TENET Explained: The Best Theories About Ives, Priyah, Michael Crosby, The Scientist And Protagonist 

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I heard Nolan got the idea for Tenet from your breakdowns of the movie!

It would've been sick if Denzel had a cameo in this as the future protagonist.

i think this movie will be much more appreciated in the future.

Well we have a community here...we are all obsessed with tenet..and it never gets young..i mean old😂

Without these videos, I would only understand 5% of Tenet, instead of the 10% I currently do.

Us : how many tenet videos will you upload? Heavy spoilers : yes

I feel like the scientist's baby being the future scientist and Neil being Max are solid theories, I also like the one about the protagonists speaking with himself on the phone. But as for Ives being Crosby is a bit of a stretch.

TENET is one of the most complex time traveling movies of all time

I hadn't even thought of the fact the some of the characters could be the same character but just older, other that Neil being an Old Max.

I was just thinking to myself, it’s been a few days since Paul has put out a tenet video.

You find out Priya works for tenet in her first scene, when she makes the symbol and uses Tenet as a passphrase

I had the same theory, albeit far less established, about Ives and Crosby. The way the camera focused on Ives gives the impression he should be someone more special than "just" a soldier who helps out and then becomes a key player holding onto the algorithm. Not to mention Crosby's knowledge of events and specifically directing the Protagonist to the correct target.

Tenet is hands down one of the best movies I have seen in 10 years. It's like Matrix had a baby with Inception and that baby had a baby with Memento with the replay ability of Fight Club.

I think the Neil being Max is an awesome theory and I think it really does make sense. Why else would he risk- sorry, give up his life for someone he only met a few weeks ago.

I swear, I can’t with this film but at the same time I wanna rewatch it 156 times

Neil is Max's kid. Sator is Neils Grandfather - the Grandfather paradox. Can you survive if you go back in time and kill your Grandfather? Neil hopes so but ends up dying as Sator is also killed

I've seen tenet at least five or six times and every time it ends I want to go back to the beginning and watch it all over again. Thanks man for breakdown videos. Just like the movie I never get tired of watching em.

Movie of the year. Sadly the academy focuses more on movies treating other values and doesn’t recognize the effort from the actor doing his own stunts and the director using practical effects, that added to the plot makes a great movie like this.

I like the idea that the Protagonist was the one creating the first capsule for Sator to find in Stalsk-12. Whats happened, happened. Maybe he had to re-orchestra the whole scenraio just to let his younger self and Neil solve it again.

I think the time travel plot was simply a smoke screen. The real questions are - how Neil as a kid visited Pompeii while they were in Vietnam, why the protagonist met Kat in Ravello when it was supposed to be Vietnam, how the yacht got from Amalfi to Vietnam, and how a quick trip on a motorized dinghy got them from Vietnam to Southampton.

Just watched it again yesterday. The scientists that shows the protagonist how to invert a bullet says "don't try to understand it, just feel it" perfect way to sum up the film I think. Also lookin forward to your review tomorrow for Wandavision. Whippppplaash.

I bet your final Tenet video will be a Trailer 1 breakdown

The actress (Barbara character) was pregnant in real life at the time.

Aaron Taylor Johnson is not american, he's English

Yeah, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is English. Says on tinternet he was born in High Wycombe.

I am 20% less confused now!

Nolan: How twisted theories will you make? Heavy spoilers : Don't be so dramatic. Protagonist : Well ,how many? Heavy spoilers : That part is little dramatic.

This is the movie that just keeps on giving. Love coming to your channel to get the latest theories!

i love the way this channel still explain about this movie, i was literally followed this channel bcs of tenet explanation 😂

Ives character analysis carries for me! Not to mention the scientist being pregnant which I completely missed! Also, max being the son of Cat makes sense in his willingness to sacrifice himself. ALSO, ALSO we find that all the rules Tenet follow end up being broken each time.

This movie is beyond epic. I’m still blown away by this story.

