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SMEGMA_MAIL
May 4, 2018
Yeah Sator could have been a lot more interesting of a villain.

Even like thanos’s and the dark knight joker’s motivations have a twisted logic beyond just “well I’m hosed so gently caress everybody”

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Ramrod Hotshot
May 30, 2003

sethsez posted:

The problem with Tenet is that it courts a nitpicky, analytical viewing style just to be able to follow it, but then it doesn't hold up to that if the viewer takes it even a bit further than Nolan intended. You're supposed to be a careful and attentive viewer for very specific things while being able to handwave away others, and the film does nothing to indicate which is which. It's where the Bond comparison falls apart, because most of those are extremely good at setting viewer guidelines and then existing within that space.

that's a good way of putting it, though far from the only problem in the movie

sethsez
Jul 14, 2006

He's soooo dreamy...

Ramrod Hotshot posted:

that's a good way of putting it, though far from the only problem in the movie

gregday posted:

Also, even though I do enjoy picking apart the inversion mechanic, no amount of analysis gets you any closer to the characters or motivations.

Contrast that to Inception, where the nature of the nested dreams actually works to show Fischer’s broken relationship with his father and how they repair it.

Yeah, the bigger problem is that this is all there is. It's an extremely mechanical plot with gently caress-all in the way of human interest beyond Protag and RPats being buddies, so all you're left with are the mechanics (and the never-ending exposition explaining them), which as stated are only satisfying under a very specific level of magnification and quickly fall off if you pay too little or too much attention.

It's funny, Nolan's puzzle boxes used to serve as a backdrop for obsessed men following their fixations into increasingly dark and desperate places as part of their quest for self-identity and a feeling of security. You'd think Tenet's conceit would be perfect for that, but here we are.

sethsez fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 4, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

SMEGMA_MAIL posted:

I dunno I didn’t feel like I needed to know or that it would be coherent. Humans have engaged in stupid arms races, wars, and climate destruction without any real rationale other than a pileup of complex power plays and prisoners dilemmas and it just became a race to plunder the past or something.

The trouble here is that everything we’re told about the future-baddies is almost certainly a lie, or at least a gross misunderstanding.

For example, the lab technician says that all the objects carefully organized on the shelves are inverted trash from a future conflict. But, because of the “winds of entropy” conceit, these objects are just randomly popping into existence inside this facility so that they can be eventually assembled. In other words, what we’re seeing is a not a museum, but manufacturing plant for inverted objects.

Likewise, the explanation of how Sator gets his money makes little sense unless we understand that he’s actually using the turnstile to duplicate gold and send it into the future. It’s logically impossible for him to remove anything from the “time capsules” if they’re directly from the future, so the gold he uncovers in the flashback must have originated in an earlier past - much too far in the past for it to have been buried by an inverted future-person.

There are several ways to explain your way out of this, but the simplest version is that the whole thing‘s a set-up.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Likewise, the explanation of how Sator gets his money makes little sense unless we understand that he’s actually using the turnstile to duplicate gold and send it into the future. It’s logically impossible for him to remove anything from the “time capsules” if they’re directly from the future

You can take the inverted gold from the future and turnstile it, now you have regular gold that you can do whatever the gently caress you want with.

This doesn't detract at all from your point that there's zero indication what the hell is going on here, that unless the gold is flying back into your hand or the corpses are leaping up from the ground or the bullets are flying back into the gun there's just zero idea what's happening.

Sir Kodiak
May 14, 2007


Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

You can take the inverted gold from the future and turnstile it, now you have regular gold that you can do whatever the gently caress you want with.

You'd have to invert yourself, unbury the case with the inverted gold in it (effectively burying the case with the gold in it according to the normal flow of time), then go through the turnstile with the gold, thereby producing gold with two futures and no past, like the dude in the hallway fight. It works once Sator has a turnstile, but it seems hard to bootstrap up to that.

Perhaps the simplest assumption is that the turnstiles constructed themselves the same way the bullet holes do, intruding into the fabric of reality just in time for when they're needed. And the idea that the world can be rewritten like that—rather than having to, say, manually build a machine—seems consistent with the fact that the doomsday device is described as an algorithm.

ymgve
Jan 2, 2004


:dukedog:
Offensive Clock
TENET has more dream logic than the movie about actual dreams

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

You can take the inverted gold from the future and turnstile it, now you have regular gold that you can do whatever the gently caress you want with.

