Have you seen the Christopher Nolan movie “Tenet” from 2020? I did. After a couple of days, I realized that main elements in the movie are distractions. Beneath the lies, I found a positive story about nuclear disarming leading to world peace. This changed my thinking about planning the future and acting in the present.

Spoiler Alert: Please do your future self a favor and use this text in the following order:

1. watch Tenet
2. watch Tenet again
3. combine all clues in the movie and write your own answers to below questions
4. then read this post

My main questions:

1. How is the Tenet organization financed?
2. Who built the turnstiles?
3. What does “inverted entropy” mean in the real world?
4. What is the “Algorithm” and what is it for?
5. What does this mean for me?

I repeat the spoiler alert:

I saw it once, I saw it twice,
time folds in shadows, not in ice.
Forward I drift, yet backward I steer,
I found an answer—
read it here.

How is the Tenet organization financed?

“Well, that part is a little dramatic.”
Neil

The Norskfreight plane crashing into the freeport is described by Neil and Mahir to the Protagonist as way to trigger the fire alarm to turn off the locks in the freeport.

Dropping multiple tons of gold on the runway is described as distraction.

But there is more.

“With a hi-viz vest and a clipboard, you can get almost anywhere.”
Barbara

“Swift extradition, then lost in the system. It’ll barely make the news.”
Mahir

For Tenet agents and Rotas goons, it is possible to

1. Place agents in the crowd of hi-viz vest people to pick up the gold on the runway.
2. Bring it into the freeport that is just a couple of meters away.
3. Transport it through the turnstile back in time.
4. Hide it inverted in the freeport in the past, as it will completly disappear without trace from police investigation in the future.
5. Distribute it from Oslo to other freeports in the past.
6. Anytime in the past, transport it through the turnstiles, and have normal gold that was stolen from the future, to pay Tenet’s expenses.

That said, Mahir and Neil do not depend on a state entity to finance Tenet. This leads to:

• Tenet works as a private organization by its own agenda.
• In the movie, Tenet avoids stereotypical CIA “satellite image intelligence” or “reporting to my superior”. They report to no one.
• From the twilight, Tenet pays anyone to do anything while keeping the real goal hidden.
• The budget is a lot of gold, but not infinite. Spending it economically is key. Achieving multiple purposes with each move is the trick.

Who built the Turnstiles?

“What about free will?”
Protagonist

“That bullet wouldn’t have moved if you hadn’t put your hand there.”
Barbara

Within Tenet a physical law exists that allows negative entropy and inverted material. Free will does create the future.

“Someone’s manufacturing them in the future. They’re streaming back at us. …Now that we know what to look for, we’re finding more and more inverted material. …
The detritus of a coming war.”
Barbara

While Barabara describes the inverted objects of “detritus of a coming war“, which is the same narrative that Priya knows, the parts in “Windfarm transitions B-2” storage are not typical weapon parts and they are not shrapnel. All parts look clean and useful. I visited world war 1 trenches in Austria and I found grenade sharpnel 80 years after. If a future war will happen with lots of inverted ammo shot, there will be tons of radioactive shrapnel. There is no widespread shrapnel. The future war is a lie to distract.

A character in the play can use free will or knowledge to get this started:

1. Choose one of the following:
   • Be a scientist, do an experiment proving “Feynman and Wheeler’s notion that a positron is an electron moving backwards in time.”, let’s say at CERN. Once you believe it and you have one positron, interact with it. Then believe and decide that based on your free will, you will build a turnstile. Decide where you will build it, for example “around the corner”. The inverted entropy optimizes to fit into free will of the characters, this may just work.
   • Be in the timeline of the movie and survive. You will know plenty of turnstile locations, pick one of them.
2. Go to the location of the turnstile.
3. See yourself exit into the past through the control window in inverted form, showing you “it works”.
4. Enter the turnstile and invert yourself.
5. Go into the past to do the following actions in any order …
   • Analyze the turnstile. Dismantle it. Rebuild it. Go through it to get back into normal time.
   • Now you know how it works, send instructions to manufacturers to build parts and ship to “Windfarm transistions B-2”. Pay with Oslo gold.
   • Instruct Rotas to build turnstiles in freeports. Pay with Oslo gold.
   • Ensure that you have one complete turnstile you can assemble while being inverted, go back in time until you have a good leeway to work, let’s say 1 year before the movie timeline. Off you go – bounce back and forth around the movie as long as you want.

