Tenet story
Tenet is a 2020 science fiction action thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who produced it with Emma Thomas. Synopsis: The film follows a secret agent who learns to manipulate the flow of time to prevent an attack from the future that threatens to annihilate the present world.
19 total · 7 major · 12 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| anthropogenic existential risk to civilization | major | It was up to the Tenet organization to stop the Russian Oligarch Sator from running an "algorithm" that would catastrophically invert the entropy of the Earth. |
| husband and wife | major | One storyline follows Kat as she attempts to stop her estranged husband, Sator, from blowing up the world. The Protagonist interacted with the arms dealer Priya and her husband Sanjay. |
| reversed time | major | Central to the plot was the Protagonist, and others, making things and people move in time by somehow reversing entropy. |
| secret agent occupation | major | The Protagonist was recruited to work as a secret agent for the Tenet organization, and it was all cloak-and-daggers from there. |
| time travel | major | A main novelty of the film is that people travel in time by reversing the entropy of things and people. |
| time travel paradox | major | The story ended with the Protagonist concluding that he was somehow the mastermind behind the very organization that he was recruited to join in a seeming violation of causality. The Protagonist scratched his head over causal loops at several points in the film. |
| what if the fate of the world was in my hands | major | It was up to the Protagonist, and the Tenet organization of which he was a member more generally, to stop the Russian Oligarch Sator from taking out the whole world with him before he died of inoperable cancer. |
| arms trade | minor | The arms dealer Priya Singh had sold weapons to the Russian oligarch Sator. |
| coping with a terminal illness | minor | Sator was dying of inoperable pancreatic cancer. |
| domestic violence | minor | Multiple not-so-subtle allusions made clear that Sator had been physically abusive to his estranged wife, Kat, in the past. |