At the end of the movie, aren’t there 2 Katherines, in present time? Neither of them is depicted as being inverted. How do they handle custody of their son? Seems confusing for him, having 2 identical mothers.
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How does Sator invert himself and weapons? How did the armed forces helping Protagonist do the same? Why did he have to wear a gas mask when he inverted to the car chase scene?
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What were the algorithms, why did Sator need to blow them up and how did his suicide and the fitbit watch factor into ending the world? Were the algorithms the device the three main characters split up into threes at the end?
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At the end when Pro talks about “prosperity” is he now on a different time travel length? Why did Neal said he knew him for a long time but not vice versa?
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How did Sator get this technology to begin with? In Kalinn, what was Pro trying to help him with or acquire? Did Pro then try to screw him over by not handing over whatever was in that red box?
What a confusing movie!
- Sator has at least one, and probably several, ‘turnstiles’ that are in the Freeport areas that he set up around the world. They were presumably built from plans sent back to him from the antagonists in the future (Future Antagonists or FA) or, maybe, prefabbed and sent back in another turnstile. Once he has a turnstile, he can throw a crate of bullets into it and make inverted bullets himself.
Sator has a second way to access reversed items - they are buried as reverse-time-capsules by future people and dug up by him in the present, although this has its own issues.
Protagonist’s ‘team’ (Tenet) also has a turnstile, on the ship. Unclear how they came by theirs, but it’s stated that the Tenet organization is founded in the future, with support from dissenters in the far FA’s time.
When inverted, you need to breathe inverted oxygen, for plot reasons. Bring O2 tanks with you when you go through the turnstile. In the Oslo freehold it looks like the ‘blue room’ is full of inverted oxygen as Sator breathes normally until he prepares to leave the room, and Kat has to have a mask on in the room.
2)The algorithms were, when combined, a key to using turnstile technology to reverse the flow of time not for objects inside the turnstile, but for everything outside of it. Without the algorithm, the future antagonists can’t reverse time and wipe us all out to preserve themselves. Sator didn’t need to blow it up so much as he needed to collect the parts that had been scattered, get them time-reversed so they would exist forward in time again, and then assemble and bury them all in one secure location so that the future antagonists could dig it up however many years in the future.
The Fitbit was a plot-dramatic way of Sator signaling to the FA that a)he had collected all the parts and b)where he buried them. From Sator’s (and our) POV, as soon as the message is sent the FA will have access to the algorithm and they will start the process that destroys our world. Sator doesn’t want to experience this destruction and also doesn’t want to die ugly due to pancreatic cancer, so once he gets all the parts he plans to kill himself and have the message sent only after his death using the heart monitor as the trigger.
It’s not clear why, exactly, Tenet could not let Sator bury the algorithm and then just dig it up a week or a year later and move it, thus keeping it from falling into FAs hands. Too great a chance of the future finding out about the dig, maybe.
Before Sator has all the parts of the Key to Time (Dr Who ref): no burial, no big deal if he’s killed. BUT it makes it difficult if not impossible to find out where Sator is keeping the parts he already has. It may also be that Sator can send partial information if he’s killed too early - if he tells the FA where six of the nine pieces are hidden, that helps them too. Sator’s only leverage over the FA to keep them helping him is the fact that he knows stuff that they can’t figure out in the future, so he’s not going to tell them anything until the last possible moment (ie at his death). He’s balancing his usefulness to them against being too much of a hassle such that they use a different agent.
Once Sator has all the parts, but before they are buried: if he dies, it’s not clear what the message might be; an unstable situation and the info might be of use to FA to continue the search with some other agent.
Once Sator has the parts, and they are buried: when he dies, message is sent and end of play.
Thus the only really safe time to kill him is once you have all of the algorithm in your control and moved away from Sato’s planned burial site without him knowing it. And, ideally, everyone who pulls that off should re-hide the parts, time-reversed, and then die without saying where. That’s why there’s the bit of a Mexican standoff at the end: the existence of the world depends on at least one of those guys time-reversing and rehiding the algorithm and then immediately dying in such a way that there’s no possibility that the information leaks to the future. Ives says that nobody on splinter team leaves the field, meaning that it’s meant as a suicide mission. It’s a leap of faith for him to give bits to Pro and Neil to dispose of on their own instead of just killing both of them and then himself after he re-hides the Algorithm.