That's half-right. The film's explanation is this:

"He buries his time capsule, transmits the location, then digs it up to collect the inverted materials they sent. Seemingly instantaneous."

That doesn't actually work, because digging up the capsule now means it will no longer be there in the future. And the inverted gold is going backwards in time, so Sator should already have it before he goes through any of this procedure.

Based on the film's logic, it must actually go like this:

1) Sator builds a "turnstile".
2) Two capsules full of gold magically pop out of each end - one of which is inverted.
3) Sator buries the inverted gold in a secret location. (He must do this to avoid a TIME PARADOX.)
4) Sator can now freely spend the normal gold.

And you can probably see how this runs into issues.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

That's half-right. The film's explanation is this:

"He buries his time capsule, transmits the location, then digs it up to collect the inverted materials they sent. Seemingly instantaneous."

That doesn't actually work, because digging up the capsule now means it will no longer be there in the future. And the inverted gold is going backwards in time, so Sator should already have it before he goes through any of this procedure.

Based on the film's logic, it must actually go like this:

1) Sator builds a "turnstile".
2) Two capsules full of gold magically pop out of each end - one of which is inverted.
3) Sator buries the inverted gold in a secret location. (He must do this to avoid a TIME PARADOX.)
4) Sator can now freely spend the normal gold.

And you can probably see how this runs into issues.

It's why Bill and Ted's 'just remember to put that there later...ah, here it is' makes at least as much sense.

I loving love Bill and Ted.

Android Apocalypse
Apr 28, 2009

The future is
AUTOMATED
and you are
OBSOLETE

Illegal Hen
I love how Arrival used the same Bill & Ted time logic during its climax.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

sethsez posted:

Yeah, the bigger problem is that this is all there is. It's an extremely mechanical plot with gently caress-all in the way of human interest beyond Protag and RPats being buddies, so all you're left with are the mechanics (and the never-ending exposition explaining them), which as stated are only satisfying under a very specific level of magnification and quickly fall off if you pay too little or too much attention.

It's funny, Nolan's puzzle boxes used to serve as a backdrop for obsessed men following their fixations into increasingly dark and desperate places as part of their quest for self-identity and a feeling of security. You'd think Tenet's conceit would be perfect for that, but here we are.

Yeah. I don't think that inherently makes it a bad film, it has incredibly cinematography while having some inspiring sci-fi concepts and some good action. Plenty of movies don't even do good action.

But its like, it almost feels like they tried to keep the story from having characters.

The Protagonist not having a name is cute for the story and mechanics, but also is symbolic of how little we know about him and how little of a human being he really is.

Ultimately TENET is a mouse-trap and the people are simply levers or cogs in the machine.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Snowman_McK posted:

It's why Bill and Ted's 'just remember to put that there later...ah, here it is' makes at least as much sense.

I loving love Bill and Ted.

That's probably my favorite moment in Bill and Ted and they're fun films.

Which just makes me think of all the more complex causality bullshit we could have gotten into.

Like imagine if you're doing a Temporal Pincer Attack and you have the team that's inverted tell you which soldiers they saw who had bullet holes and which didn't, and then you'd know not to shoot at the ones who didn't get shot to save time. (Course, is that because you missed them, or because you told yourself not to shoot those soldiers in the first place???)

Android Apocalypse
Apr 28, 2009

The future is
AUTOMATED
and you are
OBSOLETE

Illegal Hen
Tenet is on HBO HD right now on the West Coast and I'm going to watch it with subtitles on and the audio blasting (relatively) loudly.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Zaphod42 posted:

That's probably my favorite moment in Bill and Ted and they're fun films.

Which just makes me think of all the more complex causality bullshit we could have gotten into.

Like imagine if you're doing a Temporal Pincer Attack and you have the team that's inverted tell you which soldiers they saw who had bullet holes and which didn't, and then you'd know not to shoot at the ones who didn't get shot to save time. (Course, is that because you missed them, or because you told yourself not to shoot those soldiers in the first place???)

I think they could have pulled off a much more interesting temporal pincer attack with a much smaller scene. Make it involve maybe ten people on either side, or even total. Bigger isn't better if you don't have bigger ideas. Or, if you want it to be big, at least give us some cool imagery: people springing back to life as bullets are sucked out of them, or getting hit by inverted bullets and dying in a strange, backwards motion. Double tapping a body, only to bring it back to life and have it shoot at the team going the other way.

