In this post, we’re breaking down 100 of the easter eggs that we noticed whilst watching Tenet.
- Now the movie very much revolves around the idea of palindromes. In case you don’t know what one is it’s basically something that is exactly the same forwards as it is backwards.
- The idea of this is not only present in the title but it’s also present in the journey that the characters go on throughout the movie as they navigate time.
- However, it also extends beyond this and the movie itself is a palindrome. The film starts with an Opera house siege and the final battle actually takes place at the exact same time that this is going on making for one big journey exactly the same forwards as it is backwards.
- We learn that Neil has actually been moving backwards through time whilst The Protagonist has been moving forward, thus the entire movie itself is one big temporal pincer to stop Sator.
- Now we’ve already done a big breakdown on why Neil might actually be the son of Kat but here are the basic Cliff Notes in case you missed it. Firstly we’re told very clearly that Tenet agents should learn very little about each other however Neil knows what The Protagonist likes to drink.
- Due to his friendship with Kat, if Neil was her son Max then the pair would likely meet after the end of the film when all the loose ends were tied up so that they could start their friendship which is something that Neil alludes to in the finale.
- He also says when this is all over you can learn my life story and it is possible that after The Protagonist killed Priyah that he went to meet the pair.
- One of the first things that Neil asks The Protagonist is if he would take a child hostage and he then follows this up with “what about a woman?” clearly highlighting the mother and son relationship that Kat and Max have.
- After Kat is shot Neil spends a lot of time with her even though he’s not a medic showing that the two may have a relationship we don’t know about.
- The character has a Master’s in physics which he would have if he was guided by the Protagonist who would know that he needed to get one.
- Neil can also speak Estonian and he has a British accent so if he was the son of Kat and Sator then the child would likely be bi-lingual and learn how to talk from them. Pattinson actually put on a fake accent for the film, which again shows that he made a conscious choice to sound similar to Kat.
- When Kat first meets The Protagonist she remarks on his clothes and can clearly see through his disguise, stating that he doesn’t look like a billionaire even though he’s trying to come across like one. Neil dresses very well which potentially is something that he picked up from his mother.
- Pattinson even dyed his hair for this movie which is something that the actor would only do if it held a certain significance for the part. He’s actually the only actor in the film that had to do this so it’s likely something else is going on here.
- He’s an expert when it comes to theoretical physics likely because he was guided by The Protagonist and lastly…lastly…lastly…
- If you take the last four letters of the french spelling for Maximillien and reverse them you get the word Neil which yeah…might be reaching might not be.
- The climactic showdown involves two teams carrying out a temporal pincer and both have ten minutes to complete their task. The word ten has ten in it twice both forwards and backwards which mirrors how the two teams work for the finale.
- On top of this, the word Tenet actually appears in the real-life Sator’s square which contains many words that appear throughout the film.
- Firstly is Sator which is the name of the villain played by Kenneth Bragnagh.
- The second is Arepo who we learn is an art dealer.
- The third is Tenet – no prizes for guessing that.
- Fourth is Opera which is how the movie begins.
- And lastly is Rotas which is the name of the security firm that operates at the airport.
- Sators square is actually one big palindrome in itself with the letters going forward being all perfectly mirrored when they’re reversed.
- You can read it up, down, left, and right in each and every direction and it always is the same.
- So this idea is completely laced throughout the film and it helps to add another layer to the mind-bending journey that we see.
- Now the movie itself is about stopping a terrorist attack which could destroy the world. This actually has real-world allusions and if you’re as old as I am then you might that there was once a theory that existed on the internet which said the CIA was building a time machine so that they could go back and stop 9/11. I’m not kidding. Why this is interesting is because the CIA director of the time was actually called George Tenet so it seems like Nolan may have been making a nod towards it.
- Red and Blue are also used heavily throughout the film to denote which characters are moving forward and which are moving backwards.
- The opening of the film has a red warner brothers logo and a blue syncope logo to tease towards this but it appears in several notable scenes.
- The interrogation room uses red and blue lighting to showcase this and all those who are moving backwards have some piece of blue clothing on marking to denote this.
- Kat’s dress is also red which purposely stands out to portray this and this subtle device is laced throughout the film.
- This is actually based on the Doppler theory which denotes that when things are moving backwards that they have a blue shift to them whereas if they are moving forwards it’s red.
- You may remember that the show Dark which also dealt with moving through time had a character in it called Doppler and it was also one of the best tv shows ever made, don’t at me.
- We can also see on the whiteboard that there are blue and red symbols and this is actually describing the theory of James Charles Maxwell Demon which discusses breaking the second law of thermodynamics. This involves a demon sitting between two boxes and letting the hot particles move into only one box whilst the cold ones remain in another. This would mean that time moves differently in one box than it does the other and the colours blue and red are used to denote this.