What does “inverted Entropy” mean in real life?

Inverted entropy = negative entropy = “Life“.

Inverted entropy is a behavior living beings show in real life.

Living beings turn energy into order, order is inverted entropy.

Living beings separate matter, synthesize proteins, split CO2 into C and O.

Physics professor Erwin Schrödinger thought about this:

Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
(1) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and
(2) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ – am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature”.
(3) “ATMAN = BRAHMAN” to “represent quintessence of deepest insights into the happenings of the world.”
Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life – Wikipedia

It reminds me of:

“Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, not an excuse to do nothing.”
Neil

What is the Algorithm and what is it for?

TLDR: The algorithm is inverted, it is a device to create world peace.

Taking the Algorithm as reference point, according to what Protagonist, Kat, Priya and Sator believe and what we hear:

1. Scientist generations in the future creates 9 algorithm parts.
2. Scientist in the future goes through turnstile, inverts 9 parts, hides them in nuclear facilities, sending them to the past.
3. Scientist in the future kills herself.
4. Sator’s henchmen break into nuclear facilities today and steals 9 parts. As parts need to travel back in time there from now into the future, they have to steal them while being inverted.
5. Sator assembles algorithm.
6. Sator hides algorithm in location identified by “the evil future side who want to do inverted entropy to whole planet”
7. Protagonist must stop Sator
8. Sator and Priya, weapon dealers by trade, created the ultimate weapon to destroy planet and sell it to the ultimate customer, an all-powerful future tech-rulers-caste with intention to destroy world “if I can’t have it, nobody can”. Life goal of murder-suicide weapon dealer accomplished.

Yeah, that didn’t happen as planned. Excellent!

Now let us invert this timeline, shall we?

TLDR? skip forward to the timeline of 14 steps.

In the next paragraphs, I collect the clues from the movie that got me thinking.

“An obscure Tenet” operating “in the twilight” is an organization that places deception and manipulation as core values in their corporate compliance handbook.

“Divide and contain the knowledge. Ignorance is our ammunition – the more any one of us knows, the greater the risk that we’re actually making the situation worse.”
Priya

What is the algorithm … according to Neil when speaking to Kat and Protagonist within the container shipped inverted from Tallin to Oslo:

Neil: The 241 is one section of it. One out of nine. It’s a formula rendered into physical form so it can’t be copied or communicated. A black box with one function. … Inversion. But not objects or people. The world around us. … Our present wiped out, our past obliterated. Everyone and everything who ever lived destroyed instantly. Precise enough?

Is this true or manipulation?

If true…

• The algorithm is not inverted and not bombs.
• There exists a formula found by a scientist that cannot be replicated by other scientists, cannot be copied or communicated. This never happened in science and is therefore very inprobable.
• There exists a method to invert planet earth. If the turnstiles work by e=mc2, and the same method should be applied to planet earth, that’s a lot of e. Energy on the dimension the sun emits during a billion years. Very inprobable.

If manipulation…

• Neil uses the story about a physical formula. Kat and Protagonist lack knowledge about the scientific method and believe it.
• Protagonist believes he is “saving the world” against the ultimate weapon to end all life, perfect to con an Ex-CIA agent into cooperation.
• Same story for Kat, Protagonist, Sator, Priya, most of Tenet and Rotas. Easier to maintain.
• If the algorithm is inverted and the goal are 9 bombs to destroy the nuclear arsenal of the 9 nuclear powers, Protagonist as Ex-CIA may have moral doubts
• “Future scientist” is mostly manipulation, too

For the sake of this interpretation, we continue assuming this was a manipulative lie to give Kat and Protagonist exactly the information they need to hear to cooperate now.