Interestingly, Doctor Strange understood this, a film from a franchise that's pretty cookie cutter when it comes to spectacle. The inverted battle towards the end doesn't really make sense and is essentially unfinished, but it's easily the most memorable part of the film.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Snowman_McK posted:

I think they could have pulled off a much more interesting temporal pincer attack with a much smaller scene. Make it involve maybe ten people on either side, or even total. Bigger isn't better if you don't have bigger ideas. Or, if you want it to be big, at least give us some cool imagery: people springing back to life as bullets are sucked out of them, or getting hit by inverted bullets and dying in a strange, backwards motion. Double tapping a body, only to bring it back to life and have it shoot at the team going the other way.

Interestingly, Doctor Strange understood this, a film from a franchise that's pretty cookie cutter when it comes to spectacle. The inverted battle towards the end doesn't really make sense and is essentially unfinished, but it's easily the most memorable part of the film.

A fight where you had like 4 people on one side and 4 people on another side, with 2 inverted on each team, would probably carry more weight than having 20 people. Being able to recognize faces would make things way more interesting. Of course, it'd probably be prohibitively difficult / expensive to choreograph and film that kind of fight sequence, the one where the Protagonist fights himself is already pretty bonkers.

Like imagine if inverted Protagonist and non-inverted Neil were fist-fighting with some 3rd bad-guy, and they were trying to synchronize their attacks while being temporally inverted with each other. Protag sees Neil's fist coming out of the bad guy's face, and then Neil gets flung up in the air. Protag realizes he needs to "catch" Neil (actually toss him) in order to make this work. etc. etc.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Zaphod42 posted:

A fight where you had like 4 people on one side and 4 people on another side, with 2 inverted on each team, would probably carry more weight than having 20 people. Being able to recognize faces would make things way more interesting. Of course, it'd probably be prohibitively difficult / expensive to choreograph and film that kind of fight sequence, the one where the Protagonist fights himself is already pretty bonkers.

Like imagine if inverted Protagonist and non-inverted Neil were fist-fighting with some 3rd bad-guy, and they were trying to synchronize their attacks while being temporally inverted with each other. Protag sees Neil's fist coming out of the bad guy's face, and then Neil gets flung up in the air. Protag realizes he needs to "catch" Neil (actually toss him) in order to make this work. etc. etc.

Something like that, in a small apartment or safehouse or something, done with real care and dedication, would have been amazing. Hire Jackie Chan or the John Wick guys or something, get them planning and choreographing the scene as early as possible, give them a lot of control in how the scene is shot and edited. Basically, do all the things good action movies have always done to get the results they get, instead of just having two groups of guys running around in different coloured hats.

Since we're talking about time war fiction, has anyone read the book 'This is how you lose the time war'? I picked it up recently and, while it opens interestingly, it feels like it could go either way.

Lampsacus
Oct 21, 2008

A few years ago, there was a half-silly post in CD about a potential tv/streaming version set in the TENET universe.

sethsez
Jul 14, 2006

He's soooo dreamy...

Zaphod42 posted:

Yeah. I don't think that inherently makes it a bad film, it has incredibly cinematography while having some inspiring sci-fi concepts and some good action. Plenty of movies don't even do good action.

But its like, it almost feels like they tried to keep the story from having characters.

The Protagonist not having a name is cute for the story and mechanics, but also is symbolic of how little we know about him and how little of a human being he really is.

Ultimately TENET is a mouse-trap and the people are simply levers or cogs in the machine.

The mechanics ultimately being nonsense and the characters being complete ciphers would be... not great, but at least acceptable if the conceit led to some good action, but by and large I think the action is tremendously uneven, and outside of the bit where Protag fights himself I think the gimmick hurts the action scenes far more than it helps them. A huge part of what makes good movie action so viscerally exciting is the immediate and explosive sequence of cause-and-effect, and the inverse kinetics just serve to confuse an otherwise wonderful car chase and absolutely destroys the final battle by making it impossible to tell who's fighting who when, and not in an exciting "heat of battle" kind of way.

It's got a few good scenes (the opera house, the first half of the car chase, and as mentioned I'm a fan of the Protag fist fight and the entire heist sequence it's contained in), but when an action movie's central gimmick mostly makes the action scenes worse, there's a problem.

Android Apocalypse
Apr 28, 2009

The future is
AUTOMATED
and you are
OBSOLETE

Illegal Hen
:lmao: Watching it now on HBO and half of the boat race isn't closed captioned.