- Max could also be a reference to Maxwell or it could be the biggest goddamn reach you’ve ever heard.
- Now those are the most sort of obscure references outside the film but the movie itself begin at an Opera house which is taken over by Sators men. This is actually very similar to the Moscow Theatre hostage crisis which took place in 2002. The seige saw 850 people being taken hostage and we very much see something similar happen in this opener.
- The first thing that The Protagonist says is ‘we live in a twilight world’ which he uses as a password for his contact. Robert Pattinson, of course, starred in Twilight and though that’s a bit of a reach it does go beyond that.
- A twilight world describes a situation of confusion or uncertainty, which seems to exist between two different states or categories. This not only is a nod to the opening of the movie which I think everyone was confused over upon first watching the film but also the two different states of entropy that we see in the film.
- The Protagonist is rescued by Neil who is moving backwards through time. We notice on his backpack that there is a token held on by a piece of red thread. This could actually be a reference to the red thread of fate which is an East Asian belief that states two souls can be linked together by a piece of invisible red string similar to the Protagonist and Neil.
- The Protagonist is captured and we see Sators forces remove a CIA Issue pill that will apparently kill the protagonist if ingested. We learn that it doesn’t actually work and by the end of the film we discover that Sator has one too.
- So the villain actually ends up carrying something which would mean no matter his plan was always destined to fail.
- Sator’s men also rewind the clock one hour which foreshadows this idea of time going backwards.
- The Protagonist takes another pill and wakes up in a hospital bed breathing oxygen. Now there are theories that the scene in which the protagonist swallows the pill is actually his real death at the end of everything but it just doesn’t line up, especially with the dialogue in the following scene.
- The first person who meets the protagonist shows him a gesture that he says will open the doors and this involves him putting his hands together, which creates a palindrome and also hints towards the direction that time will be moving in the movie.
- He also uses the word when meeting the scientist and she then opens the door to the lab so yeah…the word literally opens up doors.
- This sets him off on a collision course with Sator and he meets Neil. The protagonist says he needs a meeting with Sanjay Singh and all that he requires is ten minutes which further ties back to this notion of Ten minutes that comes to be paramount in the finale.
- The pair carry out what they describe as a bungee jump but the way we understand bungee jumping is someone falling whereas the pair get pulled up, another nod to things being reversed.
- The Protagonist meets Priya which has several meanings including a Gift From God.’ Priya supplies the protagonist with information from the person pulling all the strings…a god working on things behind the scenes that we never meet who we learn at the end is actually the older version of The Protagonist.
- He’s directed to Michael Crosby played by Michael Caine, Crosby actually alludes to his group observing a detonation at Stalsk 12 two weeks earlier and this is actually the one that we see in the finale. So again we know that Sator’s plan was always meant to fail but the characters had to go through the motions to make sure that they played out exactly the way they were supposed to.
- There are also theories that this is actually an older Neil but due to the character’s death at the end which we see happen, we know it isn’t the case.
- The Protagonist meets Kat and she discusses how she saw a woman leaping off her husband’s boat and how she was jealous of her freedom. This character, of course, is actually Kat so she is actually longing for the day she is free from her husband’s grip which the Kat we’ve just seen diving off the boat of course has.
- The Protagonist goes to the kitchen and says…..and ey, I thought there weren’t any jokes in this film.
- The airport heist is carried out and this involves crashing a 747 which is of course a palindrome itself.
- Just before Neil and The Protagonist enter the turnstile room along with the Rotas symbol we can see a blue and red marking outside each door which shows the direction that entropy will flow in that room.
- The Protagonist fights himself and the reversed version of him seems to lose, however when we watch the fight from his point of view he actually wins because he gets to the turnstile and can turn back to normal.
- Neil and The Protagonist return to their base of operation and the former say ‘Well I’ve seen too much and I’m still alive.’ In hindsight, we know that he already knows how everything will play out and is still alive so yeah… a nice little bit of dialogue once you know the ending.
- Through Kat, The Protagonist meets Sator and we learn that the painting wasn’t destroyed because Sator had the instinct to remove it from the vault. Of course, we know this isn’t the case and that he actually knew there would be a raid on the airport.
- The trio go sailing on a blue boat which ends up going against the current at one point when Kat turns it around, again tying back to one of the main motifs of the movie.
- The Protagonist saves Sators life and he tells him the story of Stalsk 12 in which he was sent a message from the future detailing what to do along with a fortune in gold. When taking this job as a teen he was told it was a death sentence to dig up plutonium in the area and as we learn the character gets terminal cancer likely from the radiation that he was hit with during this so ey, they weren’t wrong.
