Tenet

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 in broken conversation, shooting 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. == Production ==

Writing and pre-production Writer and director Christopher Nolan conceived the ideas behind Tenet over the course of twenty years, Inspired by a feeling about how he imagined Sergio Leone made Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon, the grandfather paradox, and Feynman and Wheeler's Absorber Theory, Nolan stated that "we're not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate". Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley traveled to scout for locations in February and April 2019. Disappointed with the Royal Swedish Opera as a potential stand-in for the Kyiv Opera House, Crowley instead chose the Linnahall, which fit his affinity for Brutalist architecture. The production decided to film at the National Liberal Club after management at Sotheby's refused to participate, at Cannon Hall after Thornhill Primary School in Islington and Channing School were deemed unsatisfactory, and at Shree Vardhan Tower after it was determined that security at the Antilia was too high to film there. Casting John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki were cast in March 2019. and eventually incorporated seven countries Mayor of Tallinn Mihhail Kõlvart expressed concerns about potential disruptions, as the shooting schedule required that the arterial Laagna Road be closed for one month. The Victorville Airport was disguised as Oslo, with more than ninety extras involved. Tenet wrapped on November 12, after 96 days of shooting. Director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema employed a combination of 70 mm film and IMAX, The windfarm vessel Iceni Revenge was used for the three months spent filming in Denmark, Estonia, and Italy. Jennifer Lame replaced Nolan's long-time editor Lee Smith, who was occupied with 2019's 1917. == Music ==

Ludwig Göransson was chosen to compose the film's music after Nolan's frequent collaborator and first choice, Hans Zimmer, turned down the offer in favor of the 2021 film Dune. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Göransson recorded musicians at their homes. == Marketing ==

In August 2019, Warner Bros. debuted a forty-second teaser ahead of Hobbs & Shaw previews, Given the large investment in the film, part of its marketing campaign involved dual promotions with the watch manufacturer Hamilton and Fortnite, both of whom assisted in increasing public awareness of the forthcoming film. Hamilton featured Washington wearing the watch and endorsing it in multiple ad campaigns, while Epic Games debuted a trailer for the film within Fortnite and created an interview with Washington which was featured on multiple video game websites. == Release ==

Theatrical Warner Bros. originally scheduled Tenet for a July 17, 2020, release in IMAX, 35 mm, and 70 mm film. Following a negotiation between Nolan and Warner Bros. executives, the studio arranged for the film to be released in seventy countries, with a run time of 150 minutes, on August 26, The film was re-released in theaters for exclusive IMAX screenings in 70 mm formats for an exclusive one-week theatrical window from February 23 to March 1, 2024. It also included footage to promote the release of the studio's then-upcoming film, Dune: Part Two (2024). Nolan subsequently expressed dissatisfaction with Warner Bros. over their handling of the film, along with the studio's announcement of their 2021 theatrical slate also being released on HBO Max day-and-date without consulting the people involved with that slate, In 2023, Variety reported that Warner Bros. (having gone through an ownership and leadership change since the release of Tenet) offered Nolan a "seven-figure check" for him to return to the studio, consisting of the fees that Nolan waived to encourage the release of Tenet in theatres, which ultimately proved unsuccessful as Nolan later reteamed with Universal following the success of Oppenheimer for his next film, The Odyssey. Home media The film was released on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download on December 15, 2020. It was added to HBO Max on May 1, 2021. == Reception ==

Box office As of January 29, 2024, Tenet has grossed $58.5 million in the United States and Canada and $306.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $363.7 million. With a production budget of $200 million, In Estonia, Tenet became the highest-grossing film of all time, with a total gross of $1.2 million. In the United States and Canada, with 65% of theaters operating at 25–40% capacity, the film earned $20.2 million from 2,810 theaters in its first eleven days of release: $12 million in the U.S., $2.5 million in Canada, and the rest from previews. Tenet remained atop the American box office its fifth weekend with $2.7 million, Critical response Tenet divided critics, with USA Today Jenna Ryu and the Los Angeles Times Christi Carras respectively describing the reviews as "mixed" and "all over the place". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100 based on 50 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Guy Lodge of Variety described Tenet as a "grandly entertaining, time-slipping spectacle". Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter felt that Washington was "dashing but a little dull" and that Debicki's performance "adds a color to Nolan's palette, and [she] has persuasive chemistry with Branagh in their joint portrait of a violent, dysfunctional love-hate relationship". She concluded that Tenet is "rich in audacity and originality", but lacks "a certain humanity". In 2025, The Hollywood Reporter listed Tenet as having the best stunts of 2020. Audience reception Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, Accolades Tenet received nominations for Best Production Design and Best Visual Effects at the 93rd Academy Awards, winning the latter. At the 74th British Academy Film Awards, the film won the Best Special Visual Effects award, and also won an award in the same category at the 26th Critics' Choice Awards, out of its five nominations. It received a nomination for Best Original Score at the 78th Golden Globe Awards. == Themes and analysis ==

Tenets complex plot and character timelines, ambiguities and hidden details have been analyzed, leading to various fan theories and interpretations. Palindromes and anadromes Palindromes (words which are spelled the same forward and backward) and anadromes (words which when spelled backward produce another word) appear throughout the film in various guises. The five-letter words from the palindromic Sator Square appear as names and locations in the film: "Sator" (the Russian oligarch); "Arepo" (the art forger); "Tenet" (the name of the film and the Protagonist's organization); "Opera" (the opening scene takes place at the Kyiv Opera House); and "Rotas" (the name of the security company running Oslo Freeport). There is a further nod to the word "Tenet" in the film's final battle in which the red and blue teams each have "ten" minutes to carry out their non-inverted ("ten") and inverted ("net") operations in Stalsk-12. When the Protagonist is being tortured, trains pass by in opposite directions. Ludwig Göransson's score includes melodies that sound the same forward and backward. The film itself is a form of "temporal palindrome", as it ends at the same time as the events of the beginning of the film were taking place, "the 14th". Inversion allows multiple versions of a character to exist simultaneously; for instance, there are five simultaneous Neils (that are known) in the world during the moments of the climactic scene inside the Stalsk-12 hypocenter where he dies (two inverted and one normal on the battlefield, one normal at the opera siege and one more normal somewhere else in the world who will later meet the Protagonist in Neil's first appearance of the film), Inversion also sets up bootstrap paradoxes, whereby events are caused by themselves in a "chicken or the egg" scenario. Free will is a theme in Tenet. Kat relays to the Protagonist that when she was returning with Max to Sator's yacht in Vietnam and saw a woman (her future self, unbeknownst to past Kat) diving gracefully off the yacht, she felt jealous of that woman's freedom. Tenet has been interpreted as a war between past and future. Scientific accuracy The plot revolves around reversing the entropy of things and people, resulting in time reversibility, and the film references physics concepts including the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon, and Feynman and Wheeler's notion of a one-electron universe; nonetheless, Christopher Nolan stated in the film's press notes: "we're not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate".{{cite news ==Notes==