Nolan must hate his audience.

David D. Davidson
Nov 17, 2012

Orca lady?
To me a big part of the problem is we're told "don't think, feel" but the writers didn't take their own advice and have fallen into the Zack Snyder trap of having thought about it too much and just pat themselves on the back for being so clever.

Like the fact that if you're inverted you can breath normal air or that inverted fire takes away body heat. They are just useless details that come up but sre never used or utilized in any sort of clever way. Like they are never show to be in danger of running out of inverted oxygen or have any need to say run into a burning building while they are inverted. And even then you don't need fire to do that when it's inverted to be dangerous because well it's still fire.

gregday
May 23, 2003

David D. Davidson posted:

To me a big part of the problem is we're told "don't think, feel" but the writers didn't take their own advice and have fallen into the Zack Snyder trap of having thought about it too much and just pat themselves on the back for being so clever.

Like the fact that if you're inverted you can breath normal air or that inverted fire takes away body heat. They are just useless details that come up but sre never used or utilized in any sort of clever way. Like they are never show to be in danger of running out of inverted oxygen or have any need to say run into a burning building while they are inverted. And even then you don't need fire to do that when it's inverted to be dangerous because well it's still fire.

The inverted air tanks/masks are mainly just an easy way to signal who is inverted in a scene.

SMEGMA_MAIL
May 4, 2018
I thought the fire thing was pretty cool, it was kinda a neat planting thing to explain why he didn't die later in the movie when the car got blown up when he was inverted.

massive spider
Dec 6, 2006

the inverted air thing was neat cause it sets up the visual of him stepping out into the inverted world like its the surface of mars or something.

David D. Davidson
Nov 17, 2012

Orca lady?
I get the imagery, I just feel like the inverted air thing should have turned into a kind of ticking clock element that could have added some tension during the final battle or. Like while he's inverted Neil's air tank takes a bullet and begins leaking or something.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.

David D. Davidson posted:

To me a big part of the problem is we're told "don't think, feel" but the writers didn't take their own advice and have fallen into the Zack Snyder trap of having thought about it too much and just pat themselves on the back for being so clever.

This is pure projection, Snyder has done literally dozens of interviews where he cops to doing stuff because he thinks it looks cool and nothing else. In fact I daresay he might have been a better choice for this movie (and I don't actually think that's the case for most things) since all the visual stuff would have been amped up to the extreme and he would have had one of his little notebooks full of cool shots and visual tricks, and the plot would have been the same "don't think too hard about this"

At the very least that last battle would have been something beyond "that building getting time-hosed".

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Snowman_McK posted:

It's why Bill and Ted's 'just remember to put that there later...ah, here it is' makes at least as much sense.

That actually is precisely the logic, because Sator's flashback shows a capsule being dug up. That means his gold actually originates in the past, not the future. It had to have been planted there by somebody living before the 1980s.

So Priya gave Protag false intel. But was she lying, was she herself duped, or was she half-right because Sator has multiple sources of magic gold? We don't know, and we ultimately can't know - yet each of those possibilities changes how we understand the film.

If Sator keeps digging up buckets of gold from the 1970s with the belief that it's coming direct from the future, then he's a total idiot. That's like believing in Santa because Christmas presents appeared under your tree. ("How else could they get in if all the doors were locked???")

But if Sator's not a total idiot, then he believes the "Evil Future People" already had agents doing poo poo back in the 1970s. This just raises more questions, though - like, why don't they just pay him directly instead of going though the trouble of burying the gold? Why tell him about the time-travel stuff? Why even give this dumbass multiple time machines?

Of course, if Priya is lying, then it's possible that the "Evil Future People" never existed and Sator was just set up by Tenet for obscure reasons. "This whole operation is a temporal pincer movement", etc. So basically everything in the movie happens because Protag wanted to, and it's basically a remake of Paycheck with Ben Affleck. Or not.

JazzFlight
Apr 29, 2006

Oooooooooooh!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

That actually is precisely the logic, because Sator's flashback shows a capsule being dug up. That means his gold actually originates in the past, not the future. It had to have been planted there by somebody living before the 1980s.

So Priya gave Protag false intel. But was she lying, was she herself duped, or was she half-right because Sator has multiple sources of magic gold? We don't know, and we ultimately can't know - yet each of those possibilities changes how we understand the film.

