Board 8 > I literally cannot make Tenet make sense in my mind SPOILERS

(+) Yeah! (+)

No matter how I look at it, I can't make it make sense on how things work in reverse. I know the movie makes every last thing line up, but nothing makes sense following going in reverse / inversion to me.

Anyone else having this problem with this movie?

---

The one part that confused me was the car he gets in when he goes through the time portal the first time. Shouldn't he have had to drive it "in reverse" so to speak? Or are we to just assume that the car had been through the portal and was moving backwards too? I'm gonna headcanon it that way.

---

I'll have to see the movie, but I checked the trailer out and it doesn't seem too bad maybe. But then I saw this comment and had a good chuckle:

Inception: time go slow
Interstellar: time go fast
Tenet: time go skrrrra, pap pap cla cla cla , skiddikipapap, and br br brrroo boom!

---

Probably the single most confusing thing is when he is learning about it at first. It doesn't make sense for it go backwards there because no one ever propulsed it forward at that time in reverse.

That and the fight in the hall where they go back and forth forward and backwards. Movie just gives me a headache trying to make sense of it.

---

Corrik7 posted...

Probably the single most confusing thing is when he is learning about it at first. It doesn't make sense for it go backwards there because no one ever propulsed it forward at that time in reverse.

That and the fight in the hall where they go back and forth forward and backwards. Movie just gives me a headache trying to make sense of it.

The protagonist did propulse it forward. It's just that because the bullet is moving backwards in time, a forward moving object like him perceives the shot as the gun "catching" it.

---

Yesmar_ posted...

The protagonist did propulse it forward. It's just that because the bullet is moving backwards in time, a forward moving object like him perceives the shot as the gun "catching" it.

No he didn't. There was no way it could be propulsed from where he was. For example when he tried to grab the bullet from the table she says you have to drop it first.

---

I watched a video of Destiny and Adam from Your Movie Sucks discussing movies and Tenet came up. They talked a lot about how it's very difficult to just understand physically what's happening, like who's hitting who, because they didn't visually demonstrate how the mechanics are supposed to work earlier in the movie enough to prepare you for those scenes. They mostly just had exposition explaining it, whereas Inception would demonstrate visually what was happening along with the explanations and have some similar scenes earlier in the movie that made sense to help you wrap your head around it, so you are a lot more easily able to follow what's happening in the climax when shit gets out of control.

Destiny also compared it to backwards day at school. There's always some kid who takes it to far. How far does the reversing go? If someone says "you should run over there" to you, do you interpret that as "You should walk over there". Or is it "I should walk over there." Or is it "I should walk away from there." Or is it "I shouldn't walk away from there". Or Is it "You should walk away from there". Just what does this all apply to? It's not really clear, so when action starts in the movie you don't really understand what this mechanic applies to and it leaves you a step behind trying to interpret everything you see. If you punch this guy does that mean you are punching yourself? Who knows.

All in all, the idea is complex to the point of convolution and ultimately not set up well enough within the movie to support itself.

I thought this was all a very good explanation of this movie that I've never seen or heard anything about. This topic is literally the only thing I've ever read about this movie apart from that conversation. Seems good, I'll probably check it out.

---

It's an alright movie and some of the things they do in it are incredible to watch. I am just not sure if what I see is literally able for me to fully comprehend.

---

I feel like I understand what's going on on some intuitive level, but I can not put it into words.

---

I'm partway through the movie and they just raised the feynman electron/positron concept. That's something i had on my mind when I watched the trailer too. Even the name of the movie seems to be a play on this backward/forward concept. It'll probably devolve into a pretentious mess by the end of it all, but for now it is a fun romp.

---

SovietOmega posted...

I'm partway through the movie and they just raised the feynman electron/positron concept. That's something i had on my mind when I watched the trailer too. Even the name of the movie seems to be a play on this backward/forward concept. It'll probably devolve into a pretentious mess by the end of it all, but for now it is a fun romp.

