I don’t think they (The Future) were trying to change history. They were essentially destroying the world in their past to “shoot back” at a Past that left them a shit hole of a world in the future (their present).
That was explicitly discussed in the dialogue, I believe–the idea that the Future people were nihilistically wiping out their own existence by wiping out all their forebears. It was simply accepted by the characters as what was happening, which was another annoyance of the screenplay (for me). Why wouldn’t the characters have discussed ways of trying to change the minds of the Future people? What were the Tenet people actually doing other than running after each threat sent back?
In this movie, they were chasing after the “algorithm” pieces of machinery, and then in the next movie they’d chase after some other Scary McGuffin sent back? It all reeked of futility—at no point did the characters seem to do much thinking.
My understanding was that the future people wanted to permanently reverse entropy for the entire universe- effectively reversing time. This would destroy the past (from our point of view), but time would now be going the opposite direction- so the future people’s new “past” would stay intact (from their point of view). Us- the present- would cease to exist, but they’d be able to keep going because our past would now be their unwritten future.
You may well be right, but for understandable reasons, this theory wasn’t given much dialogue. Obvious questions would arise: if the way to ‘permanently reverse entropy’ is to send a bunch of ‘reversed’ matter back, with more and more sent making it more and more likely that you will succeed in that reversal, then how do you guarantee that YOU will be living at the point at which time begins reversing? How do you guarantee that everyone living when you are living will be ‘riding the wave at the crest’ of backward-time?
And if there’s some set amount of reversed-matter-sent-back that activates this reversal of entropy, how would you know what that amount is?
I expect that this topic–or something close–has been hashed out in science fiction stories, but I’d be surprised if the results were particularly satisfying to readers. Time travel plots seem to work best when they include fairly strict constraints, and this theory is pretty darned free-flowing.
This.
Tenet was bullshit, strictly speaking.
I’ll tell ya this; a lot of Nolan movies stick with me. Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk, even a lot of Interstellar, those movies had an emotional and intellectual impact of some kind, good or bad.
Tenet did not. The story remains, no matter how much I try to understand it, absurd and confusion, and in terms of emotional weight it is completely… weightless.
Can’t argue with that. Dunkirk definitely stuck with me. Interstellar to a much lesser degree. Inception was too much like Tenet - nonsensical bullshit. Dark Knight was just another “flawed superhero” movie trying too hard. Not sure if I actually saw it through to the end.
Right. My understanding is that by wiping out the past, the dystopian future would be improved. Or even if it wasn’t, they would enact some measure of vengeance on all of history for screwing things up I suppose. Neil even points out it doesn’t matter of it would or would not work. The point is the future believes it will.
Right–that’s where the nihilism comes in.
“Stop X from doing Y” plots don’t require X to be rational. X may be doing Y–some terribly destructive-to-many act–in order to commit suicide (consciously or not).
So, on reflection, I can live with that part of the Tenet plot (the idea that the future people might not be trying to gain advantage for themselves but simply trying to destroy all human life for the vindictive, self-destructive hell of it).
I still have a lot of problems with the rest of the plot, though.
For example, the future-people’s plan required a huge number of ‘places never, EVER looked at by humans in the years between their agent going there to find the cache of reversed-stuff (and/or instructions), and the time of caching.’ If we’re not talking bottom-of-the-Mariana-Trench, how many such places could there reasonably be?
I think there’s random plenty of places out in the desert or the Russian steppe where you could put something in a 50 foot deep hole and tell someone “dig at these GPS coordinates 100 years ago”.
Well, maybe. Remember that the Future People would need to have a record of the hundred years (or whatever the time gap was…I don’t recall) that proved that no one had done any mining or metal detecting or had otherwise disturbed the site, for all those years. It’s that sort of record-keeping that I’m skeptical about.
But…meh.
They never give a timeframe for how far the “future” is. But wasn’t the reason they chose nuclear test sites because they knew no one would ever go near them?
People of circa 2020 would obviously be unlikely to go to a nuclear test site. But just as obviously, technology changes over time, and there might be a profitable reason to dig inside a nuclear test site in the year (for example) 2060. Right now, we have no way of ruling that out.
In the Tenet plot, of course, the Future People, whenever they are living, would have at least some means of knowing the history of various sites, and they would surely consult that in deciding where to cache their reversed matter and instructions. I’m just saying that given the way humans have overrun the planet and our propensity for rooting around anywhere we can reach, it seems at least somewhat implausible that there would be a large-enough number of “never disturbed during the decades between caching and 2020-era discovery” places.
It’s not a question subject to being settled objectively*; it’s a judgment call about the plausibility of a plot-element in Tenet.
*Not that I mind discussing it, of course!
But he’s a Tom Cruise level film runner. (He was a real-life NFL running back.