Nolan owes you a credit for making TENET great

First time I watched this movie I was stoned so I thought that's why it was confusing but no, it's even more confusing sober

I really like these theories! I hadn't thought about Micheal Cain being Ives. Very interesting! It didn't cross my mind(besides Max) that characters could be hiding in the movie at different ages. Very cool!

My thinking is that the mission to retrieve the algorithm has been done several times before by the protagonist, who up until the events of the movie had failed each time but got closer to got closer to success after each time loop. He could easily go back and save Neil.

My new theory: The Protagonist is the one sending things to Sator. If you know it works out, the best way to ensure the outcome is to do it yourself. Also solves the "why would the future do this?!" problem

Keep the Tenet and teneT videos coming. Great work!

If Yves and Crosby are the same person, it could work from additional points we know from the final dialogue between Yves and the Protagonist. Yves said he would hide his portion of the algorithm and kill himself. So he likely hid the algorithm and continued his life, eventually becoming Crosby. When he met the Protagonist, he realized this was the time to die. So he may have intentionally poisoned his drink. The Protagonist does not drink when he is working, as he was told by Neil. So Crosby was trying to both kill himself and the Protagonist as he had previously warned him. But the Protagonist lived instead.

Can't have enough tenet breakdowns from heavy spoilers

I think this movie will be much more appreciated in the past

Man tenet keeps getting better & better with all these theories. Did Nolan even have this planned out? I hope he did for a trilogy

My theory is that Murph from Interstellar is the female scientist. Murph solved the gravity equation from the data collected in the time/space continuum. Not unreasonable to think the algorithm for inversion came from that data too. Interstellar talks about the world dying through global warming and Tenet references the same thing. I think the two films are linked.

So glad I found your vids! I don't know anyone from my friend groups who like this movie. As for Hitchokian doubles, this would make sense in a time travel movie, but here its time inversion. This means the characters would have to live backwards in time to get to the point they wanted and then invert themselves. Without the inversion technology already being developed in the "present," this would be impossible. Even if the machine was available, I'm thinking the older character would have reverse aged in the process so the future self would be the same physical age as the present self. There's also the issue of having enough inverted food/oxygen to last the process. All this means there's severe limits on how long they can invert.

I thought A-T Johnson had a conspicuous accent. Hearing this theory absolutely makes sense he is doing his version of Sir Michael Caine.

From the official tenet book (Tenet Inside Christopher Nolan’s Quantum Cold War) the scientist at the beginning is called Barbra not Laura...I have no idea where they got the name Laura from.

I’m often accused of overthinking things but I think this is truly overthinking things.

Love all your Tenet videos especially, always interesting stuff!

love tenet and I hope people keep watching it, the heavy spoilers for bringing this movie to the spotlight more

Ives being Crosby seems highly improbable given the age disparity and the fact that Sir Michael Crosby seemingly has a long and distinguished career (as evidenced by his being knighted). A distinguished career is a known career which isn’t possible if he’s involved with aspects of the algorithm.

Love that Nolan puts more than just a movie together. People will be talking about tenet for years. Tha should for this video!

If you look at the actors it gets really crazy. The movie came out in 2020. Michael Caine (MC) was born in 1933. Aaron Taylor-Johnson (ATJ) was born in 1990. And because MC's date of birth is one day shy of being exactly three months before ATJ's (March 14/June 13, respectively), that means there is a three-month period in 2020 where MC was 87 and ATJ was 29. At least we know it did occur. So, if you entertain the notion that the characters are of the same ages as the actors playing them, Ives possibly began his journey against time at the age of 29. If he were to travel back to the time of his birth (or at least infancy) he'd be 58. If he then began traveling with time and journeyed back to the moment the Protagonist meets with Crosby. Ives would be 87. Of course, he'd change his DOB when assuming the identity of Crosby. You could fuss about how many months he was past 29 and so on, it's far from perfect, but it's still one heck of a coincidence.

protagonist says: 'each generation takes care of it's own'. so if he lived long enough in the future when time inversion is invented he would be probably the one leading the operation of destroying the past. he's fighting his future self