As killing arms dealers is a goal of Tenet and the Protagonist, lying to them and manipulating arms dealers is foreplay.

“You’re an arms dealer, friend – this may be the easiest trigger I’ve ever had to pull.”
Protagonist

So don’t trust anything the arms dealers say. They were manipulated into a story they want to believe. A good lie contains a true part. I highlight the parts I think are true in bold.

“It’s unique. The scientist who built it took her own life so she couldn’t be forced to make another.”
Priya

A scientist so clever would know her work can be replicated by other scientists. She would not kill herself.

Protagonis: A scientist in the future?
Priya: Generations from now.

The only other scientist in the plot who knows how to operates the turnstiles is Neil. It’s safe to assume he is the “scientist who built the algorithm” and the turnstiles. It reduces travel budget and recruitment effort a lot to build Tenet in parallel to the movie timeline. Their limited gold and life-time is well spent.

We’re trying to do with inversion what we couldn’t do with the atomic bomb – uninvent it.
….
Think of our scientist as her generation’s Oppenheimer – she devises a method for inverting the world
Priya

Inverting the entropy of the world would mean to have negative entropy on the world. From the physics of the movie, a turnstile to invert the whole planet is unrealistic. Negative entropy = life, living beings. The nuclear arsenal is one of the biggest threat to all life on earth (besides climate change and CO2). Destroying the nuclear weapons would ensure life can go on.

Inverting the world = negative entropy = saving life on earth = destroying nuclear weapons.

Describing the Algorithm as ultimate weapon is a perfect lie to manipulate arms dealers. Sator and Priya are enchanted by weapons, they love guns. Getting the chance to steal and assemble the biggest weapon ever created and sell it to a future buyer is a life goal for arms dealer Sator.

He also believes he is going to die. “What I can’t have no one should have“. Going all in on this is irresistible for him on his suicide-murder mission. Probably, his goons were made to believe the same, his organization turns into a death cult. His goons march through turnstiles at the final battle, maybe to return to battle, again and again, until all have sacrificed themselves. Team red and blue outnumber them and overrun the positions quickly. Tenet can close the door to the “Sator/Rotas” organization with minimal travel expenses in one nice operation.

Priya: splitting the algorithm into nine sections and hiding them the best place she can think of..
Protagonist: The past. Here. Now.
Priya: There are nine nuclear powers. Nine bombs. Nine sets of the most closely guarded materials in the history of the world. The best hiding places possible.
Protagonist: Nuclear containment facilities.
Priya: Sator’s lifelong mission, financed and guided by the future, has been to find and reassemble the algorithm.

Let’s invert it:

Not steal — hide.

Not an “algorithm” — “nine bombs“.

Hide nine bombs in nuclear containment facilities.

“I’ve seen samples of encapsulation in every weapons class – this is not one of them.”
Protagonist

The shielding could be special: take inverted material and place it inside the same normal material. Or vice versa. The goal: deception. You can’t know if its inverted or normal when you hold it in your hand. It may be inverted but it feels normal. The advantage and double use: this is the energy source of the bomb mechanism. If inverted and normal material touch, they radiate and go … boom. If it’s following e=mc2, the energy is the equivalent of a nuclear fission bomb consuming all of the mass without the complex TNT fuse. All you need is a buffer to separate them, but as we see in the handfight of Protagonist with himself, a piece of cloth will do. The algorithm parts are highly efficient nuclear bombs.

“Until you see my signal, you don’t let him die.”
Mahir

This is to keep Kat and Sator in the belief of the Algorithm being a threat. Mahir and Neil are happy to have Kat kill Sator. Tenet has an interest to kill the arms dealer and let him know he didn’t win. Kat was right to assume “I knew you’d find a way”. The algorithm is not what Priya and Sator believe. Hiding it in Stalsk-12 was a distraction.

