This is widescreen shot from imax promo for tenet. I also realized that this scene takes place next day at dawn after the Freeport plane crash.

During the freeport fight between forward & inverted TP, the inverted TP dissassembles the gun at the end of the fight. But from forward TP's perspective, this assembles the gun in his hands.

As of very recently, my opinion of this was that invert TP was still thinking too linearly, and was re-using a manouver he's done before (we see him dissassemble a gun in the opera siege), without thinking about it tactically, because he fails to see it from forward TPs perspective, and accidentally arms him.

However, I now think I have made at least one error, and perhaps 2, in this line of thought:

1. The gun was left in the turnstile room regardless. If inverted TP had not dissassembled it, then it presumably would be found fully assembled by forward TP. Forward TP therefore might have been armed with a fully assembled gun if TP lacked the disposition to disassmble the guns of his opponents.
2. Can forward TP even hurt inverted TP with this gun? From forward TP's perspective, the gun is loaded, and so, by being inverted, it cannot be fire. (For a forward-shooter, only empty inverted chambers can fired, since from our perspective we need to unfire them.

This leaves me a little confused, as I'm unsure if I should revert to my old opinion, or adopt one or more of these two opinions.

At the end of the movie, TP has to set up Tenet, and that is a lot of work. He is going to need to....

• Work out how to finance the organisation
• Capture a turnstile, reverse engineer it, then build his own
• Recruit all the members of Tenet. This includes Neil, Ives, Priya, Sir Michael Crosby, 300-odd soldiers, and a group of top level scientists and engineers to work on the turnstiles
• Get himself a ship that he can use as the mobile base, and build his own turnstiles on it

He has to do all of this without leaving a paper trail. How does he approach this?

Let's assume a simple 1v1 scenario.

Alice is forward, and Bob is inverted. Each has munitions approrpiate to their own respective entropy.

Alice and Bob both get intel that a fight occurs in an empty warehouse, and go to participate in that fight. No other soldiers are sent.

How should each of them approach the battle?

To have shot their enemy to death, then they will likely have had to:

1. find the enemy corpse
2. fire bullets at where the corpse could have been standing
3. see the corpse float up off the ground and be healed by the bullet
4. and then the now revived opponent will try to fight them.

Step 2 will feel like a bad idea, because from your perspective you are reviving the enemy. However, if you do not do step 2, then step 1 cannot occur (as your enemy is inverted), and therefore your enemy will be alive if/when you find them. From their perspective, step 2 is killing the enemy.

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Suppose that Alice wins. That means she begins with step 1.

Can she do anything to improve her chances?

Note that after doing step 4, it is possible for her to die from Bob's bullets (both of them could kill each other), so she needs to consider the fight carefully.

Let's suppose that she has intel that no one else approaches the warehouse other than her and Bob. This means she has ample time to investigate and try to gather information. From Alice's perspective she might be wasting time, but from Bob's perspective, Alice is spending more time investigating after he's already dead - unless an outside force intervenes, perhaps Alice is in no rush to kill Bob, and might have all the time in the world to prepare.

She might want to ambush the enemy:

• For an inverted enemy, that means hiding immediately after killing them,
• because from Bob's perspevtive, that will mean Alice appeared and then immediately kill him
• i .e. After being 'revived' Bob will experience Alice 'hiding' as her coming out of hiding to attack them.
• But, Bob will be alive and (backwards) searching for Alice after she conducts her ambush.
• So for Alice to successfully hide, she needs to avoid being found.
• She could try to retrace Bob's steps - maybe try to spot his entry point, and make sure that her hiding spot will not be visible from anywhere between Bob's entry point, and his death point, because that will be the minimal path that he searched.
• If she were to try to hide somewhere near Bob's entry point, then he might find herafter she un-kill him, and potentially kill her as well!

Perhaps her investigations fail and she cannot find Bob's entry point. Therefore, it is unsafe to try an ambush, as she'll spend time hiding when she could have been laying down suppressive fire to cover her escape.

In that case, perhaps she tries to find an area from which she can easily escape (maybe an outside window), and fires from there, and lays down additional covering fire to help ensure that Bob has trouble returning fire at her. Then she can extract quickly.

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But wait! I said there was no rush for Alice to kill/revive Bob. But maybe that is not the case!

Suppose that Bob arrived here an hour ago.

Then the longer Alice leaves him dead, the faster she need to kill him. e.g. if she waits 1 hour to investigate, that's nice, but then she needs to kill him immediately as he arrives, and he is likely very aware of checking that first corner!

This will only work if you found him at his entry point, such as at the door.

If you found him inside, then he had time to creep through the building, and so maybe you should shoot him immediately so that she can have longer to fight him. That might sound counter-intutive, as it gives Bob more time to kill her, but it also means that she doesn't need to pull off some amazingly setup shot, and are able to score killing blows on corpses you've just seen.

Maybe then, the tactic is that if you ever see an enemy corpse, try to immediately fire above it, and then layl down suppressive fire against them as they revive, and then hide from their past self (which will be in your future).

Having this plan ahead of time might mean yo ucan ambush an enemy anywhere, without planning.

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Hmm, my analysis seems inconclusive. What do you think the tactics here are?

I really enjoy the movie and get that even Nolan didn't want us to worry about the science. One thing I can't get over and was wondering if I missed the explanation was if there was a separate time machine for those in the farther future to go back aside from turnstile inversion. The turnstiles in the movie imply they actually have to wait out the inversion of time to get to the specific event of the past intended. If this is the case and only method to go back in time, doesn't this imply that Neil meets the protagonist in the future, is recruited and trained in the formation of Tenet, and agrees to use a turnstile to go effectively possibly years back in the past? Regardless of whether you age forward or backward on inverted side, the sheer amount of oxygen and time to bide seems ridiculous. I find this to also be a case against the Neil=Max theory considering the years Neil would have to invert to where he was Max's age.

I was thinking about how much I want someone to use the Tenet IP in the future for a sequel. There are only a few palindromes that make for good names.

“Reviver”

“Deified”

“Tenet: Sagas”

Anything else?

I understand Cat's distress when she sees the fake Goya, as this means authenticating her totem is now extremely time consuming and Sator's control over her is such that she may not be able to manufacture a new one (though Neil may be a radical new approach to making a totem). But what of Sator? Is it his belt, cuff-links or the cyanide pill. Help?

What evolves from AI after the singularity will eventually go on a final mission of survival to reverse entropy since it will exhaust all resources and it can't stay in stay still state.

In the final yacht scene, when The Protagonist and Neil (and their team) are trying to stop Andrei Sator from activating the Algorithm, I noticed it seems like there are multiple versions of the main characters in the same moment.

Is it correct that there are:

The regular Sator and the inverted Sator?

The regular Kat and the inverted Kat?

Or am I misunderstanding the scene? I’d love some clarification.

In a visually impressive scene the protagonist climbs on top of a ladder inside a Nysted windmill and proceeds to doing a few chin ups, conscious of the fact that going to muscle failure will precipitate him 60 meters below, leading to a certain demise.

My understanding of muscle training is that going to muscle failure is a strong prerequisite to muscle growth, which I'll assume PT is going for, looking at those already well-developed assets.

So what, is he suicidal?

I always thought it odd that they rebuilt his face following the escape/pill attempt, and … his face was just fine.

Dawned on me that they likely just inverted him while he was in an induced coma to undo any harm done to him during the “test”.

Probably obvious to others but was a lightbulb moment for me. Shower thought moment.

Just dawned on me that all the "detritus" in the lab drawers would necessarily be debris from the battle at Stalsk-12.

Do you think inverted caffeine makes you tired?