TENET: Review
“We live in a Twilight World; There are no friends at Dusk”
TENET, the name itself presents the name of the writer and the director Christopher Nolan as it has Nolan brand, Labyrinth story. It got that passion of a sci-fi movie and a strong story-line.
As the movie starts with the opera attack, the audience get an idea that the whole movie is going to deal with weapons. And the guest appearance of the mysterious-backpack guy with a backward-traveling bullet bends our minds to a different direction. But it is better to move on with the weapon topic because, in the next frames, our hero is assigned to a top-secret mission: TENET, to investigate a curious arms dealer.
Nolan introduces us a new invention from the future called Inversion. It is a technology that reverses the entropy of people or objects to move backward through time. Entropy is a complicated physics concept which explains why some processes occur spontaneously while their time reversals do not. Of course, it is complicated as one of the movie characters says “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it”. Anyway, it is demonstrated in the movie by a bullet that returns to the magazine when it is triggered which pause us at a point which feels familiar. Yes, it is the mysterious-backpack guy from the opera attack who used this type of bullet to save Protagonist. This reveals that he is from the future.
Everyone who watched or even heard about this movie is talking about one specific topic: Time-traveling.
And someone may ask, “Is it possible to travel through time?”
Well, I got my own answer for that which does not support the topic I am going to discuss in this moment. (I put it in my to-do list and continue with TENET.)
In the movie, the characters travel back and forth in the time and do several things. But if you look at it keenly, you might see that everything they do in that bent time is already planned or has happened. It is my opinion that they actually experienced them and will experience them accordingly to the reality.
Around this matter, comes the Grandfather paradox, in which a time traveler goes back in time and kill their parents or grandparents, that gives a result of their non-existence or their life is forever altered. But, there is another concept associating the parallel universe concept. It explains that the specific time traveler may never born in one parallel universe but still born in another.
If you watch the movie carefully, you will understand that the story runs through different parallel universe within the same time frame. Andrei’s activities are the major hint for it. Later, Protagonist uses it too to protect Kat from the inverted bullet.
It is mentioned that you cannot contact your past or future self when you travel through time as it causes ‘self-annihilation’, meaning you kill yourself. This looks familiar to the audience who have watched “Alice through the looking Glass” or “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” which show this concept. Hence, Protagonist have a hand-to-hand combat with his forward self in the vault of Andrei which leaves a doubt in my head.
Time has a major role in the movie. So, as I focused on the clocks in the movie, I figured out something interested.
I should take you to the scene where Protagonist was caught and being tortured by the enemy. He says, “Your colleagues will clear by 7” which moves the camera towards the yellow clock on the table. It means that the colleague will go over his limits of bearing and unfold the facts when the clock states 7. But, according to my opinion, it has a hidden meaning that tell “Protagonist will understand the whole mission when he reaches 7”.
It creates the question: What are these 7 things?
If you look back in the story, you will find that it is created around 7 roles. First one in the list is the person who invented the inverted weaponry. Protagonist meets the inventor — Mumbai arms dealer — Priya who is surprisingly a woman. But later he gets to know that she sold it to a Russian arms dealer named Andrei. Protagonist is advised to use Andrei’s wife Kat to reach him. So, she becomes the second person in our list. Then, he studies the character of Andrei who is the third person in our list. As a part of a trade with Kat, Protagonist and Neil decide to steal the counterfeit painting that she sold to Andrei, which is located in a free port at Oslo airport. Neil introduces the fourth person, Mahir who has the capability to crash a cargo plane onto the airport in order to make a distraction that helps Protagonist and Neil to sneak in to Andrei’s vault. He also helps Kat to kill Andrei on yacht. Then, the fifth person joins the team, named Ives who also appear at the end of the movie when they rescue the Algorithm from the explosion at Soviet Nuclear facility. Then comes the sixth person, Neil.
You may ask me why I hold him up to the end. It is because he is the most complicated character in the movie. The audience meet Neil in Mumbai when Protagonist sets snare to catch Priya. But the behavior of Neil increases the suspicion in the audience as he acts like that he knows each and everything that will happen. As I said before, from the first scene in opera, the mysterious-backpack man who saves Protagonist from his attacker with a backward-traveling bullet, to the final mission where he takes the bullet which was named for Protagonist’s name on it, the story runs through different parallel universe within the same time frame. I say so because, as we come to the end of the movie, we understand that the mysterious-backpack guy is Neil who claimed to be recruited to TENET in the future by Protagonist and sent back and forth in time to keep the things happening according to the plan. That is why he knew Protagonist’s drink at their first meeting.
Finally, the seventh person appears, The Protagonist.
It is revealed that the mission TENET is his idea and he is the mastermind of the story. He spends the whole time of the movie to understand the leader of the mission. But at the end, he reveals himself that he has been working under himself and he is “the Protagonist”.
“We live in a twilight world; There are no friends at dusk”
This is a phrase used by the CIA agents in the mission to recognize themselves among others. It is clear that it has a deeper meaning than it shows with an unspoken dawn in it.
The twilight is the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon. The dusk is the time just before the night when that soft glowing light is gone but when it is not completely dark. The dawn is the period of the day when the first rays of sun reach the Earth.
At twilight, we start to walk into the darkness — dusk, with a hope to survive till dawn. Precisely, the twilight is the hope and the dusk is the rebirth where the dawn becomes the death. It can be mentioned simply as the life.
When Protagonist swallows the cyanide pill, he enters to the dawn and wakes up in the twilight. It is the twilight with hope to start a new life in TENET. Then he walks to the dusk — rebirth, where he finds himself in a solemn and complicated mission to save the world.
“There are no friends at dusk” refers to the character of Neil who starts his life in TENET at twilight and ends at the dawn. It is mentioned that he is from the future which is the twilight — hope. He teams up with Protagonist. But he reaches to the dawn at the end of the movie when he dies to protect Protagonist. Accordingly, it is the time when Protagonist is in his dusk. It is depicted by the last conversation between Neil and Protagonist.
Neil: “For me, I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship”
Protagonist: “But for me it’s just a beginning?”
And Neil departs with his last words to Protagonist, “I’ll see you at the beginning, friend”.
It is crystal clear that Christopher Nolan allows the audience to think in the TENET movie. The success of the movie is held among the variety of potential meanings of the story. It is my opinion that it is the Nolan brand.
-GS Kariyapperuma.