“We hide it, we end our lives. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Ives

This is a disctraction we as viewers should believe.

Neil: “You’re not heading back to London to check on Kat, are you?”
Protagonist: “Of course not. That would be too dangerous.”

Soon after, Protagonist is in London and close to Kat. We are signaled clearly that this is not true. Loud and clear: do not trust the content of the dialogue here. Remember Protagonist answer whether Kat and he were intimate: “Not yet“.

“I don’t have any locksmiths as good as you.”
Ives to Neil

Not a lock-picker, a locksmith.

Neil is a mechanic. A builder. He created Tenet. He instructs Sator and Rotas to build the Freeports and Turnstiles. He knows all about the alarm systems and the locks. Including the locks and doors at Stalsk-12.

The inverted timeline of the algorithm

Now, let’s invert above timeline and put everything together:

1. Neil in the future creates nine bombs. Very nasty handheld nuclear inversion bombs. Their shielding of placing inverted and normal inside of each other is the explosion mechanism.
2. Neil inverts the bombs and starts travelling into the past. The next steps follow the inverted algorithm parts travelling back in time while aging (in brackets the forward time view).
3. Neil goes to the Stalsk-12 location, to a time 1 minute after the movie ended. Any time will work, the operation is cheapest when assuming 1 minute.
4. Neil separates the algorithm into two packs and gives one pack to Protagonist, the other to Ives. (forward: Protagonist and Ives give them to Neil).
5. Ives and Protagonist assemble them to one thing, give them to Volkov (Forward: Protagonist takes it from Volkov).
6. Volkov flies back in his heli and gives the bombs to Sator (forward: Sator gives it to Volkov).
7. Years pass, during which for each of the 9 bombs will be placed (forward: each of the 9 bombs is stolen):
   • Sator gives a bomb to his goons (forward: receives it from a goon after it was stolen by goon from facility)
   • Goons go through a turnstile and in inverted form place and hide the 9 algorithm bombs inside 9 nuclear containment facilities of all 9 world nuclear powers. (They believe they steal them)
   • Magic: The bomb now stays in normal forward timeline in inverted form and travels into the future in the nuclear containment facilities.
   • Goons go back through the turnstile with emtpy hands (Forward: on their mission to steal an algorithm part, they go through the turnstile to invert themselves. They don’t yet have the bomb at this moment)
8. In forward time: Shortly after the end of the movie, after Priya is killed, the Algorithm is “activated“.
9. In forward time: Neil presses “the button”, the nuclear containment facilities of the 9 nuclear powers are blown up by 9 nasty algorithm bombs. Tenet disarmed the largest arms holders. Not knowing who hit them, the nuclear powers are blackmailed by a hidden organization working in the shadows into “we got you at the balls, do not build nuclear weapons”.
10. The timeline of the bombs going forward ends here. The algorithm does not exist anymore.
11. With the nuclear powers disarmed and some arms traders killed, humanity is closer to World peace. Neil is alive to witness his plan succeeding. Protagonist, Cat, Mahir may still be alive to celebrate with him.
12. Neil goes through a turnstile to invert.
13. Neil travels back into the past.
14. Neil lives through the movie plot. At the end of the plot, he already knows he saved the world years ago in his subjective timeline. Neil knows that he lived life to the fullest extent possible. In inverted time, he closes the door to the hypocentre. He is relaxed, smiles, and enjoys what he achieved. He steps into the path of the bullet Volkov shot and dies, saving a friend.

What does this mean for me?

Protagonist: What about free will?
Barbara: That bullet wouldn’t have moved if you hadn’t put your hand there. Either way we run the tape, you made it happen.

What should I make happen?

“Because their oceans rose and their rivers ran dry. Don’t you see? Their world shrivelled because of us.“
Sator

This is true for Sator in the movie and also for me living on planet earth in 2025.