If Sator keeps digging up buckets of gold from the 1970s with the belief that it's coming direct from the future, then he's a total idiot. That's like believing in Santa because Christmas presents appeared under your tree. ("How else could they get in if all the doors were locked???")

But if Sator's not a total idiot, then he believes the "Evil Future People" already had agents doing poo poo back in the 1970s. This just raises more questions, though - like, why don't they just pay him directly instead of going though the trouble of burying the gold? Why tell him about the time-travel stuff? Why even give this dumbass multiple time machines?

Of course, if Priya is lying, then it's possible that the "Evil Future People" never existed and Sator was just set up by Tenet for obscure reasons. "This whole operation is a temporal pincer movement", etc. So basically everything in the movie happens because Protag wanted to, and it's basically a remake of Paycheck with Ben Affleck. Or not.
I dunno if I should reply to a SMG post, but I think I know what the movie was implying.

I think Nolan thinks it works like this:
-Sator buries a capsule
-Sator e-mails the location to a server that presumably does not get shut down ever
-Future People read e-mail (let's say 100 years from now)
-Future People dig up capsule, insert inverted gold which travels back in time, and rebury capsule
-Sator digs up capsule (right after he buried it) that now has inverted gold that's been sitting there for 100 years in reverse
-Sator (presumably) re-buries capsule in same spot, or else... gold will disappear because an empty capsule will not be in that spot 100 years from now?
-Sator inverts the gold and spends it

For the next drop, he picks a different location.
I don't think... there's a problem with this? Maybe?

This is the same logic that deflated the ending because Nolan claimed that things happen pretty much instantaneously if they're buried and the email is sent, but if anyone messes with the dig site inbetween now and the Future People, nothing happens. If the heroes just spent the next 10 years digging up the nuclear blast site, they'd find the algorithm and stop the whole plan.

There's one option the Future People could do to win, which is to invert operatives who would live decades in a bunker (even through generations???) so that they could travel back to our present to get the algorithm now that they know its location. But if they were willing to do that, why bother doing a lot of the other things in the movie...

JazzFlight fucked around with this message at 17:40 on May 6, 2021

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

JazzFlight posted:

I think Nolan thinks it works like this:
-Sator buries a capsule
-Sator e-mails the location to a server that presumably does not get shut down ever
-Future People read e-mail (let's say 100 years from now)
-Future People dig up capsule, insert inverted gold which travels back in time, and rebury capsule
-Sator digs up capsule (right after he buried it) that now has inverted gold that's been sitting there for 100 years in reverse
-Sator (presumably) re-buries capsule in same spot, or else... gold will disappear because an empty capsule will not be in that spot 100 years from now?
-Sator inverts the gold and spends it

For the next drop, he picks a different location.
I don't think... there's a problem with this? Maybe?

They would have to rebury the backwards-travelling capsule in a different location, otherwise you'd have the forwards-travelling capsule and backwards-travelling capsule occupying the same space at the times in between the shipment. This also means that every future-to-past or past-to-future shipment has to use a different area. And, if i remember correctly, we do see something like this at the abandoned nuclear site where Sator's mooks are constantly digging up new areas.


quote:

This is the same logic that deflated the ending because Nolan claimed that things happen pretty much instantaneously if they're buried and the email is sent, but if anyone messes with the dig site inbetween now and the Future People, nothing happens. If the heroes just spent the next 10 years digging up the nuclear blast site, they'd find the algorithm and stop the whole plan.

There's one option the Future People could do to win, which is to invert operatives who would live decades in a bunker (even through generations???) so that they could travel back to our present to get the algorithm now that they know its location. But if they were willing to do that, why bother doing a lot of the other things in the movie...

They address this head on. Logically, to the best of their understanding of how inversion works, such an approach would work. And logically, to the best of their understanding of how inversion works, they have already succeeded at whatever they will do. However, since they're really not so sure about how this whole time inversion entropy thing works, they decide for prudential reasons it's better to stop what Sator is trying to do in the first place. Just in case they're wrong about this whole time magic thing. This ties in to the movie's whole theme about acting on faith and all that.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
You're right in that is how Nolan thinks it works, but by the rules of Tenet it doesn't actually work. SMG is right: the actual way, by the rules of Tenet, that the inverted gold drop would work is this: the turnstile would suddenly spit out two gold cases at the exact moment Sator would send an email that says "I need gold, please leave it behind the old oak tree", he would bury the inverted one (that's the one from the future) behind the old oak tree and keep the other.

