What if you could reverse the direction you traveled on the timeline? How would that change how you saw the past, the present, or the future? Could you change enough to not only survive but to thrive? This month, Eve and I melt our brains with Christopher Nolan’s latest offering, the mind-bending, time-manipulating, two and a half-hour long TENET .
TENET ‘s premise is that sometime in the distant future, scientists learn to use particular radiation to “reverse the flow of entropy” on objects and individuals. This “inverted” reversal results in the object traveling backward on the timeline. Cause and effect become reversed. An inverted stone will leap back into the hand of the person who’d not yet thrown it. An inverted bullet, back into the chamber of a gun that had just not fired it.
Are you confused yet? Yeah, us too.
Opposing this future sect and the present villain is the TENET organization. Their goal is to save the past through empowering agents in our present by feeding information from the future. As the protagonist learns more about TENET, its mission, and its capabilities, so do we.
TENET by Christopher Nolan was a very fast-paced two-hour and thirty-minute mind-bending action film with music by Ludwig Göransson. While we enjoyed his work in Marvel’s Black Panther, his music in Tenet is much more techno-oriented, with trance elements and some rap. While it didn’t bother me as much, Eve is less fond of rap than I am. The techno’s noisiness, combined with the trance’s high tempo and repetitive nature, did serve the story. It helped inform the scene but was also a distraction, particularly if that style of music is not your thing. Warning: the soundtrack does contain explicit lyrics.
Initial Reactions
As a whole, the pace of TENET is so fast that they give you no time to digest the story. There aren’t any revelations in the theater; they all come after you’ve left and had time to consider and review. This delayed revelation is partly due to the astronomical amount of information the movie needs to convey to make the background premise comprehensible. Eve and I were both in agreement. The story that Nolan tells in TENET would have been much more digestible and better presented in something like a Netflix or Amazon Prime series.
The main character of TENET is an agent called only “the Protagonist.” He is an everyman character—certainly showing a level of operational competence that we all wish we possessed. It is with the Protagonist that we ride along to understand the concept of inversion and the TENET organization’s mission.
Drawing on her education as an English Literature major, Eve realized a subtle but sure connection between the presentation of the world of TENET and the poem The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot. When viewed this way, the ideas presented in TENET take on a layer of complexity that helps elevate it to unique art.
Like most time travel movies, TENET challenges the audience to consider the linear nature of time and how human perception is so influenced by it. It’s not a concept that you can wrap your mind around during the movie. You have to spend some time—a few days—moving the pieces around in your head to make them fit. TENET goes on the record as Nolan’s least understandable movie to date, but it’s still a good movie. You can tell that Nolan put the work in on this one. Nolan also used both visual and audio clues to inform the audience about the entropic state of the individual character and scenes.
I found the sound volumes distractingly loud. In my first viewing, which was an xD format, the volume was just one step shy of pain-inducing. This element alone was, for me, a significant factor working against my enjoyment of the film.
After thinking about it all for a week or two, I concluded that the core ideas behind entropic inversion did not hold up. It veers away from the questions of free will and cause and effect. Still, you can’t help but wonder how people in a standard timeline perceive the impact of inverted action.
In the end, much of the frantic pace serves as a magician’s misdirection, distracting the viewer from clear plot holes and logic fails while highlighting the flashy things he was doing. That said, the flashy stuff is mightily impressive.
Spoilers!
Spoilers!
Chris’s Question: What’s the Point?
We usually try to give out listeners a heads up regarding what we hope to do for the next episode. With TENET , it was a different situation. UK listener Chris Turner was able to see TENET a week or more before we were able to. One of the questions that Chris had about TENET was, “What’s its point?”
With any other writer/director’s movie, this is a straightforward question, but not so with TENET .
TENET ’s idea is that time is a variable that humanity, the ultimate agency of the universe, can manipulate at will. Like many of Nolan’s films, it seems to embrace a humanistic view that humanity is humanity’s only hope. With exceptional knowledge, certain men can have the power of “god” over the lives of everyone else; past, present, and future. Our action will save us from our depravity and shortsighted nature. This granting of god-like status to certain people, through celebrity, knowledge, or political power, is a common theme for Nolan, but more prevalent in TENET . Most of humanity remains ignorant, while a small group of exceptional people will save us all. And since absolute power corrupts absolutely, that means these people will develop god complexes.
