gregday posted:

Any time an object is inverted it’s “traveling backwards from the future”. I’m not seeing how it’s different whether it’s in a box.

gregday posted:

Maybe my brain is completely broken at this point, but I just don’t see how inverting gold and sending it into the past in a time capsule is any different than how inverted bullets get (un)shot.

Boris Galerkin posted:

I really don’t understand why taking the gold bar out of the box would break causality.

Boris Galerkin posted:

The bar got there because someone in the future put it there, and nobody in any point from that time until present day found it.

SMEGMA_MAIL posted:

One theory I read that actually makes the motivations of future people make sense is that the device they sent back is part of a thing that would invert the earth itself which would reverse ecological collapse but would seriously gently caress things up coherence-wise so they have to erase the past to rewind the earth.

Boris Galerkin posted:

But this isn’t the same example because it’s fundamentally different. You’re talking about time travel. I’m talking about moving in the -t direction.

Boris Galerkin posted:

The point is we’re all time travelers. It’s just that we’re all traveling “forward” in time.

Boris Galerkin posted:

Also, Sator never had the gold to begin with so your example doesn’t fit.

Boris Galerkin posted:

If he takes it out in 2021 and inverts it, and a year elapses and it’s 2022 then there is no gold in the box. There doesn’t need to be gold in the box. By 2022, the gold bar will have aged 101 years, assuming it was mined and created in 2121. 100 years moving “backwards,” 1 year moving “forward.”

Boris Galerkin posted:

What I meant by saying I’m talking about moving in the -t direction is that I’m seeing it as nothing more than moving in the -x direction vs +x direction.

We know that in order for someone to travel backwards in time in the movie, they have to actually let that same amount of time elapse. So I don’t see that as time travel in the sense of popping up somewhere in the past. If you’re 30 years old in 2021 and decide to travel to 2011, you’ll “arrive” then but now you’re 40 years old because 10 years needed to elapse. You don’t magically turn 20.

Boris Galerkin posted:

So the gold bar doesn’t need to still be in the box in 2022 if Sator takes it out in 2021.

gregday posted:

To continue with the example of a living thing. No the person wouldn't be 40, but they would appear to you to begin the backwards journey at 40, and by the time your forward time counted up to 2021, they would have reversed back to 30 at the point where they inverted.

stratdax posted:

I mean the movie explicitly shows you're wrong about the gold. Time travel isn't real, the idea of it working one way is perfectly logical but another is a paradox doesn't make sense. This is the way the movie says time travel works, so in Tenet's universe, it isn't impossible. It Just Works (TM).


Ps the movie is bad and self contradictory to the point where they literally tell you not to think about it. Just do what the movie suggests. The Calvinball approach to time travel.

Boris Galerkin posted:

I don’t know. You’re telling me that something the film explicitly shows is impossible despite the fact that the film explicitly showed it happening in a scene that was in the movie of which we’re talking about.

But yeah, I must be wrong?

I’ll concede I’m wrong if the movie supports that but the movie doesn’t. Sator is rich, and presumably the future antagonists help him become rich by telling him what to do and sending him gold from the future. This is a thing that happened in a scene in the movie. And we can safely assume he is able to trade the gold for cash because having bars of gold is useless.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

I actually have a lot of fun with these scenarios and goofing around with the idea of this movie. It's a fascinating idea and famously, Feynman diagrams that describe quantum interactions have no directional time component in them, they can be run either way. What frustrates me is that even though they clearly did a lot of work and came up with some fascinating scenarios (the Inverted Man sequence is an all-timer to me) they also dropped the ball in really strange ways.

I think my next post is going to be talking about Kat's Cell Phone and the two ways that you could send yourself information from the future.

Boris Galerkin posted:

Either way, no matter what timestep you choose, no matter how fast your computer is the time on the clock on the wall still elapses at the same rate. Which is how I think the “time travel” works in the movie because they tell us that the protagonists have to wait in a box and wait for 1 “wall clock” week to pass for them to go back in time. It’s just that their timestep is now -dt. There is some time counter that is always incrementing, and you’re either going +dt or -dt at every increment.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Rare triple post in the wild. Love it.

Boris Galerkin posted:

If this is obvious and true then it absolutely matters because there is no paradox. The gold bar was put into the box in say 2121 at a location of Sator’s choosing. The gold in the box has a -dt timestep. It ages 100 years in the box until Sator takes it out and inverts it back to +dt timesteps. What happens to the gold now does not matter anymore. It doesn’t need to still be in the box in 2122. “What’s happened happened” or whatever.