Climate change is the biggest threat to the future of the planet’s safety, economy, and organic life. Military strategists, economic leaders, and scientists all agree on this. The rivers in France already run dry in summer, the ocean already rose, thousands died in floods, millions are fleeing from areas. In the future, parts of the planet where billions live will turn into death zones, if we don’t stop this.

It’s easy to stop it: reduce CO2 emissions quickly and strongly.

This can be solved in a day, by changing the laws. The investors will then quickly follow, and once the capital is away from oil and into renewables, the world will change very quickly.

Look at Denmark or Sweden, who have an effective CO2 tax. People there are happy. Their economy is growing. Climate Action Tracker and Climate Change Performance Index CCPI track and publish the good that happens in these and other countries around the world, the leading champions saving the planet.

In the movie, Neil sacrificed his life, because he knew that it is worth it. In real life, doing the right thing doesn’t hurt as much. Moving to renewable energy saves money. Reducing CO2 pollution keeps our air clean. I don’t have to die to save the world. I can drink scotch whisky and live on.

I found it worthy to use my free will and my actions to talk and support the positive change that is already happening towards the Paris Agreement.

Tenet is an organization working in the twilight. I found non-governent organizations (NGOs) working in the open. I joined Fridays For Future Austria and I support other activists there in their political lobbying, organizing civil protest, and publishing news on the website.

You can do this, too. Look around you. Think about your friends, family, and work colleagues. Which NGOs organize activism were you are living? Who is already working against climate change? Who needs help?

My takeaway from Tenet:

• Think in decades, have a plan.
• One day in the future, I will celebrate that CO2 levels are going down, and I will honor the people who made this happen. The Neils of the real world.
• We will surely celebrate 2050, the year Europe is climate neutral. In the next 25 years, maybe longer if I can, I will celebrate the climate heroes of today. Spread their stories.
• Even if it is small, I know that my contribution to fight climate change and CO2 pollution is well invested, as the goal is to save life on planet earth.

“No one is too small to make a difference.”
Greta Thunberg

Appendix

Here are more observations and questions I stumbled upon which I find fascinating, but not essential.

Bonus question: what is the timeline of the gold package that Sator received from the future as teenager?

How did teenage Sator get the case with the gold and the letter from the future Tenet in the ruins of Stalsk-12?

PROTAGONIST: We need a distraction.
Ives looks ahead to the LEANING RUIN OF A BUILDING TOP…

In the last act, destroying the building in Stalsk-12 was described as distraction to cover Protagonist and Ives entering the HYPOCENTRE.

Dropping tons of gold in Oslo is also described as a distraction.

Sator finds gold bars.

Let’s dig deeper.

I looked at the cityscape of Stalsk-12:

• When team blue arrive in the future, the building is rubbles
• When team red arrive before the climax, this building is rubbles. So it is rubbles before the events, probably back to Sator’s teenage years.

A great opportunity to save travel cost and personnel. How about this timeline for the package:

1. Tenet prepares the package for Sator including Gold and Letter in a military-looking box.
2. Team blue attacks Stalsk-12 from the future in inverted timeline, carrying this package in inverted form.
3. Team read shoots at the upright building, rebuilding it (normal time: destroying )
4. Team blue shoots at the destroyed build, in inverted timeline they see the building being re-built (normal timeline: it is shot down from the future and stays rubbles going backwards in time)
5. Hence it only exists in upright form for a few seconds, between the grenade of team blue “building” it from rubbles and the grenade of team red destroying it.

When Sator goes through the ruins of Stalsk-12 as teenager, the building is in rubbles and in the background, there are upright buildings. There is “radioactive rubble”. It is from the future, radioactive because of sharpnel of team blue.

The rubble hides the package for Sator.

They are in Stalsk-12 anyway and can save travel budget by doing this package delivery while they are there.

A distraction and a cheap way to send the package to young Sator.

Oslo gold well spent.

It is no coincidence that the stories in Oslo and Stalsk-12 are connected: both feature gold, both a prominent distraction.

