The Hero's Journey in TENET ni yenruoJ s'oreH ehT

Listen to this while you read: 

Tenet (2020) is a mind-bending, action-packed, sci-fi film by Christopher Nolan. It's the most recent of his movies to be released--that is, until Oppenheimer Style (2023) drops this summer, of course. While it's one of Nolan's more controversial movies, I think it's an amazing film with a lot of thought and care put into making the whole inversion concept really shine.

By the way, spoilers for the entirety of Tenet. Please go watch the movie, it's really good. 

We begin the movie in the Kyiv Opera House during a staged terrorist siege. The Protagonist (the only name we get) is leading a CIA extraction for an informant who hands off a part of the Algorithm during their escape. During the siege, the Protagonist is saved by a stranger with a keychain who shoots an inverted bullet. This is his call to adventure, his first experience with the mysterious world of Tenet.

However, on the way out, his team is captured and tortured. The Protagonist swallows a suicide pill but awakens on a boat, to a guy in a suit telling him he passed the test of courage. Now he's part of the cool Tenet club! This first sequence runs at a breakneck pace, so we aren't given a chance to see the Protagonist refuse the call. However, he does receive supernatural aid from this mysterious Tenet organization. Now that he's been revived, he's crossed the first threshold of this worldwide conspiracy. After recovering, the Protagonist spends some time inside a windmill over the ocean, where he does curl-ups nonstop. This windmill is the belly of the whale, where the Protagonist prepares for the beginning of his new mission for Tenet.

We follow the Protagonist as he goes on some crazy missions with his new pal Neil, another agent of Tenet, along his road of trials. He learns about bullets with inverted entropy that move backward through time and tracks them down to a supplier in India named Priya, who turns out to also be a part of Tenet. Priya tells the Protagonist that her bullets come from a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator, who has contact with the future. They try to steal artwork from a freeport in Oslo to get the help of Katherine Barton, Sator's wife. While in the freeport, the Protagonist and Neil fight two masked men that emerge from either side of a turnstile, one inverted and one not. Kat is the goddess in the Protagonist's journey. He works to save her life multiple times over the course of the film.

After Kat gets shot with an inverted bullet by an inverted Sator, the heroes all invert themselves backward through time so Kat doesn't die. However, to un-invert, they have to go back to the freeport in Oslo where the Protagonist ends up fighting his past self, realizing that he himself was both the inverted masked man and the uninverted man that emerged from the turnstile. He also learns that Neil knew it was the Protagonist all along, after being unmasked by a past Neil. This is his apotheosis, where the Protagonist learns to fight inverted, and also begins to comprehend what Tenet is all about, although he doesn't fully learn until the end. 

Later, we end up at the hypocenter of a fake nuclear test where Sator is trying to dead-drop the Algorithm for his contacts in the future to use, with the coordinates being sent to the future after his death. The Algorithm is the key to inverting the Earth itself, so that the people in the future may reverse the effects of climate change. The Protagonist and another Tenet operative, Ives, enter the hypocenter to steal the Algorithm without Sator knowing, so that neither Sator nor the future realize that the Algorithm is not at the dead drop. Volkov, one of Sator's men, locks himself and the Algorithm behind a gate, but a mysterious inverted soldier with a keychain that was lying on the ground suddenly rises and blocks a bullet shot by Volkov, and then proceeds to open the gate and leave. Ives and the Protagonist steal the Algorithm and escape. Meanwhile, Kat kills Sator while impersonating her past self, and throws his body into the ocean. The heroes have their Ultimate Boon, but they need to keep it hidden and safe, so they also refuse to return it to the known world, choosing to keep it split amongst themselves. 

However, instead of leaving, Neil gives his part of the Algorithm to the Protagonist, saying that he still has to get that lock open, because PLOT TWIST Neil has the keychain on his bag. He's the one who saved the Protagonist both in the opera siege and in the hypocenter. Neil says that it was all according to the Protagonist's plan. Basically, he's from the future, and the Protagonist creates Tenet. Spoilers, by the way. At the end of the movie, Priya tries to assassinate Kat for knowing too much, but the Protagonist appears behind her, now a master of two worlds, of inversion and of Tenet itself. Then he shoots Priya. He's attained freedom from being a tool of some unknown organization like he was during most of the movie, and Kat has attained freedom from Sator, now able to see her son again.

If you read through this entire post as you still haven't watched Tenet, you should still go watch it. Even if you know the twists it's still amazing. I've watched it three times already, so I know.