'Tenet' ending explained — a complete breakdown of the finale of Christopher Nolan's new movie
Jacob Sarkisian Sep 3, 2020, 9:15 PM
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John David Washington Tenet
John David Washington stars as the Protagonist in "Tenet." Warner Bros. Pictures
WARNING: Spoilers for "Tenet" ahead.
Christopher Nolan's new movie "Tenet" can be hard to get your head around, so Insider has broken down the ending of the film, and explained exactly what happens in the finale.
"Tenet" follows John David Washington's Protagonist trying to stop Kenneth Branagh's Sator from ending the world via an algorithm that inverts the world's entropy.
The final sequence sees half of the Tenet strike team traveling backwards in time and half traveling forwards in a bid to find and stop Sator's algorithm.
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Christopher Nolan movies are best described as blockbusters with brains. And his latest, the palindromic "Tenet," is no different.
The film follows John David Washington's Protagonist, who is aided by Robert Pattinson's Neil and Elizabeth Debicki's Kat, trying to prevent the end of the world. But the Protagonist's mission takes on a time-travelling twist as he works to put a stop to villain Andrei Sator's (Kenneth Branagh) plan.
A second (or third) viewing will likely help to understand this movie further, but we've broken down the entire ending of "Tenet" and explained what it all means.
What the hell is entropy?
After surviving an assault at an opera house and trying to kill himself rather than give up information to the enemy, the Protagonist is recruited by a mysterious man to embark on the "Tenet" mission and save the world.
He quickly learns of a new type of bullet — ones that have been manufactured so that their entropy is inverted, meaning they travel backward in time rather forward.
To borrow Den of Geek's definition: "Entropy can be described as a measurement of how much information is needed to describe a system."
DoG's Chris Farnell continues: "Because the second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of entropy can only increase, throughout history many scientists and philosophers have used the increase of entropy as a handy by-word for the arrow of time – the idea that everything moves from the past, to the future."
In "Tenet," entropy can be inverted, meaning that less information is needed to measure a system and instead of disorder being the end result, the opposite happens: order. For example, if you were to reverse the entropy of a cheese grater, the grated cheese would go back through the grater and reform into the block of cheese (order), whereas normal entropy would mean the cheese goes from the block, through the grater, and into a grated heap of cheese (disorder).