The name of the movie is very in tune to the plot of the movie.

---

Watched it last night - I had a fine time understanding the overall macro-level story and I think I get the turnstile-thing. But I was incredibly confused and distracted during the individual action set pieces trying to comprehend what was happening.

In general it's really hard for me to wrap my head around a forwards person fighting an inverted person. Not to mention a normal person fighting using an inverted object against another normal and/or inverted person. I'm really not convinced the movie gets little micro-level details like that right, but I can't comprehend it far enough to criticize concretely.

---

Regarding the bullet:

We move forwards from time point A to time point B. The bullet moves forwards from time point B to time point A. At time point B, the bullet is fired and moves forwards towards time towards time point A, which for us looks like it is moving backwards when in reality it is moving forwards in the opposite direction in time.

---

Someone explain to me where the algorithm was in the car chase the whole time and where it ended up WITHOUT looking it up.

---

Finished up the movie. Pretty ok stuff. Didn't drop the ball as I feared it might. It played it a bit safe with a number of time tropes, but the big pincer scene still threw me for a bit of a loop even with having a general idea of what was going on. I can see why people vouch for repeated viewings. As a viewer, I can respect that it often took the simple route in how the narrative flowed, because the material was complex enough that otherwise we'd have a kind of Primer situation where you need 10 timelines crisscrossing and looping inside and around each other to even begin to have an idea of what's actually happening. This movie though, kept it all pretty focused with a forward/backward motif played with thematically and literally.

---

Lightning Strikes posted...

Regarding the bullet:

We move forwards from time point A to time point B. The bullet moves forwards from time point B to time point A. At time point B, the bullet is fired and moves forwards towards time towards time point A, which for us looks like it is moving backwards when in reality it is moving forwards in the opposite direction in time.

It helps me to assign agency to the gun. The gun itself is moving backwards through time. It was inverted at some point in the future and it will continue on its backwards trajectory unless it is at some point taken through another turnstile.

As far as the gun knows it's doing everything correctly and forwards. At various times three gun gets picked up by non inverted people who appear to the gun to be moving strangely, but when it's trigger is pulled it behaves as intended and fires a bullet in the direction it was pointed. But the gun's relative reality is entirely consistent.

Now the sad thing is that the gun could end up continuing to go backwards in time forever because it could reach a point before the turnstiles existed and them how could it be reverted? I get a bit fuzzy on how, if at all this is addressed.

With people they explain that you will see yourself exiting/entering from the other direction when you are going in but for an inanimate object that gets left behind or discarded what is the deal?

Personally I would imagine that it just keeps going backwards and you could eventually have a cave man stumble upon the iPhone that you dropped but even that is difficult to wrap my head around.

Modern person A inverts in 2020, while inverted they visit a cave that has been empty since cave man times.

Modern person A leaves phone in cave then goes and reverts themself.

Phone sits on floor in the cave until it reaches 3000 BC and gets discovered by Cave man B? But how can that work? We know the phone must never get picked up or moved from its position at that point because we know that from the phones perspective it was motionless for 5000 years. Or is it a situation where the cave man doesn't discover the phone where modern man dropped it, but rather somewhere nearby? And cave man discovers that when he "anti-kicks" in the direction of the phone or causes it to fly towards him? And so he anti-kicks the phone around the cave for a bit until it eventually rests where modern man left it? And from the phones perspective it spent 5000 years motionless, then it got kicked around for a bit and then spent more time in the location where the cave man found it, though from the phones perspective that's where the cave man "left" it when it was done kicking it about.

.

These are the thoughts I had when I saw the movie earlier this year.

---

Is anyone able to address post 14?

---

Forceful_Dragon posted...

