Tenet's Time Inversion Rules are Nonsense

#Tenet #Inversion
Tenet was recently released and while it was exciting, the more I thought about the "rules" of time inversion the more ridiculous it became.

[WarriorsAce]

I was in the theater watching this, convincing myself it made sense, when I had the thought "so if an inverted person shoots a surface that means it has to always have been shot" and then my brain exploded and I realized I was watching the fast and furious of time travel movies.

[foobar]

I think the problem with tenet can be neatly summarised with the following paradox: imagine you are sitting in a room with two doors on either side. Suddenly, someone travelling backwards in time bursts through one door, runs across the room and out the other door. From your perspective the person will be running backwards. Now let's say you pick up your gun and shoot the guy before he reaches the other side of the room. From your perspective you have just shot someone who ran backwards into the room, and never left. From the other guys perspective, he is lying on the ground dead, then has a bullet sucked out of him and back into a gun, gets up and runs out of the door. It makes no sense.

[khyzan]

That robert pattinson body paradox also applies to anything shot with an inverted bullet. The glass shot by protangonists gun took the bullet holes away, which means the the building designers knew they were putting in glass with bullet holes. And again with the wound manifesting before it happens implies that his body is still moving forward, buts it just his perception that was inverted, which also means he should be able to breath non inverted air while still being inverted.

[willlaurie]

I'm glad I watched this. It confirms what I thought. This movie doesn't make sense.

[lonelystranger]

Excellent video. Wonderful points to add to the other nonsensical elements discussed elsewhere. No wonder the physicists Nolan approached rejected being a part of it. But Nolan had to make a 'cool' movie to appease his enormous fan base. As a sci-fi movie, Tenet has very little to do with science and a lot with fiction.

[dookdawg]

This video barely even scratches the surface of how stupid the film's inversion rules are. When inverted, people should be totally blind and deaf. The lightwaves are leaving your retinas and the soundwaves are leaving your eardrums. So your brain is given no images or sounds to process. Also, how do inverted objects coexist with non-inverted objects? If the bullet is inverted to go backwards, shouldn't it keep going back and back until it finds its way back in the bullet factory?

[tylerjanesprime]

Great video and thank you for making it. It's criminal that it doesn't have more views.
Tenet was a lot of fun on first viewing but its mess of internal logic ultimately ruins much further reading into it, as far as it's central concept goes.
We suspend a certain amount of disbelief with every story we watch, especially high concept action movies.
It's when they break their own rules that the storytellers make it that much more difficult for a thoughtful audience to remain engaged after the first viewing.
Thanks for illustrating this so well with your vid.
(Edit to add below)
Also - great call back to Timecop!! I was hoping to see a 2020 CGI effect of double body annihilation too!

[Quantum_]

“Bursts of spontaneous snowfall”

Some good concepts you brought up here .

[storyscholar]

Very good points. I'm actually planning to cover "Tenet" soon myself and this was a good reminder of how crazy this film is.

[VideoHostSite]

Tenet is the kind of movie that stupid people refer to as "clever". And when legitimately smart people tell them they're wrong, they inevitably say "you just didn't get it." No, we got it. And it sucked.

[ezrazonable]

I knew this movie's premise was stupid, but I didn't want to waste my time articulating why. So, thanks for making this video.

[Kranitoko]

That issue you mention about pattinson always being there can also be applied to the bullet holes in the glass and walls. So were they made with bullet holes in them? Where did the holes come in the forward flowing time world?

[willjackson]

If physics worked inverted and fire attracted heat instead of expelling it, then when the inverted Protagonist is literally anywhere, he should be slowly heating up as bodies expel heat and he would quickly die. And also, physics working inverted would mean when he steps on the non-inverted ground, Newton’s third law would be inverted and instead of his foot experiencing the normal contact force, it would instead be crushed into the ground perpetually. THIS MOVIE MAKES NO SENSE

[danny]

There are two types of science fiction:
1. The very imaginative one, but not at all based on scientific facts (e.g. Star Wars).
2. The one that tries to be based on scientific discoveries and remain consistent with them (e.g. Star Trek).

That's why I'm more of a Star Trek fan. For me, Star Wars is more like fantasy than science fiction. It imagines characters with unimaginable possibilities in the real world and objects that will probably never exist. It's easy, it's within children's reach.

Serious people are more interested in science fiction in which science takes its rightful place.

I thought Nolan was among the last ones: serious people who are really interested in science and try to respect its basics. TENET seemed to fit what I consider to be the only true science fiction, i.e. the science-based kind of science fiction that stays with the science throughout the novel or film.
But Nolan dropped out. His pseudo-science of space-time curvature doesn't hold up. So, I also dropped out when I watched the film.

If Nolan claimed to be a member of the Star Wars fan community, let him stop pretending to be one of the Trekkies. Then I'll still go see his films, but I'll consider them with the same lightness of judgment I use for novels or fantasy films.

[willjackson]

It’s so annoying to me that this movie ended up making no sense. I really think the concept could’ve worked with just a few more “this is just the way it is and we don’t know why yet” kind of statements. They didn’t stick by the rules they set, so they shouldn’t have set those rules

[nevbezaire]

Thank you!
These lapses in internal logic bugged me from first viewing and only grew as I thought about them. But most video analyses either ignore them or haven't thought about them.

Some movies have successfully combined free will and predestination (see The Infinite Man) but most fail because of the inherent paradoxes. Tenet fails on such a massive level that is a highly frustrating watch.