Kazzah posted:

Honestly, the inverted bullets in the glass bug me way more than the reverse dead-drops

Boris Galerkin posted:

If you walk forward 10 steps and then walk backwards 20 steps then you’ve walked a total of 30 steps. The act of walking backwards doesn’t erase the fact that you walked forward. The fact that you’ve ended up 10 steps behind where you started doesn’t invalidate the fact that you’ve also been 10 steps ahead of where you started. If a bus were to hit you at some point during the time you were walking backwards (thereby removing you from the equation) that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve walked forward 10 steps before that point in the past, all it does is make you unable to continue walking backwards. No history gets erased.

Boris Galerkin posted:

Do you have the same issue with the premise of the inverted characters sitting in a non-inverted shipping container for 7 days to go back in time? They take themselves out of the box after 7 days and invert again and their history doesn’t get erased. That 7 days inverted in a shipping container is part of their history. The fact that they removed themselves from the container after 7 days doesn’t create a paradox like you keep insisting taking the gold out of the box would. How is it any different?

Boris Galerkin posted:

You can say that the gold bar thing was a throwaway line that an insignificant amount of time was spent thinking about but the entire principle of “invert yourself, stow away somewhere for 1 day/week/year to go back backwards in time for 1 day/week/year” is established in the movie as a pretty significant thing. I highly doubt that Nolan got that part wrong since it’s a main principle of the movie. So the only logical conclusion is that you are wrong about your understanding of the gold bar.

Sir Kodiak posted:

Because when they walk out of the shipping container, they're walking out of the shipping container from the perspective of someone moving into the past, because they're inverted. If you were to watch them in regular time, they would walk backwards into the shipping container and then sit there for a week, doing everything in reverse. So there's nothing paradoxical about believing they travelled into the past using the shipping container: you can literally watch them do it.

In contrast, think about forward-moving Sator removing an inverted gold bar from the box. He's moving forward in time, so when he carries the gold bar out of the box, he's moving it away from the box in his future, moving forward in time. But his future is the bar's past, because it's inverted. Therefore, the bar's past must have been to be with Sator, not to be in the box.

Sir Kodiak posted:

The basic problem is that, in the Protagonist's incorrect theory, the gold bar has to do a turnaround without a turnstile.

Zachack posted:

It's no surprise that the complete loving dullards in CD can't work out the intricate puzzlebox that Nolan constructed, but I'll spell it out for you, with as many small words as possible:

Sator puts the box in the ground, sends a signal.
Future people get signal location, dig up box, put inverted gold in inverted box five feet deeper. This is called The Pledge
Inverted box travels backwards through time.
Inverted box reaches Sator's time, keeps going back in time.
Box reaches 1890s, keeps going into distant past
Simultaneously, Nikolai Tesla activates his duplication machine and makes a duplicate of the Box, but the Box moves forward in time. This is called The Turn
Tesla places the new Box in a time-locked, spring-loaded, false-bottom container that sits above the inverted Box, which is where it's always been.
New Box moves forward in time
Sator buries box inside the false-bottom container that he doesn't know about, but the future does.
False-bottom activates, drops empty Box into the space above inverted box, dirt falls too covering the Sator Box.
Springs simultaneously push the new Box a couple feet foward into the Sator Box space
Sator digs up regular gold, gets rich. This is called The Illusionist.

Sir Kodiak posted:

He just leaves out an inversion step. So it's not even so much wrong as incomplete. Of course, this assumes he has a turnstile, which he wouldn't early on (presumably).

stratdax posted:

To me the gold is the same as the bullet in the wall. Bullet gets shot by an inverted person with an inverted gun in the future (presumably during the final battle in the movie, where they shoot a lot of walls. Let's say 2022 for simplicity). Bullet is chillin' in the wall to some point in the past (Let's say 2015, why not). The lady scientist (I guess the Tenet organization?) finds the wall and cuts it out and brings it to the lab (in 2020). Well now it's in two places at once. They keep screwing around with it while they're not inverted but the bullet is. From the bullet's perspective, in 2020 it's in a wall in a lab, and in a wall in a quarry.

No? Am I wrong? I saw the movie once, in what seems like ages ago.

Zachack posted:

What comes across as weird once written down is that the bullet (assuming it came from the distant future and not near-term inversion) was made in (say) 2100, bounced around backwards for 80 years, and then is at the lab for the sequence. It's also functionally useless in "forward" time - it can't be fired because it has to wait for the past - but at some point Tenet has to lose control of it so it can move forward to when it got inverted*. That said, this is almost the solution to the gold problem: Sator can pick up the inverted gold if he always picked it up. The future doesn't have to bury the gold, it just has to have a way of tracking it from the past so that they can find and invert the same pre-inverted bars, and gold bars are a pretty reliable way of doing this if you assume they stay as gold bars stored somewhere after Sator digs them up and sells them. The only part that doesn't make sense is digging a hole and putting the box in, as the gold should already be there.