Phone sits on floor in the cave until it reaches 3000 BC and gets discovered by Cave man B? But how can that work? We know the phone must never get picked up or moved from its position at that point because we know that from the phones perspective it was motionless for 5000 years. Or is it a situation where the cave man doesn't discover the phone where modern man dropped it, but rather somewhere nearby? And cave man discovers that when he "anti-kicks" in the direction of the phone or causes it to fly towards him? And so he anti-kicks the phone around the cave for a bit until it eventually rests where modern man left it? And from the phones perspective it spent 5000 years motionless, then it got kicked around for a bit and then spent more time in the location where the cave man found it, though from the phones perspective that's where the cave man "left" it when it was done kicking it about.

This logic is along similar lines to where I keep getting tripped up and where the movie might be failing?

To take an example from the movie: say a war in the year 2100 blows a gear off a machine and it lands somewhere obscure. Now this gear sits somewhere, undiscovered, until 2020 where it is picked up by a modern-day scientist. This scientist then places said gear into a drawer in some lab. Scientist continues to live their life with the reversed gear now stored away in a drawer.

But how is this possible? When the gear was making its trip backwards through time, it was still undiscovered until 2020 and not in a drawer. In the movie they clearly show a drawer full of reversed objects from a future war.

Is this not a possible scenario?

---

tyder21 posted...

This logic is along similar lines to where I keep getting tripped up and where the movie might be failing?

To take an example from the movie: say a war in the year 2100 blows a gear off a machine and it lands somewhere obscure. Now this gear sits somewhere, undiscovered, until 2020 where it is picked up by a modern-day scientist. This scientist then places said gear into a drawer in some lab. Scientist continues to live their life with the reversed gear now stored away in a drawer.

But how is this possible? When the gear was making its trip backwards through time, it was still undiscovered until 2020 and not in a drawer. In the movie they clearly show a drawer full of reversed objects from a future war.

Is this not a possible scenario?

Were those things from a war?

---

tyder21 posted...

This logic is along similar lines to where I keep getting tripped up and where the movie might be failing?

To take an example from the movie: say a war in the year 2100 blows a gear off a machine and it lands somewhere obscure. Now this gear sits somewhere, undiscovered, until 2020 where it is picked up by a modern-day scientist. This scientist then places said gear into a drawer in some lab. Scientist continues to live their life with the reversed gear now stored away in a drawer.

But how is this possible? When the gear was making its trip backwards through time, it was still undiscovered until 2020 and not in a drawer. In the movie they clearly show a drawer full of reversed objects from a future war.

Is this not a possible scenario?

Reverse causality is a bitch. Those objects would be destined to be removed from the drawer and moved to the turnstile that inverted them at some point in the future if their causality is to be preserved. They're probably also removed at some point in the past too, because they would not always be in that drawer forever. I imagine that anything would start rusting/breaking down after sufficient time, and that the lack of these objects noticed in modern times is probably proof that the Tenet organization is doing its job, whatever its job is.

Forward/backward interacting is starting to make my brain hurt now.

---

tyder21 posted...

This logic is along similar lines to where I keep getting tripped up and where the movie might be failing?

To take an example from the movie: say a war in the year 2100 blows a gear off a machine and it lands somewhere obscure. Now this gear sits somewhere, undiscovered, until 2020 where it is picked up by a modern-day scientist. This scientist then places said gear into a drawer in some lab. Scientist continues to live their life with the reversed gear now stored away in a drawer.

But how is this possible? When the gear was making its trip backwards through time, it was still undiscovered until 2020 and not in a drawer. In the movie they clearly show a drawer full of reversed objects from a future war.

Is this not a possible scenario?

Maybe the objects in the drawer were placed in there in the future? In regards to the first scenario, I think that would be impossible. If someone attempted to interact with the backwards moving gear they would only be able to move it backwards in spacetime.

---

tyder21 posted...

Now this gear sits somewhere, undiscovered, until 2020 where it is picked up by a modern-day scientist.

A forward-moving scientist could not simply pick up a reverse moving gear. The forward moving scientist's interaction would have to be the opposite of placing or dropping the gear into the position it sat.

