Tenet - An absolute Mind Bender. My thoughts about the movie.

Christopher Nolan is one of the best directors to have ever walked on planet Earth. For me, he is the best. Not open to arguments. He has directed some of the most amazing films I have ever seen. The Batman trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Memento, The Prestige, and Tenet, to name a few. Chris Nolan really likes to play with time and its workings. Interstellar, Inception, and Tenet feature very important roles in time and the way it works. Tenet, meanwhile, makes the most use of it, in a mind-blowing way. It is the most confusing movie I have ever seen, not even kidding.

There are huge spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't seen the movie. So, read forward at your own risk.

The Plot

The story ends at the same moment it starts. You read that right. The beginning and end of the story are at the same time. This is what I was talking about when I said Nolan likes to play with time. The basic idea behind the story is as follows. The humans from the future messed up planet Earth. Andrei Sator: Because their oceans rose and their rivers ran dry. This dialogue was spoken by the Antagonist of the story, well, the only major one we can see. The protagonist has no name. He is referred to as the Protagonist. Nobody calls his name throughout the film. Andrei Sator, when he was 14, finds out about an algorithm that the humans from the future made. Erm, if the algorithm was made by humans from the future, how did Sator find it in the present? This is where it gets interesting. A scientist from the future, their generation's Oppenheimer, you can say, created an algorithm that could reverse the entropy of objects. In simple words, an algorithm, or a method, that could reverse the direction of time. Shortly, you would be able to restore a broken cup as it was just by doing the action that it fell from your hands. Pretty mind-bending. It's not real, though. It's Sci-Fi. The scientist rendered the algorithm in a physical form and hid it in 9 different places. We'll get to why she hid it later. The 9 different places were nuclear bomb sites. Andrei Sator was mining Plutonium at one of those sites when he found one of the pieces of the algorithm and the manual that said how to collect all the rest of the pieces and start the algorithm. To start the algorithm, he would have to detonate the algorithm with a nuclear bomb at one of the test sites. Stalsk-12 was the name of the site he chose. Now, going into the particulars of the way reversing entropy works in the movie is pretty confusing in itself. I, personally, watched the movie 8 times, maybe more, and I think it's safe to say I haven't completely understood it yet. Overall, you need to know one thing. The future ourselves were ready to kill the present ourselves by reversing our entropy and thereby preventing their rivers from going dry and oceans from rising. However, present humans, they thought of it differently. They believed in the Grandfather Paradox. What the Grandfather Paradox tells us is that, If you build a time machine and you go back in time and you kill your grandfather before your father was born, there might or might not be consequences. It's a paradox so it doesn't have a conclusion. But it can divide believers into two groups. The first group of believers believes that killing your grandfather means stopping your father from being born, thereby stopping yourself from being born. Once you stop yourself from coming alive, you don't build a time machine, which means your grandfather can now live and also your father gives birth to you. Then, you build a time machine, go back, kill your grandfather, indirectly kill yourself and your father, and the loop goes on. The other group of believers believes that you can go back in time, kill your grandfather, your father, your mother, and your entire family, and you can do whatever you want without affecting your present. This simply means, killing your granddad will not stop you from coming alive. A bit absurd, but what isn't? The future ourselves belonged to the second group of believers. They were ready to kill their grandparents (us), stopping us from polluting rivers, air, and soil, and effectively saving the Earth for themselves to enjoy. The present us were from the first group. Eventually, the present fights with the future through time and the fight is just exhilarating.

My thoughts.

The idea, theme, and concept of the film are out-of-this-world. You need to be present, at every second of the film to understand what's going on. Every scene is breathtaking, it keeps you glued to the edge of your seat. Every time I watch the movie, I find new hidden details in each shot that just makes rewatching the movie so exciting. It's one of the movies I've rewatched most amount of the time. Probably the only movie. 8 times for a 3-hour long movie is a lot. A lot. At least, for me. I constantly need new things to watch, use, and listen to. I'm a restless person. And if something lasts with me that long, it's either something extremely important, or it's something so creative, so beautiful, that I can't get my mind off it. When I first watched the movie, it was all a blur. I don't remember understanding it at all. You get the overall idea, for sure, but you don't understand what's happening in each scene. I still don't. There are a lot of sequences where everything is just so confusing that it sometimes makes me wonder if even Nolan has actually understood what he filmed. To look at it, the film is beautiful. The scenes, shots, and takes are thrilling. The direction, as always, is mind-blowing. There's not much to say about the storyline. It leaves me speechless every time. I've shown this movie to so many people and every time I have the same enthusiasm, the same excitement on my face. There are some scenes shot in Mumbai, India. There are scenes from the Colaba causeway and The gateway of India, making it more interesting for Indian viewers. My advice to all the readers who haven't watched it would be 1, why didn't you watch it? and 2, go watch it. That's it. It is the least I can speak about the film. Worth the time. Absolutely.