his sci-fi action thriller film was written and directed by Christopher Nolan who, with the critically acclaimed blockbusters such as Inception and Interstellar under his belt, is no stranger to science fiction genre. Although Tenet doesn’t reach the heights of the former two films, it delivers on its promise of multi-layered intrigue and high-octane temporal action.
The film’s name and plot references are borrowed from the ancient Sator Square – a palindrome with four symmetries (i.e. the text can be read in four directions).
The film’s name, and partly also its plot, revolves around the ancient Sator Square, a five-by-five letter square made up of five 5-letter Latin words, forming a two-dimensional palindrome with four symmetries (i.e. the text can be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, or right-to-left).
The storyline starts unfolding at the Kyiv Opera House (the 4th word of the Sator Square), where the ‘Protagonist’ (John David Washington), a secret agent, participates in an undercover operation with the aim to retrieve an ‘artefact’, when things go wrong and his life is saved by a masked soldier with a trinket on a red string, who seemingly ‘un-fires’ a bullet (i.e. the bullet flies backwards from the wall and into the barrel of soldier’s gun) through a hostile gunman.
Some time later, the Protagonist joins a secret organization called Tenet (the 3rd word of the Sator Square), where a scientist shows him bullets with ‘inverted entropy’ allowing them to move backwards in time. Aided by a local contact Neil (Robert Pattinson), the Protagonist traces the bullets to Indian arms dealer Priya Singh (Dimple Kapadia) who reveals that the bullets are indeed of her provenance, but they were purchased and time-inverted by Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (the 1st word of the Sator Square) (Kenneth Branagh).
To gain access to Sator, the Protagonist approaches his estranged wife Katherine ‘Kat’ Barton (Elizabeth Debicki), an art appraiser, and learns that she unknowingly sold Sator a Goya drawing that was an imitation by a forger named Arepo (the 2nd word of the Sator Square) and Sator now uses the counterfeited drawing to blackmail her, thus keeping her under his control. Kat agrees to introduce the Protagonist to Sator, in return for which he promises to steal the drawing from a free port facility at Oslo Airport. As the vault housing the drawing boasts a practically impenetrable high-end security, the Protagonist and Neil come up with a daring plan involving crashing a Boeing 747 airliner into the facility.
The Protagonist and Neil try to steal a forged Goya drawing from the secure vault at Oslo Airport, when they come across two locked doors, marked blue and red.
There, behind blue and red marked doors leading to a room divided in the middle by a glass partition into two equally large parts, they find a peculiar turnstile that suddenly produces two masked men – a normal-timeline one on Neil’s side and a time-inverted one, who promptly attacks the Protagonist. The Protagonist only barely manages to fend off the time-inverted hostile, but not before he ‘un-fires’ several rounds from the glass partition, around Protagonist’s head, and into the barrel of his handgun. The name of the free port’s security firm, Rotas (the 5th word of the Sator Square) that means in Latin “turm” or “rotate” gives a final clue that the strange turnstile is in fact a future-tech device able to time-invert not only objects but also persons.
Kat introduces the Protagonist to Sator on his super-yacht, but Sator, to Kat’s vexation, shows her the intact drawing. When the Protagonist saves Sator’s life after Kat pushes him overboard during a high-speed catamaran race, Sator asks him to help retrieve a case he says contains Plutonium-241 in Tallinn. The Protagonist and Neil ambush an armoured convoy and during an elaborate nerve-racking highway chase steal the case, which in fact does not contain nuclear material, but rather the artefact lost during the Kyiv Opera House botched operation. No sooner they get hold of the contraband than they are ambushed by time-inverted Sator, who holds Kat hostage and demands the artefact.
Behind the blue door, the Protagonist finds a peculiar turnstile that produces a time-inverted man, who attacks him and ‘un-fires’ several rounds around his head.
The Protagonist gives Sator an empty case and saves Kat, but is captured and taken to Sator's warehouse. There, time-inverted Sator shoots and mortally wounds Kat, while normal-timeline Sator demands the location of the artefact, to which the Protagonist gives him false information.
The scientist who found the time-inverting Algorithm was so distraught by the profound implications of her discovery that she committed suicide so that it never can be misused.
Tenet operatives led by Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) rescue the Protagonist but Sator manages to escape. The group takes Kat through the time-inverting turnstile, reversing the effects of her wound, thus saving her life. Then, the Protagonist time-inverts himself, returns to the ambush site on Tallinn highway and gives Sator a chase. Alas, his vehicle is overturned, and Sator sets it on fire, but the Protagonist is again saved by Ives’s team. Then he and Neil travel back to the free port facility at Oslo Airport. There, the Protagonist fights off his past self (realising that the masked man from the first encounter here was actually himself) and enters the time-inverting turnstile to time-revert himself to the normal timeline.
Priya explains to the Protagonist that a female scientist in the future discovered an 'Algorithm' – a mathematical formula capable of inverting the entropy of the whole world. The scientist that found the Algorithm was so distraught by the catastrophic and irreparable implications of such a discovery that she committed suicide so that it never can be used. Before killing herself however, she rendered the Algorithm into nine physical objects – the artefacts – which she then time-inverted and sent back in time to be hidden at some of the most thoroughly guarded places there are – alongside nuclear arsenal of the nine nuclear powers. Given that Andrei Sator was from Stalsk-12, where he was hired to handle a clean-up of a nuclear accident, those in the future chose him as their handler for transferring time-inverted objects to the past, as they realised that he should be one of a very few people who would be foolish enough to enter this extremely dangerous irradiated zone.
At Sator's warehouse, behind time-inverting turnstile, ‘backward’ Sator shoots Kat, while ‘forward’ Sator demands the location of the artefact from the Protagonist.
Kat reveals that Sator is dying from pancreatic cancer and that he plans to trigger the Algorithm with a dead man’s switch, taking the whole world with him. She believes that he will kill himself during their holiday in Vietnam, when they were last time in love and happy together. The Protagonist, Neil, Kat, and the Tenet armed forces time-travel back to that day, so that Kat can delay Sator’s death, while Tenet forces secure the Algorithm and disable it. Split in a two groups, normal-timeline red team and time-inverted blue team, Tenet troops descend in a ‘temporal pincer’ manoeuvre on Sator’s hometown of Stalsk-12 in Northern Siberia. The Protagonist secures the Algorithm, but not before he is aided by a blue-team trooper, with a trinket on a red string attached on his backpack, who dies while saving the Protagonist from Sator’s bodyguard Volkov (Yuri Kolokolnikov). Simultaneously, in Vietnam, Kat boards Sator’s yacht and kills him.
The Protagonist, Neil, and Ives break up the Algorithm into several separate parts, thus rendering it unusable, and part ways. Only then the Protagonist notices the trinket on a red string hanging from Neil’s rucksack and realises that it was him all along who saved his life both in the Kyiv Opera House and in Stalsk-12.
TRIVIA: For the scene at the Oslo Airport Christopher Nolan blew up an actual Boeing 747, as he found that purchasing a real airliner will be more cost effective than employing CGI.