Take the car chase and run thru motivations from Sator or Protagonist's perspective: nonsense

[nadarith]

1. its not the formula to stop time but to reverse universal entropy so that objects moving backwards in time can actually propagate the effect of their existence far into the past instead of just stopping at some point


2. the existence of inverted time means that situations that would result in someone changing the past simply do not arise, the neccesary conditions needed for them to arise are simply impossible, so such a scenario where dave betrays the team and they would then know and prevent him by trying to change the events would simply never happen (consequently someone knowing about it but chosing not to tell anyone would allow it to happen), the elimination of possibilities is literally the point of the temporal pincer, so how could it be a problem with the rules of the movie when the movie explictly acknowledges it and then has characters exploit it?


3. the ice only forms on the matter that is inverted relative to the fire and directly exposed to it, you don't feel fire heating you up by more than a few degrees when standing near it so why would walking next to some fires while inverted suddenly start cooling you enough to ice you over?

normally the guns will never be cold to themselves when inverted because the both the gun, propellant and the bullet are inverted, the barrel may feel cold when you fire an inverted gun too much without being inverted yourself, but it would take a rifle and a solid minute of non-stop fire for the barrel to actually frost over in presence of non-inverted air

similarly chemical explosives are contributing negligible heat to their sorroundings, their main damage mechanism is air overpressure, also its a fucking desert and has barely any moisture anyway for snowfall

its like the moment time inversion is mentioned you lost the sense of magnitude of just how much something needs to be cooled to freeze or how much its heated normally in comparison


4. the injury started acting because he was feeling the effects of being stabbed by an inverted (relative to him) object, first was the effect, the wound, then the closer to the stabbing the worse the wound got, finally he got stabbed, then when the object came out it was clean and the wound was gone

this also demonstrates that normal flow of time takes precedence, because when the inverted protag was stabbed by a normal object he had the effects show first then got stabbed and it vanished, showing that the wound progressed forwards in time, while when kat was shot by an inverted bullet she had the effects show after that and they were steadily getting worse as some tissue sorrounding the bullet had their time arrow knocked backwards by the bullet and heal backwards fucking the entire thing up, something that was made even worse by kat being inverted as then the tissues that were going backwards because of the bullet were now normal while the rest of the body was inverted and the forward wound tissues started to steadily convert the sorrounding tissues to also go forward, making wound on the inverted body worse and worse as form its perspective the wound was unhealing itself without limit

so when an inverted object is hit enough to violently change its structure by a forward one the entire affected area is knocked to go forward again, but when a normal object is hit like that the entire affected area still goes forward but some of it still tries to go backwards in the direction the inverted object knocked it's arrow of time into, there's a resistance against going backwards in regards to the universal flow of time


and that leads into:
5. the corpses weren't always there, in a matter of fact they probably weren't there just a few days or weeks ago, the dominant, forward flow of entropy arrests the propagation of the effects of retroactive time and is a constant danger to backwards existing objects

not only that but there's the implication that there's a degree to how much 'backwards' something is, the backwards 'inverse radiation' that was briefly mentioned, and the more of it something has, the further back into the past it will propagate before 'winds of entropy' arrest it, and so the things manufactured directly in the future go the furthest, like the device pieces, because they presumably can make that radiation in isolated form and infuse it instead of just inverting an object and calling it a day

in a matter of fact, that radiation is probably the force of something already inverted knocking something backwards in time, something that has evidence in how the stab wound propagated only minutes into the past on the protag, but some bullet holes seemed to be already there for hours or longer, and we all know bullets have more energy than a typical stab with a metal pick, the more mass something has also means it propagates further before degrading, culminating with the objects that have constant activity inside of them (people) as they essentially propel themselves to an extent

i mean if it propagated into the past forever, then why else do you think the device that can reverse universal entropy is being fought over in the first place? the entire point of the movie is that backwards future humanity cannot exist indefinitely into the past, this was explained, not in great detail but it WAS explained!



the best part of tenet is that anyone criticizing its logic or inversion rules is neccesarily wrong, because the entire damned movie is essentially a self-contained palindrome in how it was made, its rules are very much consistent, some of them just aren't simple, and anyone that argues that there's a logic error simply didn't understand some rule or its implications, i did not yet find an exception to this

its not a good 'movie' movie, but as a consistent piece? it has the consistency of a tautology, a circular argument

[val]

Even though I had some of the same problems, I could follow it up until the scene they are getting ready for the final fight: up to this point inverted characters see themselves walking and driving forward while the world goes backwards. but the ships before the final battle are going backwards and the rest of the world is backwards as well. Also blue team was supposed to tell red how the fight happens. And then serve as a distraction for red to go in and sneak in to the bomb. But that would mean red would have to invert instead of blue at that point b/c whoever is inverted is able to sneak in (see the second airport scene where the inverted characters are able to get by their past selves)

[LUISMIKE]

I think some one wasn't even paying attention to the movie, Wheeler said "you are inverted, the world around you does not", if the protagonist or Niel touch the fire from the plane, they won't burn, instead they would freeze.

[damianlegion]

1:27 Sounds like Todd Howard's Its Just Works!

That's so stupid because in the gun-bullet's scene he came into the room for first time, and the bullet was already there. He grab the gun and shoot the gun but the bullet came back to the gun, which created this paradox:

"...Who shoot that bullet? And when?..."