- Neil was recruited by Pro at some point in Neil’s past - whether that is in our future (ie Neil has traveled back in time to this point) or in our past (ie Pro traveled back in time to recruit him) is unclear.
4)Sator dug up his first time capsule from the future antagonists while he was a teen in that hidden city, excavating to find plutonium fragments. FAs sent him a bunch of gold and instructions. It’s a bit of a paradox as to how they knew to do this. Frankly it’s also unclear how the time capsule works without a turnstile to reverse it at the end. From the POV of a reversed time capsule, it gets buried (in the future), lives underground for a while (backwards) and then gets dug up (now) and its parts scattered (in our past, before it was dug up). ISTM that to us, living forward, it should look like Sator trades his equipment for gold over time, which he then puts in a weird capsule and buries - analogous to the reversed bullet assembling itself from smoke, lead fragments, and a hot casing, and ending up in Pro’s gun. Instead, it acts like it’s been reset to flow forward in time as soon as it’s been dug up. Or, maybe maybe, agents of FA working even farther in the past buried the capsules so that they could move forward in time and be dug up at the right moment. Head ache yet?
Maybe FA sent him plans for a turnstile, or they built a humongous turnstile that incepted a massive turnstile to run backward in time in a cave somewhere, set on autopilot, that could spit out a big turnstile, running forward in time, that Sator could dig up at the appropriate time.
The Kalinn operation was a Russian doll of different motivations. Top layer, Pro was told by Priya that Sator was after P241 as part of his evil machinations - the same P241 that he had tried to grab at the opera but which got snagged by the Ukranians. Pro, to get close to Sator and figure out his plans for Priya and Tenet, will help Sator get the P241. Of course, there is no P241 - there is just the last piece of the Algorithm. Once Pro gets the orange case and opens it, he realizes that it isn’t a plutonium containment device, and is confused, but Neil (who knows what it is, and that it’s worse than plutonium) tells him not to give it to Sator anyway. So Pro pulls it out of the case and throws the case to Sator but the fragment into the car between them (being driven by an inverted Pro).
Watched again, it’s clear that Sator is inverted the whole time during this exchange, doing a temporal pincer movement. From the POV of inverted Sator, he goes to shootout site and searches the BMW but finds no algorithm. He drives along and picks up an empty case from the roadside, then throws it to Pro and notices that Pro catches the Algorithm flying out of the Saab at about the same time that Pro catches the empty case from Sator. Thus Sator knows that the Algorithm is in the Saab.
These might be stupid questions but:
- How did Pro’s team know in advance about the opera house siege?
- When he’s torturing Pro on the train tracks, the bad guy sets a timer and says Pro’s team had a certain amount of time to get clear. What is he talking about?
- Why were the cars driving in reverse? How could the vehicles have been inverted?
(Great movie, by the way!)
Still no answer to the OP?
Pro’s team may have been informed in advance by someone from Tenet tipping off the regular CIA beforehand - more chicken and egg stuff. It’s a little hinky what’s going on there anyway - is the CIA guy stealing the (what they describe as plutonium) from the Ukrainians? Giving it/trading it to them? It’s opaque. All we’re meant to care about is that this is a point in time where the location of the macguffin is known to all relevant parties, and when it is vulnerable to attack.
The bad guy in essence tells Pro that Pro only has to hold out until his team gets away, and thus the bad guy only has an hour to get the info he wants, so he’s going to torture Pro to get it. So Pro can hope that he only has to hold out for an hour and then the torture might end/he can give up the info without consequence. But surprise, that’s a mind game by the torturer, because the torture is going to keep going! Maybe the team is still in the field, or maybe the dude is pissed that Pro didn’t break and now just wants to punish him pointlessly, but Pro can’t know and still has to try to hold out, and no longer has an end point to look forward to. It’s a bit of mental torture to add to the physical torture.