And so you could not simply see the gear, and pick up the gear, and begin to measure/examine/study the gear, because we already know the gear sat where it sat those 80 years on it's way to be found and so anything you did to it would have to be something it had already experienced during those 80 years back.

So either we're operating under the belief the gear sat there and nothing happened to it, in which case it either went entirely undiscovered or un-interacted with.

OR after it was lost it did a helluva lot of things during that time as it was interacted with in reverse that exactly matched how it was examined over those 80 years. But in that scenario you wouldn't expect it to be where it was lost, but rather somewhere else. But that opens up a can of worms as you trace the interactions the gear has with various people backwards through time.

So say it's 2020 and you're the scientist. So someone in your government approaches you and asks you to look at this unexplainable gear that can only be interacted with in counter-intuitive ways. But prior to being examined by you it was just in some government storage facility, and before that who knows. But then, so you could examine it, it was reverse-dropped from it's location to be handed to you, and over the next 80 years it becomes interacted by you and who knows who else, but eventually it will somehow end up where it fell off in the first place in 2100. Over the course of that 80 years as it gets experimented with it becomes newer and newer looking. It becomes less chipped and damaged and aged

But that's from your forward-moving perspective.

From the gear's reverse-moving perspective it flies off the machine, it gets reverse interacted with for a bunch of years causing it to be aged and chipped and burned and affected by whatever other experiments it underwent until eventually it is dropped into the storage facility where it was being stored as some weird oddity. And you can trace it back further than that, but eventually it will end up being reverse kicked/dropped/placed into some obscure location and never interacted with again. Or hell it will find it's way into the hands of ancient civilizations where even they recognize the mystical properties of what at that time appears to be a shapeless rock. The Mayans might recognize that this rocks behaves differently than all the others so it was treated as a gift from the heavens or some such.

But it gets really damn messy the more interactions the backwards moving object has which is why the future-people used radioactive sites to minimize the likelihood that something they sent back would ever be disturbed.

But then their plan still has chicken and egg issues.

Someone from the future needs a stooge from the past. So they send back a time capsule with instructions, but then how does the past person confirm they got the message? Well any form of record keeping that has persisted during the interim will suffice, so you could say "Take out an ad on in the new york times that says X", and the future people can review the New York Times to see if such an ad exists, but that ad should have already existed even before they drop the capsule. At least it's my understanding this movie doesn't subscribe to the "reality changes around you when you set a past change into effect", but knowing that then the future people should know that everything they are hoping to accomplish would have already been accomplished if their efforts were successful.

Unless it IS a universe where reality changes as the past is manipulated, but the movie we're watching is taking place in the changing-past so we're just seeing one branch of reality playing out. But again, that doesn't seem to be what the movie implies so we have to assume that every version of everything from the future and past was in place and in motion at all times.

---

Okay, those last couple posts actually makes a lot of sense to me.

What's interesting to me is that this "what's happened happened" framework from the movie seems to imply that no matter what they do, a forward-moving person (A) could not physically keep an inverted-person (B) from making it to a turnstile (from A's perspective).

If A kills B, then from A's perspective they would stumble across B's dead body which would then be miraculously revived from A's (reverse???*) shooting gun. B would then proceed to walk backward until, with certainty, eventually enter a turnstile disappearing forever.

Wild. I kinda want to watch this movie at reduced speed.

* EDIT NOTE: Does it matter if A shoots B with a reversed bullet vs a normal bullet? Does the situation change? Is one of these impossible? Just when I think I get it, my brain stumbles across a question I can't answer.

---

I think if there is a shootout between forward moving Person A and inverted Person B, what you would see occurring would depend entirely on what occurred. If person A won, then things will play out accordingly and vis versa.

Imagine a hallway so long that it takes 10 minutes to get from one side to the other.

Imagine Forward Person A enters from one side at 8:00 PM.
Imagine Inverted Person B enters from the other side at 8:10 PM.

.