*in theory since Tenet creates itself it's possible that Tenet inverted the bullet in the near future to get it into the lab for it to be fired.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The part on the blue line where “Sator places [buries] the empty capsule” is redundant. He’d just be burying an empty box, then digging it up, just to bury it again.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

we’re specifically shown the exact opposite happening with the bulldozer.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

We’re also shown that things are much weirder than a few sentences can convey - because if the technician can make bullets fly “towards” her hand just by (somehow) remembering to unpush them, then it’s likely possible for Sator to change the gold’s past and his own future by simply choosing not to (un)bury it.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

One way to conceptualize these interactions is that, every time a character sees an inverted thing, they are technically prophesying that thing’s future. When a character manipulates an inverted object, they are altering its past to match that ‘predetermined’ future. So although people try to rationalize it as some blandly deterministic universe where everything is locked in place, we have this additional layer of complexity where everything is in constant flux, because decisions in the present affect past and future simultaneously.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

He would just put inverted gold in the box and bury it. That's the same action minus the redundancy.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Whether Sator is inverted or not is fairly irrelevant, since normal people can interact with inverted objects (and vice-versa) without much difficulty.

As for where the inverted gold "comes from", it either pops into existence spontaneously, as the bullets do, or it pops into existence from out of a time machine.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

ACTUALLY!!!

I did not write anything about "alternate timelines"; I am referring to iterations of the loop. It is possible to modify the loop through actions that change both past and future simultaneously. This should be understandable to anyone who's seen Terminator 2.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

You're going in a lot of directions at once, so let's stick to this specific claim for now.

None of the characters come from the future, so we have no 'firsthand' knowledge of the future from which the gold 'originates'. It could be anything.

The standard view of time is that the past is set but the future is open. The conceit of the film is that this is reversed for certain objects.

So, you know the ending of the story, but you can (re)write how it begins, because you're literally just applying physical forces to some magical anti-aging particles.

Sir Kodiak posted:

Sir Kodiak posted:

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

You're writing things very convolutedly just to make a basic assertion like "the past is set in stone!!!". From that assumption, the existence of backwards stuff is taken to mean that "everything is set in stone!!!".

I understand that this is your basic view.

However, if the protagonist takes a bullet that should be made in India in five years, and then keeps it in his pocket for six years, this wouldn't actually contradict anything in the film except some very dubious exposition. He will have simply altered the bullet's origin.

"But he can't do that! He MUST take the bullet to India so it can be made?" Why? The same dubious exposition says he has free will, and this is a fantasy movie about wizards who use spy magic. The bullet can be a magic bullet that has existed since the dawn/end of time.

Its Chocolate posted:

thank you. I had the same problem as SMG where I couldn't figure out how the gently caress sending gold back in time to spend would work but this makes perfect sense

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The issue with the gold story is not that it’s impossible; but that it simply doesn’t work as the characters say it does.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

But we do know for sure that his plan involves bouncing the case off a backward-driving car's hood, as one does, and hoping Sator doesn't notice anything odd about that. Also, hoping that Sator (who Protag does not yet know is inverted) will release Kat without first checking the case.

This is the whole movie!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

They basically don't care about anything unless some record of it reaches "the future people". But they also insist that the faked jet heist/plane accident/terror attack on one of Sator's main bases won't leave any record, so....

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

The blue room having reverse oxygen raises the question of why protagonist was able to go to the blue room in oslo and I feel like the answer is written down on some piece of paper somewhere because to get to that room they have to go to a bunch of rooms with choking atmospheres. And I think you are supposed to assume the backwards oxygen vented with the halide gas. when the freeport refilled with air after the "fire". Since it feels like a lot of movie work to make a premise there is two unrelated unbreathable gases in a single building.

Euphoriaphone posted:

Is the Turnstile meant to be two separate circles, or just one large one? I guess it's two because there must be some level of teleportation happening at the moment of inverting. If not, then in the moments leading up to inversion, your Forward and Inverted selves would need to merge into one (before immediately disappearing in the forward chronology).

Euphoriaphone posted:

Nolan is particularly bad when it comes to editing car chases

https://vimeo.com/28792404

Happy Noodle Boy posted:

Quick cuts aside, the fighting/choreography in the Bourne flicks is pretty good.

bawfuls posted:

Alternatively if Neil is Max, then Neil must spend like a decade inverted to reach the events of the movie as a 30-something adult or whatever. Either way that's a fuckass long time to live sequestered in a buried shipping container or whatever with a decade's worth of inverted food/water/air.

Terror Sweat posted:

My favourite theory is that Nolan hates action movies and practical effects and is trying to destroy their profitability by filming the worst action climaxes possible and making practical explosions incredibly dull.
"Clear action then reaction? No thanks" -christopher nolan

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

The construction company brought piles of rubble to the town, which 30 years later turn into a building that blows up?

ruddiger posted:

Is there a way to watch the movie in reverse?