The vehicle action is weird, because not all the cars behave the same way, and on Reddit and other places this has led to debate as to what’s really going on. A soldier tells Pro that the Pro is inverted but the car isn’t, which is why driving is so tricky. There is a theory that the Saab that inverted-Pro drives has itself been inverted by driving it into the turnstile, but that has its own problems. For an inverted driver to drive a normal car ‘normally’ (ie looking out the front instead of looking in the mirror the whole time), he’d have to put it in reverse and drive it backwards from our POV. He’d have to tromp on the brake to get the car moving, and hit the gas to get it to stop, etc.
It’s very hard to figure the car chase out in a satisfactory manner. It might be a filmmaker error, or something is going on that never got explained to us explicitly.
As to the OP: no, there aren’t two Kats at the end. There are multiple Kats at various points in the movie, but by the end there is just one. Kat lives forward, gets shot, doubles back for a while to heal, lives forward for a bit, doubles back to get to the boat off Vietnam, then lives forward thereafter. She lies low after jumping off the boat in Vietnam until she knows that her other version has been shot and inverted. Beyond that point, she’s the only Kat, and she can pick things up with her son. The shooting of Kat is probably also the furthest forward in time that Sator ever gets, too - he runs into the red room, hits Pro, his freeport gets overrun and he jumps in the turnstile. Inverted, he shoots Kat/interrogates Pro, then continues to look for the algorithm while inverted until he notes the sleight of hand at the handoff of the case. Offscreen he obtains the algorithm (maybe by radioing his forward goons to get it out of the Saab to take it to Siberia) but at any rate he continues back to the boat in Vietnam to die. Since he’s dying of cancer, he would not have spent a lot of time living forward and then living an equal amount of time backward to reach Vietnam, so his continued existence into the future would be short even if he didn’t go straight back to Vietnam from the car chase.
The movie has a bunch of little bits that don’t make obvious sense, like the museum of inverted objects that the lady shows Pro. How does a museum collect such objects? From our POV they’ve got to get taken from the museum and stuck in the ground at some point in the future. She says they keep finding more items now that they know what to look for, but the museum should have more objects in its past than its future if the objects are traveling backwards in time. If an inverted person collects them and puts them through a turnstile, they can stay in the museum into the future indefinitely, but then they should lose their inverted weirdness.
I believe there will be 2, but just for a short while, and then one of them will invert to do some of the things from earlier in the plot, while the other continues on as the regular Kat. I think that’s the case for all of the characters who double at some point.
Just saw the movie last night, by the way, and I loved it. I know that if I really, really think about it, the logic starts to break down, but I think it had a very cool central idea, and the movie used that cool (but probably ultimately entirely illogical) idea about as well as possible to make a really cool and thoughtful movie.
Actually, thinking more about the museum, it’s a neat idea that the people of the future invert their trash and send it into the past, just like we send our trash to the future. A kind of revenge for us having destroyed their environment. Only the most durable parts persist to make it back to our time.
So from the trash’s POV, future people invert it, drive it to a landfill (ideally an old one) and bury it (while inverted). Many years later it gets uncovered and jumps up into a different dumptruck, which takes it to a museum building where it sits for an unknown amount of time. Pieces are taken away and not returned to the museum. Early on, many are taken, but the removal slows down over time until the building is empty and the trash is scattered all over the place. Eventually even the durable bits of trash crumble away to dust.
From our POV, dust assembles itself into scattered bits of weird trash, which are found over time and brought to a building to be studied. A few at first, but the finds accelerate over time. The pieces are studied until we learn all we can from them, and it’s time to make this knowledge disappear from the world. At that point we put them in a dumptruck, drive it somewhere, push them into the ground, and bury them. The trash continues to un-decompose gradually, more and more molecules clicking into place from the environment. In the remote future, fresh trash gets dug up, goes through a turnstile, and eventually becomes useful objects for a time.
Yes. I started thinking about if you could really interact with objects moving the opposite way through a timeline and it got real messy. The most obvious being your sense of vision. While moving backwards through a timeline objects would not be emitting light/color for you to see them. They would be attracting light/color.