Tenet: That Ending Explained And All Your Questions Answered

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Tenet is out now in the US and UK. Don't forget your mask.

Warner Bros.


So you've watched [/news/tenet-review-christopher-nolan-latest-time-twister-isnt-as-clever-as-it-thinks/ Tenet], Christopher Nolan's new sci-fi-spy film. Your mind has been suitably blown by the visually stunning action, cool wardrobe and the plot that rewinds backwards and forward through time.
Tenet has made $150 million at the box office -- not bad considering many theaters still haven't reopened and potential moviegoers may be leery about going to see it. Sadly you can't [/news/tenet-that-ending-explained-and-all-your-questions-answered/ stream Tenet at home], which would really help us figure out exactly what happened. Like, how did [ John David Washington] and [ Robert Pattinson] prevent World War III?

We're all in this Tenet puzzle together. Here are a few answers that will hopefully help you out.
Warning: Spoilers ahead. 
John David Washington.

Warner Bros.
What's inversion?
In the future, a technology has been developed that reverses the entropy of people and 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. "Ice melting, salt or sugar dissolving, making popcorn and boiling water for tea are processes with increasing entropy in your kitchen," [ according to one explanation]. In Tenet's universe, the Protagonist (John David Washington) is shown a bullet with inverted entropy that returns to its gun. You can tell if a human has been inverted, because they have to breathe special oxygen through a mask -- regular air doesn't go through inverted lungs. If you contact your "forward" self, it causes "self-annihilation," meaning you kill yourself. Complicated stuff.
What's the Algorithm?
Nine objects, hidden in nuclear faculties, form an algorithm that reverses the entropy of the Earth. Setting off the Algorithm ends the world.




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What is Sator's plan?
Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) is in contact with an unknown agency in the future. Sator plans to set off a doomsday device, also known as the Algorithm, that will reverse the entropy of the entire planet. He's dying from inoperable pancreatic cancer and believes if he can't live, no one can. Sator travels back to the holiday with Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) in Vietnam when they were both happiest, planning to die there peacefully and set off the doomsday device with a dead man's switch linked to his heartbeat.
Why is the future working with Sator?
In the future, everything is destroyed. An unknown agency is working with Sator to kill everyone in the past, because they're responsible. The people in the future believe that reversing the entropy of the Earth will prevent climate change. With no other choice for their survival, they're willing to destroy their ancestors and threaten their own existence -- the grandfather paradox.
Why Sator?
Sator grew up in the Soviet Union in a small community acting as a "closed" or "secret" city with sensitive facilities, kynghidongduong.vn such as nuclear research sites with a plutonium production plant. Sator was in the right place at the right time as a teenager, when he dug up a piece of the Algorithm in the rubble of his home in Siberia. The scientist in the future who created the Algorithm has been hiding the pieces back in time, realizing no one should have the technology. The unknown agency charges Sator with recovering the pieces and dropping the finished Algorithm into the "dead drop" in his nuked home town, where they'll find it centuries from now. The agency buries time-reversed gold bars that Sator tour hồ ba bể từ hà nội digs up for payment.