Tenet: Timeline & Time Inversion Explained

In this article, we’ll cut right to the chase.

Below, we’ll answer the most common questions that may have surged after watching Tenet for the first time, and we’ll even explain the timeline with a cool infographic we made for you. If you want to dive directly into the timeline, just scroll down to the end of the article. We left it at the end because it’s probably better to understand all of the concepts in Tenet first so that the timeline makes sense, but do as you will, we just hope this helps you understanding Nolan’s film better.

Which type of time travel is used in Tenet?

Tenet uses one specific time travel style that many audiences are already familiar with: The Single Continuum type of time travel or the “this has always happened time travel”. In this type of time travel, characters can’t change what has happened as they are stuck in a never-ending loop that has no beginning or end in which all of the film’s events have already existed. The best & most popular example of this use of time travel is Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban.

However, there’s a keen difference between how time travel is achieved in Tenet.

How does time travel work in Tenet? How do they achieve to travel in time?

In Tenet, instead of jumping to a specific time and place in the space-time continuum, you have time inversion. Time inversion works by allowing yourself to travel backward in real-time through what has already happened. For example, if you want to go back to 2010 right now in 2020, you’ll have to live in reverse and in real-time for the whole 10 years until you reach the point you wanted. However, there’s a trick. You will also age normally as you travel through the inverted flow of time.

Adapting to experiencing everything in reverse ain’t easy. Your brain isn’t accustomed to this, so you’ll feel quirky and weird as we can clearly see the Protagonist in his first experience with inversion.

Time inversion also has other physical repercussions. You will need special oxygen because the inverted oxygen’s chemical composition is dangerous to your lungs. Also if you are caught in a fire, you’ll die of hypothermia, and vice versa. Weird huh?

Who invented time inversion & how did the characters in the present discovered it?

200 years in the future, a scientist found a way to inverse objects, so he created an algorithm for this to work on a massive scale. He found that it was too dangerous of a weapon and coded it into 9 pieces that he inverted so they go back in time and are never found. While at it, he also took his own life so that the secret locations were safe, however, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Sator dug up a container and found inversed gold and instructions to find the algorithm. Fast forward to present day, and he is just one piece away from completing the algorithm and set off the doomsday clock device.

The instructions included from the future were given to him by an unknown organization that wants him to discover the digging sites so that Sator inverses the world in the past and solve their climate changes in the future, not caring if the world of today is destroyed. (We also know that this isn’t going to work, as time travel works in a predestined loop, as explained in the first question, however, these guys in the future, and even the Protagonist, have faith that maybe there’s a way to act differently and break the loop.)

What is a temporal pincer?

A temporal pincer is when you have already lived through something, more specifically a mission, and send a team to inverse themselves back in time to experience it again and favor its outcome, although technically, the actions they did, have already been present in the things they had experienced because of how time travel works in this film.

Who’s the guy with the mysterious keychain?

That guy is Neil (Robert Pattinson). We can actually see a man with the same keychain in the Kiev mission, during the final fight & the reveal is done until the end after Neil says goodbye to the Protagonist. So yeah, Neil actually saved the Protagonist in Kiev, opened the door for him in the final mission & took a bullet for him.

What did Neil meant at the end that this was the end of a beautiful friendship?

The Protagonist actually recruited Neil in the future. This means that the Neil in the ‘present’ timeline is actually someone who inverted himself in the future until reaching this time and place. There’s a theory out there that Neil is in fact Max, Kat’s child, but we won’t get into that, if you want to know more about it, click here.

If this theory is correct, there were in fact 6 Neils at the same damn time by the end of the story. If the theory isn’t correct, well, then there were just 5 of him.

The Protagonist & Neil’s Timeline in Tenet:

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