How I worked

I watched Tenet first on 2025-09-13 and re-watched it 2025-09-14 and this YouTube video cut of the last seconds of Neil as it was hard to step through the frames.

The movie kept me thinking for two days and I wrote the first version of my answers on 2025-09-16.

I summarized my own conclusions and published them on 2025-10-01.

When googling for the Neil youtube video, I noticed a sentence in the search result list “Neil is the son of Kat, Maximilien backwards”. I perceived this as an interesting thought. I liked it. Neil being the son of Sator and Kat would add a nice father-son relationship where the son frees his mother and empowers her to kill his father so that both can be free. Also, Neil destroying weapons would be the opposite as Sator trading weapons. A positive twist.

I quoted from this Tenet script I found online. The script helped me to look for cues that validate my theories in the dialogue.

What got me started to think that there is something wrong is the story of a future scientist who hid the algorithm in nuclear facilities and killed herself and the artificial stress that was placed around stopping Sator from assembling the algorithm and storing it in a pile of rubble.

It was all too far fetched.

It sounded like a fever dream, a lie.

It contradicts multiple principles of the real world:

• All science can be replicated. Killing herself is useless.
• A formula is information and information can be copied or destroyed. If the scientist wanted the algorithm not to be used anytime soon, she could have easily destroyed it or hidden it in places not to be found. Drop one into an active volcano, sink another intop the mariana drench, sneak one into the concrete foundation poured for a hydro dam … cheap and easy. It will probably be quicker for another scientist to replicate her work and build a new algorithm than searching in these spots.
• Hiding it in nuclear containment facilities is labor and money intensive. It took Sator a whole life and a lot of gold. A scientist trying to hide a formula would find more cost-effective and accessible hiding places. But in an inverted timeline and given “inverted entropy=life” and the chance to save life by annihilating nuclear weapons, inverse hiding bombs in nuclear facilities in the past to disarm nuclear powers makes a lot of economic sense.

That raised my critical thinking, questioning everything in the movie to find another story hidden. There are so many cues that Tent is working in the twilights and manipulates, I wanted to wrap my head around it.

I think on hindsight I used “abductive Sherlock Holmes reasoning“: “This form of inference involved making the best possible explanation for a given set of observations. Holmes would gather all the available evidence and generate hypotheses, selecting the one that best accounted for the facts at hand.“

As facts I am using what is shown on screen: the actions, people, and objects. I treated all dialogue as “can be lies to manipulate characters into doing something“.

Given this approach, what is the best possible explanation of my observations? It there a story which does not depend on much more off-screen (“generations from now”) but only uses what we see on-screen? Is this story cost-effective, time-effective, using only the characters, objects, locations we see?

I see that the manipulation “the algorithm is a formula that will destroy earth” also happens on us as viewers. Once you saw the movie, and your brain saved this explanation as the main story, you will have a hard time switching because of anchoring bias and confirmation bias. The movie pacing creates time pressure, under which people become more susceptible to manipulation.

My own critical thining abilities only kicked in multiple days after I saw the movie twice. My moment of “hang on, a scientist would not commit suicide because…” came days after. That’s why I believe that analyzing the movie to come to the “algorithm is inverted!” needs a relaxed atmosphere, no time pressure, no shortcuts, a save space to question own assumptions, cut through the manipulation we were exposed on screen. In that regard, I think coming through this experience also sharpened my senses for manipulation.

Kudos to Christopher Nolan for all the levels of cleverness and hope I was able to find in this masterpiece for myself.

Now I will google and look for interpretations of others. I wanted to use my own brain first, as the movie is such a wonderful riddle. If you know of interesting articles, add a comment below in my Blog or reply on Fediverse/Mastodon to this post.

I didn’t like the dark mood that came from the mouths of the arms dealers. I find the positive view that Neil transports, sipping whisky before a mission, being relaxed before dying much more inspiring. I am personally very happy I found an explanation in which the algorithm is inverted and ends the nuclear threat, saves life.