Tenet

Tenet (stylized in all caps, previously as TENƎꓕ) is a 2020 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife, Emma Thomas. It stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The film follows a CIA officer who is recruited into a secret organization, tasked with tracing the origin of objects that are traveling backward through time and their connection to an attack by the future.

Nolan took over five years to write the screenplay after deliberating about Tenet's central ideas for more than a decade. Pre-production began in late 2018, casting took place in March 2019, and principal photography lasted six months in multiple countries. After delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tenet was released in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2020, and in the United States on September 3, 2020. It was Nolan's last film to be released by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Tenet was the first Hollywood tent-pole to open in theaters during the pandemic and grossed $366 million worldwide on a $205 million budget, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2020 despite failing to break even. The film received generally favorable reviews, but divided critics more than Nolan's previous works. It won Best Visual Effects at the 93rd Academy Awards and received numerous other accolades.

• Year: 2020
• Runtime: 150 min
• Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller
• Starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki
• Awards: Won 1 Oscar. 49 wins & 135 nominations total
• Ratings: Internet Movie Database: 7.3/10; Rotten Tomatoes: 70%; Metacritic: 69/100

Plot

On "the 14th,” the Protagonist leads a covert CIA extraction during a staged terrorist siege at an Opera House in Kyiv. Compromised, he is saved from KORD forces by a masked operative whose bag has an orange trinket. The Protagonist retrieves an artifact but his team is captured and tortured. He swallows a suicide pill but wakes up to find it was a fake—a test that only he passed. He is recruited by "Tenet", a secretive organization that briefs him on objects with "inverted" entropy that move backward through time. With his handler Neil, he traces inverted munitions to Priya Singh, an arms dealer in Mumbai.

Priya reveals that she is also a member of Tenet and that the man who inverted her bullets, Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, is communicating with the future. Sator's estranged wife Kat Barton is an art appraiser who authenticated a Goya forged by her friend Arepo. Sator purchased the Goya and used it to blackmail Kat into staying with him. To earn Kat's help, the Protagonist and Neil try to steal the Goya from Sator's freeport facility at Oslo Airport but are thwarted by two masked men who emerge from either side of a machine. In Mumbai, Priya explains it was a "turnstile"—a device that inverts entropy. The two men were the same person but traveling in opposite directions through time. She reveals it was Sator who sabotaged his CIA team and that KORD has the artifact, which is weapons-grade plutonium.

Believing the Protagonist has destroyed the forgery, Kat introduces him to Sator in Italy. Sator agrees to help steal the artifact, which the Protagonist and Neil do in Tallinn, but they are ambushed by an inverted Sator holding Kat hostage. The Protagonist hides the artifact and rescues Kat, but they are recaptured and taken to a freeport in Tallinn where the inverted Sator interrogates them for the location of the artifact and shoots Kat with an inverted bullet. Tenet troops led by Commander Ives arrive, but Sator escapes into the turnstile. To save Kat's life, they also invert via the turnstile. The inverted Protagonist drives back to the ambush to retrieve the hidden artifact, but encounters Sator who overpowers him and takes it.

To un-invert, the Protagonist travels further back in time to the Oslo freeport, fights his past self, and enters the turnstile, followed by Neil and Kat. Later in Oslo, Priya tells him Sator now has all nine pieces of the Algorithm, a device future antagonists need to invert the entropy of the world to destroy its past. Priya planned for Sator to get the artifact to reveal the other eight pieces in preparing his dead drop. Recalling an earlier conversation with Michael Crosby, he realizes it is a nuclear hypocenter detonated on the 14th in Sator's hometown, the closed city of Stalsk-12.

On a Tenet ship traveling back to the 14th, Kat reveals Sator has terminal cancer and is omnicidal. They surmise that after the Kyiv opera house siege on the 14th, Sator returns to a family vacation in Vietnam to take his own life, sending the dead drop coordinates to the future via a dead man's switch.

Arriving at the 14th, Kat poses as her past self in Vietnam as the Tenet forces in Stalsk-12 try to recover the Algorithm. They use a "temporal" pincer movement—inverted and non-inverted troops create a diversion so the Protagonist and Ives can steal the Algorithm before detonation. Sator's henchman, Volkov, traps them in the hypocenter. Calling from Vietnam, Sator explains the antagonists are trying to prevent catastrophes due to climate change. As Volkov is about to execute the Protagonist, an inverted soldier with an orange trinket appears and sacrifices himself, enabling the Protagonist and Ives to escape with the Algorithm. The hypocenter detonates in Stalsk-12 just as Kat kills Sator in Vietnam.

In Stalsk-12, the Protagonist, Neil, and Ives arrange to separate and hide pieces of the Algorithm. The Protagonist notices the orange trinket on Neil's bag. Neil reveals that he was recruited in his past by a future Protagonist and that Neil has known him for a long time. Neil leaves them his piece of the Algorithm as he inverts to return to where he sacrifices himself in the hypocenter. Later, in London, Priya plans to kill Kat to maintain the secrecy of Tenet. Having realized that he is Tenet's creator, the Protagonist kills Priya and watches Kat leave with her son.

Cast

Also appearing are Jefferson Hall, the "Well-Dressed Man", whom the Protagonist tries to extract at the opera house; Andrew Howard as the Driver who sabotages the CIA's Kyiv operation and tortures the Protagonist; Wes Chatham as SWAT 3, a member of the Protagonist's covert CIA team in Kyiv; Denzil Smith as Sanjay Singh, Priya's husband; Jeremy Theobald as the steward at the Reform Club; Laurie Shepherd as Max, Kat and Sator's son; Jack Cutmore-Scott as Klaus, an employee of security firm Rotas at the freeport in Oslo; Josh Stewart as the voice of a Tenet agent in Mumbai; and Sean Avery as the lead soldier on the Red Team.

Source: Tenet, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); facts via OMDb.