r/tenet

Hello, I just had a thought and wanted other pov's from people as they help me think.

Turnstiles are said to be technology from the future sent to the past so people can invert there.

Does this mean that the turnstiles are always inverted (maybe have gone through an even bigger turnstile to be sent back) and if so, are they from the "normal" perspective functioning in reverse?

I know this can seem like irrelevant to a degree but it might mean that the turnstiles would show up even earlier in the "first loop" and would influence more?

I'm sorry if I'm wrong to begin with and plain dumb.

Thank you.

The irony of this line is insane.

(And people complain about the writing in this film...)

When Sator says this, he's talking down to The Protagonist, mocking The Protagonist for being committed to a cause he doesn't truly understand. The irony is that this doesn't actually apply to The Protagonist — it applies to Sator.

When Sator says it, they are both technically acting on blind faith, since neither of them can know for certain who they are serving.

By the end of the film though, we know that The Protagonist is actually acting on his own instructions — instructions that come from a future version of himself that has already lived these events. Therefore, he's not acting on blind faith at all, but following his own guidance — guidance informed by his own first-hand experience.

In contrast, Sator is being guided by whoever sends him the gold in the capsule...

(...whether that's the future Antagonists trying to acquire the Algorithm or The Protagonist secretly pulling the strings...)

Kristina Wiltsee | Life Alchemist

This essay argues that the clumsiness you feel watching it is not a flaw. It is structural.

Obviously we can't ever have true, full inversion as portrayed in the film in a video game where you can influence/participate in the bitemporal timeline, since that would literally require violating causality. Like, any subsequent runs you make through a timeline would look different from how they looked on your first run through, because the game didn't know what you'd do in your future. But you could use inversion in a "Return of the Obra Dinn" style game, where you aren't influencing the timeline yourself, instead you're observing different points in the timeline and trying to deduce what happened. An inversion detective. You look at different frozen snapshots of time and cross-reference the positions of objects and people and try to deduce what's going on and where all the objects and people end up, which direction they're temporally moving, etc. Unsure if it'd be better to have the specific times of each scene be explicitly portrayed to the player (e.g. you know the scene you're looking at occurred on date X time Y etc), or if it'd be better to have the player not know at what point in time each scene occurs and instead they have to infer the linear order based on the interactions of objects and characters across those scenes.