future protagonists and unmasks him realizing that it's a protagonist and this all must be part of some future inversion then neil joins protagonist on the talon heist he helps rescue him alongside ives and then neil inverts himself with cat as they head back to oslo neil waits for the protagonist to go in first and then he takes cat and himself through that oslo turnstile with all three of them now moving forward just in the past but then all three invert again back to the day of the battle neil joins the inverted blue team and notices that ives and protagonists are headed into a tripwire so he reverts himself in the nearby turnstile to try to warn them but he's too late and while sniping around the tunnel he sees another future version of himself sniping around two more on that in a second but then neil pulls protagonist and knives out of the tunnel with the artifact but he's not done inverting folks he hints to the protagonist that'll help his blue team the next time around and he leaves the protagonist with his third of the algorithm then he heads off to complete his final inverted loop through the tunnel where his inverted self will pick the lock on that gate and takes a bullet for the protagonist ending his life so neil is kind of the kyle reese of the story an agent who goes back in time to save his future superior and save the world a world that extrapolating the logic of this movie has already been saved but only if these agents decide to go forth with their missions that's why secrecy is so important to tenant agents ignorance is our ammunition as they say things only go according to plan if characters don't know their destinies it's also important for inverted travelers to avoid contact with their past selves because if you think about it each inversion creates three versions of yourself existing simultaneously version of you moving forward before you invert it then your inverted itself moving past you and then that invert itself reaches another turnstile and then reverts so that now they're moving forward on another layer and neil's timeline compounds that see during the battle of stahls 12 he was actually a child during that period but he was also an inverted agent saving the protagonist in kiev and then he was a reverted agent chilling until mumbai moving on to oslo and talon and then in talon he inverts again back to oslo and then that same kneel reverts forward but then shortly after inverts again to stalk he reverted to move forward mid-battle and then inverted once more to pick the lock and save the protagonist that is at least six nils existing at the same time maybe even more and along with the palindromic structure you might have noticed some key words scattered throughout this film the villain named satyr the opening scene at the opera the oslo security company wrote us cats forger a repo and with tenet all these words come together to form the famous latin satyr square a four-dimensional palindromic matrix found in the ruins of pompeii and across europe with an unknown origin of meaning max was said in this movie to be visiting pompeii perhaps nolan is suggesting that the seder square from history was a relic from the future inverted back through time to start to give young max slash neil an idea of his future role in the fate of mankind look folks there's obviously so much to this movie so many visual details so many layers of meaning i'm eager to unpack it all but it may take me a bit of time meantime if you have any further questions about the film the best way to find me is on new rockstar's official discord server which we offer to patrons of new rockstars of any tier even a dollar a month just go to patreon.comrockstars subscribe to new rockstars and hit that notification bell follow me on instagram at eavos follow me rockstars and thank you for watching and uh to those three a-holes in san diego amc who couldn't stay off your damn phones the only reason i didn't get up to yell at you is i am you from the future inverted trying to make sense lieutenant by watching it backwards this is what you have to look forward to have fun with that

Channel: New Rockstars

Views: 3,418,033

Keywords: new rockstars, new rockstars youtube, youtube new rockstars, tenet, tenet explained, tenet movie, tenet full movie, tenet trailer, tenet soundtrack, tenet music, tenet review, tenet 2020, tenet scene, christopher nolan, robert pattinson, john david washington, tenet analysis, tenet breakdown, tenet timeline, tenet timeline explained, timeline explained, tenet time inversion, tenet time travel, tenet ending, tenet final scene, tenet ending explained

Id: x6Kbphnil7s

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020