- He also gets given a part of the algorithm from a contact wearing a red T-shirt so it’s likely that they were moving forward through time to get this.
- We learn that Sator buries the time capsules and then digs them up again and that they have the information inside from the future. So this object goes through the years like normal and the people of the future then dig it up, put the information inside, reverse the entropy and then place it back in the ground so that Sator can dig it up in the past almost instantaneously getting what he wants.
- The care chase then happens and we see Kat moving forward like normal which is why she’s wearing red and doesn’t have a gas mask on.
- Things go to hell and Neil actually says he’s calling in the Cavalry which The Protagonist has no idea about. These actually turn out to be Ives forces, showing that Neil knows far more than he’s letting on.
- Now The Protagonist is captured and you may notice that the soundtrack is actually reversed at this point. You can also hear breathing and though Christopher Nolan doesn’t tend to do cameos in his movies this effect was actually provided by him.
- The Protagonist goes through the turnstile and exits through a blue door, once more showing this motif. Let me know if you’re sick of that yet.
- Things still go to pot and The Protagonist is set on fire which causes ice to glaze over the window as the transfer of heat is reversed. This actually isn’t accurate and there’s a tonne of physicists breaking down why this is wrong…however, we all make mistakes, especially me so I’ll let the lad off.
- On the boat, we can actually see that there is a shipping container for Rotas showcasing that Tenet always had a close eye on Sator and may have even helped some of his operations along so that things could happen the way that they were always supposed to.
- Neil explains the Grandfather clock paradox and also puts his hands together similar to what we saw the contact do at the start, showing The Protagonist that he can trust him.
- The reverse fight at the airport then happens and we actually see from the Protagonists point of view that he becomes aware of what is going on and is able to block the attacks because of his prior knowledge.
- Now the mission is successful in the end and because of the knowledge that Crosby gave to The Protagonist, he knows that Sator will carry out an operation at Stalsk-12.
- This idea of knowledge of the future forcing things to happen a certain way is also shown in Priyah who The Protagonist informs of the algorithm which she tells him about earlier in the movie but after this happened in the timeline.
- Cut to the Protagonist doing pull-ups on the boat from the start and he actually glances over to the windmill that he was dropped off in at the beginning of the movie. As we know from the start he was doing something similar at the exact same time so this is an amazing bit of mirroring in the scene.
- Now Kat returns to Sator and Sator actually believes that this is the past version of his wife when really it’s the one who’s seen all that he’s capable of. Kat kills this version whilst the past version of the character is offshore and he returns, not knowing that the past Kat has just seen the future one dive off the boat.
- This obviously caused issues with the past Kat and she was no longer loving to Sator who didn’t understand why. Earlier in the movie, he did seem confused when she brought up his other women so it’s a bit of a chicken and the egg situation over who wronged who first.
- Also, look at Max’s face when the woman dives off the boat, I definitely think he caught it too.
- The Tenet team carry out an operation using blue shipping containers for the past and red ones for the future and we also see the watches carry this colour scheme.
- I’ve seen a lot of confusion over what they’re actually doing here and how it works and in simple terms, the Tenet team are trying to make it seem like the Algorithm was buried so that the past version of Sator believes that he will be successful. Because of his knowledge of the future he has to believe that things go his way so the team’s job is to actually fail to stop the bomb but take the algorithm so that it appears to be buried.
- After the operation, Neil would reverse himself once more and go back to open the door whilst this final scene is going there are actually several versions of the character moving forwards and backwards. I’ve actually done a full breakdown of the character’s timeline which you should check out after this.
- The group say their goodbyes, split up the algorithm and Ives promises to kill them if he ever comes into contact with them again. As we know from Neil he never did and Neil also drops a cool little line that hints at why he knows what’s going to happen.
- He asks The Protagonist if he’s going to go check on Kat in London to which he replies no, it’s too dangerous. Neils says ‘even from afar’ and as we know from the final scene, the character did actually go to the city and keep an eye on her from a distance.
- Neil of course already knew this as he knows what happens next for the character and oh my god he’s max.
- I didn’t cry I promise.
- The protagonist ties up all the loose ends including Priya who gave her word that she wouldn’t kill Kat. The protagonist plays a voicemail from Kat before she actually makes it showing that he travelled beyond this point and then inverted to go back and stop her.
- It ends with Kat and Max walking off and The Protagonist likely going to join them and form the organisation, Tenet.
- Probably should’ve made point 100 points ten and then we could have a ten pun but hey, not like you expect quality jokes from this channel anyway.
Your Thoughts
That ends the movie and obviously, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the film if you noticed anything you noticed that we didn’t make sure you comment below and let us know if you enjoyed this video.