Or the turnstile could just spit out a couple of cases occasionally, Sator doesn't bury the inverted one until he knows where he found it. That's the thing about this time inversion stuff, to a forward observer inverted items that work with the turnstiles look totally random.

Sir Kodiak is also right that Sator could invert himself and go "dig up" (which would look like burying it to someone in normal time) the inverted case and then walk into the turnstile holding it, which results in a perfectly normal Sator walking out with perfectly normal gold, and the inverted gold has "disappeared". Again to a forward observer this would look exactly like the turnstile randomly activating and two Sators walking out, the inverted one walking away backwards and "burying" the gold.

But there is no way for the "empty case, close case, open case and it's full of inverted gold" technique works, because the minute you open the case and view the gold you're interacting with that gold's past and we know what the past was: it's been sitting in the ground untouched until you opened the case. Whoops! TIME PARADOX

Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 18:21 on May 6, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

JazzFlight posted:

-Future People dig up capsule, insert inverted gold which travels back in time, and rebury capsule
-Sator digs up capsule (right after he buried it) that now has inverted gold that's been sitting there for 100 years in reverse.

That doesn't work because, if Sator removes inverted gold from the capsule, the gold will no longer have been put into the capsule.

It's helpful to isolate the specific perspectives.

From the perspective of the gold, it is being buried in the future and unburied in the past.
From the perspective of Sator, he is simply burying the gold and leaving a treasure map.

It is logically impossible for Sator to ever dig up inverted gold from the future and use it. He can only bury the inverted gold that randomly appears out of nowhere.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
Double post while editing! My bad. .dab yM !gnitide elihw tsop elbuoD

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

But there is no way for the "empty case, close case, open case and it's full of inverted gold" technique works, because the minute you open the case and view the gold you're interacting with that gold's past and we know what the past was: it's been sitting in the ground untouched until you opened the case. Whoops! TIME PARADOX

There's always time magic like "the transport box is programmed to de-invert itself as it reaches the agreed upon time." Maybe Sator has to pick it up at the exact perfect time. Maybe the time magic keeps the object's entropy in some way "frozen" so when it reaches time T it simply stays at T instead of returning to moving forwards through time.

It's a time magic cheat, but it's already part of the movie that we don't know for sure just what the time wizards can do.

It may not be satisfying but it's enough to say that (on this particular point) the movie isn't logically impossible.

gregday
May 23, 2003

I think I broke my brain thinking about the Blue team member that gets sealed up inside the wall at Stalsk-12.

So from his perspective, he’s trapped inside the wall. But from the red (forward) perspective, they exploded a wall and a guy emerges inverted and returns backwards to the blue helicopters. So in the winds of entropy, is this guy hosed or does he get out OK?

This created a new paradoxical question: if inverted people never revert, then from the forward perspective, where do they “come from”? That’s probably a question that arises from linear thinking and as the movie suggests I should just not think about it.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Hand Knit posted:

They would have to rebury the backwards-travelling capsule in a different location, otherwise you'd have the forwards-travelling capsule and backwards-travelling capsule occupying the same space at the times in between the shipment. This also means that every future-to-past or past-to-future shipment has to use a different area. And, if i remember correctly, we do see something like this at the abandoned nuclear site where Sator's mooks are constantly digging up new areas.

The capsule isn't backwards travelling. Only the gold is. That's the trick.

The problem (as mentioned earlier) with it is that if the gold is travelling backwards, Sator should just... have the gold already.

If you send the gold back in time to Sator, the gold keeps going back in time. So as mentioned, it would have to suddenly spawn inside a turnstile and he'd have two copies of it or something weird like that.

We know the gold is inverted though because we see Sator "drop" the gold upwards into his hand.

But if he "spends" inverted gold it'll cause all kinds of problems. So you have to re-invert the inverted gold back to normal to spend it. Hm. I guess that works though? This is all too loving complicated lol.

I may need to draw a picture to think this through...

gregday posted:

This created a new paradoxical question: if inverted people never revert, then from the forward perspective, where do they “come from”? That’s probably a question that arises from linear thinking and as the movie suggests I should just not think about it.

Yeah, exactly. I think the idea is "they can't", because they necessarily MUST have already re-inverted sometime. Since everything is all happening at once and already has happened, it has to be logically consistent, and paradoxes just can't happen. But yeah its weird.

The protagonist and Neil intentionally hand wave this as "we don't really know but we think it works this way" which is for the best.

Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on May 6, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

gregday posted:

I think I broke my brain thinking about the Blue team member that gets sealed up inside the wall at Stalsk-12.

If the film were playing fair, you would have an army of inverted skeletons. Tenet people could place them in strategic locations to undecompose and 'spring back to life' when needed.

Unfortunately, the film uses "winds of entropy" to say that the corpses just pop in/out of existence offscreen.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

But there is no way for the "empty case, close case, open case and it's full of inverted gold" technique works, because the minute you open the case and view the gold you're interacting with that gold's past and we know what the past was: it's been sitting in the ground untouched until you opened the case. Whoops! TIME PARADOX

Except, here's where it gets weird.

What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT. This then means the gold is no longer sitting in the box, so Past Sator sees no gold.

I think that actually works?

Its weird because from the perspective of the future people, the email was always sent, so it seems like the gold should be there from the start. But if Sator later takes the gold out after sending the email, then it would make sense why the gold wouldn't be there until he sends the email.

Its one of those things where its like "This happens because you already did it" more than "this happens because of necessary cause and effect", like how the protag can try to "drop/catch" the bullet, and it doesn't move, but then he tries again and it does. He has to have already done it.

You just have to keep thinking about things happening at the same time in both directions, which is ultra confusing. An inverted object can still be manipulated in space by non-inverted objects, and vise versa. That's what makes everything so loving weird and complicated.

If it was only inverted objects interacting with inverted objects and only normal objects with normal objects it'd be way simpler, but that's the crux of it.

JazzFlight
Apr 29, 2006

Oooooooooooh!

Zaphod42 posted:

Except, here's where it gets weird.

What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT. This then means the gold is no longer sitting in the box, so Past Sator sees no gold.

There's actually no conflict there.

You just have to keep thinking about things happening at the same time in both directions, which is ultra confusing. An inverted object can still be manipulated in space by non-inverted objects, and vise versa. That's what makes everything so loving weird and complicated.

If it was only inverted objects interacting with inverted objects and only normal objects with normal objects it'd be way simpler, but that's the crux of it.
Yeah, the movie pretty much states this is how it works, so by its own rules we have to accept it.

gregday
May 23, 2003

I think there’s a few tiers of sensemaking in Tenet

1) Perfectly logical closed loop:
(Kat sees herself dive off the boat. Eventually becomes that person, while her past self sees her dive. That past self will eventually invert, disappear, leaving only reverted Kat to live her life)

2) Mostly makes sense given the movies rules, I suppose:
(Most of the Tallinn car chase)

3) “The winds of entropy”
(Bullet holes forming then un-breaking, damaged mirror un-breaking)

4) Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.
(The Protagonist being able to stop the inverted SUV as if it were not inverted.)

pospysyl
Nov 10, 2012



Zaphod42 posted:

Except, here's where it gets weird.

What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT. This then means the gold is no longer sitting in the box, so Past Sator sees no gold.

I think that actually works?

Its weird because from the perspective of the future people, the email was always sent, so it seems like the gold should be there from the start. But if Sator later takes the gold out after sending the email, then it would make sense why the gold wouldn't be there until he sends the email.

Its one of those things where its like "This happens because you already did it" more than "this happens because of necessary cause and effect", like how the protag can try to "drop/catch" the bullet, and it doesn't move, but then he tries again and it does. He has to have already done it.

You just have to keep thinking about things happening at the same time in both directions, which is ultra confusing. An inverted object can still be manipulated in space by non-inverted objects, and vise versa. That's what makes everything so loving weird and complicated.

If it was only inverted objects interacting with inverted objects and only normal objects with normal objects it'd be way simpler, but that's the crux of it.

Here's the issue: what if Present Sator closes the box and opens it a minute later. Logically, there should be a gold bar there; in the inverted timeline Sator hasn't taken it out yet. Can Sator get unlimited gold in this way?

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Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

pospysyl posted:

Here's the issue: what if Present Sator closes the box and opens it a minute later. Logically, there should be a gold bar there; in the inverted timeline Sator hasn't taken it out yet. Can Sator get unlimited gold in this way?

Yeah, in theory just trying to touch the inverted gold bar should probably cause some matter/antimatter explosion that collapses the entire known universe.

It still doesn't quite work yeah... like the second after you take the gold the gold is still there? To make it really work you'd need to be inverted when you collect the gold and then un-invert with the gold, but then how could Sator get it in the first place. Shits a confusing mess. (but fun)

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