NOLAN VOID 2.5: TENET

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This week TGTPTU goes deeper into Season 12’s NOLAN VOID with TENET (2020), a title spelled the same forward and backward, and the progenitor of TGTPTU’s “temporal pincer movement” description of our podcast’s episode pairing methodology.

Instead of spoiling the episode with notes, here’s a transcript spoiling cohost Thomas’ plot summary:

We’re following one main person, played by John David Washington, who gets his guy but when he returns to get rid of bombs, he himself is saved by someone who is not from his crew nor the police nor of the terrorists but has a noticeable red charm like for identifying airport luggage on his pack.

Unfortunately when he gets back to the van, Washington’s undercover character appears to have been made, and so he’s getting his teeth pulled out at a train depot and is unable to take his cyanide pill but his buddy is able to slip him his and our protagonist is not dead but awakens with new teeth and has passed his test as the suicide pill was not real. Instead, it was all test; he’s now considered dead and can pursue a deeper danger that is only known as “Tenet” (and interlocking fingers).

Because of arms dealing or something, Protagonist meets his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson) who knows all about Protagonist, including that he prefers cola to soda water. They slingshot themselves onto an impenetrable building to meet an arms dealer who informs Protagonist the real baddie is a Russian oligarch who’s getting info from the future.

Protagonist travels to brunch with Michael Caine who plays Michael Caine to inform Protagonist that his entry point to the oligarch is his wife Katherine “Kat” Barton (Elizabeth Debicki) who had an art scam she’s being blackmailed for by her husband, so she meets Protagonist for dinner and husband oligarch (still unseen) isn’t happy and his goons arrive to take Protagonist into the kitchen to rough him up but instead get the business end of a cheese grater from Protagonist.

So now we’re at like Minute 40 and it’s a two-and-half-hour movie.

Oh, Branaugh’s got a fitness tracker, the radioactive material from heist is really the final piece from the future’s doomsday device that might not be set off in the future as Branaugh now has all the pieces and that fitness tracker is a deadman’s switch so Washington’s Protagonist and an army with turnstyle technology on a boat and Pattinson’s Neil get divided into two teams (one going forward, one backward) to raid the facility with the device while Debicki’s Kat is on a yacht with Branaugh to keep him from suiciding, although she wants to kill him.

Neil swaps sides between forward and backwards during the attack to save the day and, after saving the day because it hasn’t happened yet from one timeline maybe, needs to go back to the past—and his likely death (although Protagonist keeps this information compartmentalized).

Neil lets Protagonist know they will be friends in the future because that’s where he’s from and Protagonist notices a red doohickey we saw from the Opera scene. Movie continues because there was a cell phone and we find out that Protagonist appears to have mastered timey-wimey things because he saves Kat from being killed by the arms dealer from earlier to protect the Tenet secret by killing the arms dealer first, and everything’s fine and there are no repercussions. Yay!

Oh, spoilers. But you already knew that. Or you will.
THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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