TENET — The Plot
The movie starts with an unnamed CIA agent who is later known as Protagonist (John David Washington), is sent undercover to retrieve a colleague and a strange artifact — MacGuffin during the attack at the Kiev Opera. In the chaos, he is being saved by a mysterious man, who kills his attacker with a bullet that travels backward. But the CIA agent’s cover is blown, and captured, tortured in order to disclose any information. He swallows a cyanide pill in an attempt to ensure that he cannot be interrogated and to avoid a forthcoming unpleasant death. But he wakes up on a boat, finds out that it was a test and the artifact is taken. His fidelity to his agency adopts him to a top-secret assignment known as TENET.
The assignment leads him to learn their threat — inversion.
Inversion — the objects have been found in which their materials has been inverted, resulting them to move backward through time. It is demonstrated in the movie through the bullet that returns to the magazine when it is triggered.
Protagonist leagues with Neil (Robert Pattinson) to track down the arms dealer — Priya (Dimple Kapadia) in Mumbai, where they find out that she sold the bullets to a Russian arms dealer — Andrei (Kenneth Branagh. Under the advice of Crosby (Michael Caine), Protagonist uses Andrei’s reluctant wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) to understand the moves of Andrei. As a part of a trade with Kay, Protagonist and Neil decide to steal the counterfeit painting that she sold Andrei, which is located in a free port at Oslo airport. Their friend Mahir (Himesh Patel), crashes a cargo plane onto the airport in order to make a distraction. As they enter the vault room, they come across two masked guys — one moving forward, one moving backward. During this fight, Neil lets his opponent disappear from our vision and stops Protagonist who is trying to kill the other guy. And the painting is not there. Protagonist explains this incident to Priya who reveals that is a device from the future called a Turnstile. It allows people to invert themselves and travel backward in time, that tells that there was only one guy in the vault who inverted himself using this device.
Protagonist gets in good with Andrei by setting a reference to the opera and saving him when he was thrown off a catamaran by Kat. He understands Andrei’s malignant plan of using inversion technology to end the world. Later, he and Neil understands that MacGuffin is not Plutonium during the highway raid. However, Andrei and his henchmen with special oxygen masks appear in a reversed car chase when Protagonist is being threaten to pass the stolen package over an inverted silver car’s bonnet while Andrei is pointing a gun at Kat. The inverted Andrei tries to kill Kat in a car crash but Protagonist saves her. Then they are being attacked by Andrei and captured by the henchmen. Protagonist wakes up in a chamber where a Turnstile is located and the inverted Andrei asks for the MacGuffin as it was not in the package. As Protagonist refuses to answer his questions, he shoots Kat with an inverted bullet. Then Protagonist lies that he hid it in the glove compartment of his car. As soon as he tells this, the forward-time Andrei enters to the room but could not do anything as Neil appears from the other corner with the cavalry. He withdraws into the Turnstile along with the inverted version of him in the other room. Protagonist thinks that Neil is a mole in the assignment but he explains that Andrei is executing a temporal pincer movement — a time bending technique that you approach it moving forward in the time, simultaneously, approach it in reverse moving backwards from the future. Protagonist proposes a plan to follow Andrei through Turnstile that will also help them to save the wounded Kat.
Protagonist experiences the same car chase where he passes the package to the inverted Andrei in the previous scene. But he cannot escape form Andrei’s attack and wakes up in an air-locked container ship with Neil and Kat. They sneak into Andrei’s vault at Oslo airport and the Protagonist learns that the mysterious masked guys from the vault room in the previous scene are himself who comes through the Turnstile. The team travels through the Turnstile that start to move forward again.
Protagonist meets Priya, and she explains that the MacGuffin is actually one part of nine parts that stack up to form a thing called the Algorithm that results the doomsday. But later, she kills herself as the scientists do not approve her invention. but she sends the parts of the Algorithm to the past before her death. However, Andrei collects all the nine parts of the Algorithm. Meanwhile, Kat reveals that Andrei is suffering from terminal cancer and he sets who will trigger the Algorithm at the time of his death. He travels back to his happy time on the yacht with Kat and his son. It happens simultaneously to the opera attack and an unexplained explosion at an abandoned Soviet nuclear facility.
The climax happens in two locations moving forward and backward in time simultaneously, where Protagonist, Neil and the TENET army attack the abandoned Soviet nuclear facility and Kat sneaks into the yacht that Andrei spends his happy time. The TENET army goes into the battle in two team. Blue team including Neil — goes backward and Red team including Protagonist — goes forward in time.
Future Kat arrives at the yacht just after Past Kat departed with a speed boat with her son and the Past Andrei took off from a helicopter to monitor the opera attack. Meanwhile, the future Andrei arrives at the yacht and Kat reveals that she came from the future and shoots him.
Accordingly, Protagonist and Neil manage to save the Algorithm from the explosion. They separate the Algorithm into three parts with Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as planned but Neil gives his part to Protagonist revealing that they have known each other for years when the Future Protagonist recruited the Past Neil to the TENET operation. As he walks towards the Turnstile, Protagonist sees the backpack which is familiar for him two life edge situations. One, at the opera attack when the inverted-bullet-guy saved him and then — at the Nuclear facility when he was trying to take the Algorithm from Andrei’s henchman.
Later in the movie, Kat drops her son at school and notices a strange car and calls Protagonist as she was told by him to inform him at a sense of a danger. At the same time, Priya who is in the strange car, tries to shoot Kat when she is interrupted by the Future Protagonist who shoots her, revealing that he is the mastermind of the whole story.
The movie review will be published in due course.
-GS Kariyapperuma