God Complexes
The hallmark of the present villain in TENET , the Russian oligarch Sator, is that he is engineering a scorched earth policy on all of reality. This policy is where his goals and the goals of his future patrons align. But there isn’t a lot of scripture that speaks to this level of evil. The closest we found was:
Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour. (1 Peter 5:8)
Sator even knows that he is just embracing his nature of destruction. His certainty and his esoteric knowledge of future events have elevated him in the eyes of those around him. Sator even sets up a dead man’s switch that allows him to hold all of reality’s future in his hands in a very god-like manner.
But I trust in you, Lord; I say, “You are my God.” The course of my life is in your power; rescue me from the power of my enemies and from my persecutors. (Psalm 31:14-15)
Sator seems to feel that the course of everyone’s life is in his hands, and those around him treat him as if he knows everything (like a god). The Protagonist also has this power but embraces it for preservation rather than destruction. The result is that Nolan sets up the protagonist and antagonist as representative as the eternal good versus evil struggle. Throw the inversion concept into the mix and it ups the ante considerably.
This is how we will know that we belong to the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things. (1 John 3:19-20)
Nolan seems to want us to consider each of the main characters’ actions as equally valid. He seeks to blur clear moral lines and obscure moral absolutes. Without God, can there be any?
Free Will
Eve and I agree that God’s omniscience is not a barrier to our perception of free will. We agree that the topic is not as easy as all that, and it is very likely beyond our human understanding. The TENET premise does not appear to be compatible with free will. Neil, Robert Pattinson’s character, uses a mantra several times throughout the movie, “What happens happened.” Fatalism or not, it makes sense within the mechanics of the film. The activities of the future preordain actions in the present.
Nolan’s complete failure to deal with the question of free will highlight God’s fantastic sovereignty for us. It is a concept that Nolan can’t even touch in a two and a half hour movie, but that our God built into nature itself. God is so great, so big that He is beyond even our most incredible imaginations.
The Future as an Entity
In TENET , the future is the off-screen, all-powerful entity that grants power to the present actors. Neil describes the opposing future faction’s position as believing they can viciously kill their grandfathers without impact. Either that or any effect will be preferable to the present in which they live. Of course, the group that sponsors TENET opposes them.
But we know that God is outside of time and sovereign over all past and the future. And he has plans for us.
“For I know the plans I have for you”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” (Jeremiah 29:11-12)
While this verse is specifically for Israel, it does speak to the idea that we cannot mess up God’s plan because he’s got it under control.
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
We have a sponsor in the past, the present, and the future—the Almighty Creator. God and much of his creation are beyond human understanding, but we can rest assured in his plans for his people.
The Hollow Men
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Sator uses this ending line of T. S. Eliot’s poem in the movie, believing that he held the end of the world in the palm of his hands. This line ends up being the key to a deeper level of understanding of TENET . It links the concepts to the poem and changes the perspective. TENET ’s presentation parallels the poem’s three worlds. The characters’ interaction with each of these realms informs them and grants them understanding, just as in the poem.
For the fate of the children of Adam and the fate of animals is the same. As one dies, so dies the other; they all have the same breath. People have no advantage over animals since everything is futile. All are going to the same place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows if the spirits of the children of Adam go upward and the spirits of animals go downward to the earth? I have seen that there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy his activities because that is his reward. For who can enable him to see what will happen after he dies? (Ecclesiastes 3:19-22)
Conclusion
Even now, weeks after our multiple viewings of TENET , Eve and I are unsure of all the film’s details. How the concepts work, how the characters came to know what they know. We can’t even figure out how Sator thought he was ending the world. This simple man’s simple creation was salient enough to know it makes sense but confusing enough to be senseless. How great is it that we can understand that our God, who is as far beyond our understanding as the east is from the west, has everything under His control. God isn’t just our security blanket or crutch; He is the very ground on which we stand firm.
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