The logical part of your brain would tell you that they meet in the middle, at 8:05 PM. Right?

But that doesn't necessarily work, at the very least it isn't set in stone because you could make just as logical an argument that they would be occupying the same part of the hallways at any particular time during those 10 minutes. I'm not sure how you would determine where/when they encounter each other, but it could be at any point down the hallways.

If Person B did not exist then Person A would have reached the other end of the hallway at 8:10 and been there when person B was coming through.

The same thing is true in reverse. If Person A was not in the hallway yet then person B makes it all the way to the other end at 8:00 before person A steps into the hallway.

So they could logically encounter each other and would theoretically be at the same part of the hallway at each conceivable interval of time. So do you think they fight in the middle? Or at one end or the other? Who's reality has priority over the others? Does your answer change if Person A and B are the same person?

It makes me believe the reality they are experiencing has predetermined outcomes and they are just playing their part and going through the motions that invariably must have occurred to fulfil those outcomes.

---

You guys are breaking my brain

---

Waluigi1 posted...

You guys are breaking my brain

Watch the movie. Then it will be broke.

Notice how still no one can answer post 14.

---

I have seen it lol

---

Corrik7 posted...

Watch the movie. Then it will be broke.

Notice how still no one can answer post 14.

I'm fairly certain if I wasn't so far removed from having seen the movie that I would be able to give some semblance of an explanation. As it stands it's been months and so I only recall the broad strokes of that scene, but I don't remember being bewildered at the time.

---

I'd rather discuss interesting aspects of the movie like how it is essentially a movie form of a sator square than laser focus on one specific moment where the cast was playing 'who has the macguffin?'. I accept that however it shook down, the baddie got it. If I want more details, there is the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sator_Square

---

That reminds me of the brands used in the Dan Brown novel, Angels and Demons. That was one of my favorite parts of that book.

---

I do remember being a but puzzled about how it got where it did, but it's been many months ago for me too so I don't remember.

---

There was a Vulture article that gave a very detailed run down/summary of what happens in the movie, but when it came to the algorithm they were just "lol beats us?"

---

Yesmar_ posted...

There was a Vulture article that gave a very detailed run down/summary of what happens in the movie, but when it came to the algorithm they were just "lol beats us?"

They don't show the conclusion of it and kind of just act like it never existed later on in the sequence. But, to figure that scene out is like impossible for me.

Apparently it was in the car trunk the entire time. *Shrug* lol

---

Corrik7 posted...

Someone explain to me where the algorithm was in the car chase the whole time and where it ended up WITHOUT looking it up.

I think it was in forward protagonists possession, he threw the orange case to backwards antagonist, then he threw the actual algorithm thing in what he thought was a random car driving between them.

That random car was actually being driven by inverted protagonist later in the movie. Inverted antagonist notices this and slams into that car, then goes back and takes it from the wreckage (I think)

---

MarkS222222222222222 posted...

I think it was in forward protagonists possession, he threw the orange case to backwards antagonist, then he threw the actual algorithm thing in what he thought was a random car driving between them.

That random car was actually being driven by inverted protagonist later in the movie. Inverted antagonist notices this and slams into that car, then goes back and takes it from the wreckage (I think)

Sorta. He throws it to the silver car. Where it stays. Sometime after he goes inverted and grabs the car to drive away, Sator's men grab the aglorithm from the car while it is parked in forward time after the point where he inverts with it.

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkO-Wp8HrB0

I wondered when Honest Trailers was gonna get this movie done. "It's not Nolan at his best, but Nolan at his most" sums it up pretty well.


---

Lol I like it.

Is there any kind of bts vid of Nolan explaining everything for this one?

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t23ZEKqGHzs&feature=emb_logo

---

I can't stand their thumbnails. Are they funny?

---

Pitch Meetings are tight

---

Waluigi1 posted...

I can't stand their thumbnails. Are they funny?

First one I ever watched. It was funny for this movie at least lol

---