I’ve only watched the movie once in the theater when it came out. It was pretty cool but extremely confusing and hard to follow. I’m going to go ahead and dedicate quite a bit of time to watching tenant over and over in an attempt to understand all of this(the movie and your breakdowns)

I am fed up with tenet not because it has so many layers to it but because it failed to emotionally resonate with me. When you don't care about any character or plot of the movie such dense and subtle movies will become mentally exhausting. Period

I think in an environment where very little information exists or is given, it is natural to draw claims that overextend the relevancy of the only pieces of information available. Tenet is both vague by design (protagonist learns about things in backwards motion) and by technical shortcoming (Nolan could have better explained important moments and relations, such as how 241 was grabbed by the antagonist).

My theory is the broken Cello is actually the maple tree you see in the background as they take the sailboats out to sea. It's a classic Hitchcok double

I think that people with parts of the algorithm at the end of the movie, the protagonist and Ives have the ability to travel faster back in time (but not into the future). This also could explain how an adult Neil can participate to the movie, he's been given the algorithm parts to travel to the past after having grown up. Another possibility is that the protagonist, Kat and Neil travel back to the past shortly after the end of the movie. Growing and then travelling back to the past seems more likely.

I wouldn't say it was deliberately made to make the audience feel confused. I didn't, half of the people I talk to didn't feel confused. Some people simply understood it. Some took a lot more time to get it... some still don't.

"Ooh Christopher Nolan makes films which the audience's don't understand and can't hear. He's such an awesome film maker."

Tenet 2 was amazing! I can’t wait until they start filming it!

we would be so lost if paul didn't do these brilliant tenet breakdowns and theories!

I had surgery yesterday for the aneurysm I'm going to have in four days after watching this video backward a year from now. Thanks.

Ives looks like a Royal Marine Comando, cause the green beret without insignia.

I will have to rewatch this movie because I felt there was a line that Kat said that implied Neil was Max. Coupled with the fact that she felt the girl diving off the boat was free, implies she has a sense of "what is" , for want of a better phrase.

I've seen several of these theories. The big problem with all of them, is that for any people from the distant future to get to their past (the present of the movie), they'd either have to spend years being inverted, which seems wildly impractical, or they'd have to stay in a short loop, alternating forward and backward, which is more manageable but still quite impractical, and which would create many copies of the individuals potentially running into one another.

Loved the idea of Neil being Kat's son! --- Hadn't crossed my mind and makes [some] sense. The only problem though, is that they reverse time for themselves. Direction, but not speed. So for them to be the same person, the boy would have to grow older towards the future, but it is said that he was recruited in the past by the [future] protagonist. Which contradicts the logic. Unless, the boy gets reversed at a young age and ages towards the past (gets younger as times passes for the rest, similar to Benjamin Button, eating reversed food and breathing reversed air.... ha) this way he could meet the future protagonist during the past and be old enough to be recruited and be reversed again and brought back to a 'forward' looking timeline. But, then it would mean that the boy knows almost everything, as his memories as a kid would represent the future for everyone else. Then why he didn't say anything? Well, one explanation would be that he was too young to understand. Or his reversal happens in the future beyond the movie's timeframe. Or, he knows everything, but continues regardless as he knows he would eventually sacrifice himself to save the world but most importantly, to save his mom (Kat), just like Cooper saves the world to save his daughter in Interstellar. But, to kill all this, the boy's name is Max, so unless he changes his name, is just a different person. All I know... I'm my own grandpa ....and I'm the fizzle-bomber as well (if you watched that one, the you'll tell me to go f-myself 😂)

Christopher Nolan got the idea for Tenet when he won the Screenwriting award for Tenet

Good catch on the accents 👏 Any chance of seeing any Snowpiercer season 2 breakdowns? Really dug your takes on season 1 🤘

Tenet is immune to spoilers. It just gets stronger with spoilers.

I liked the intro music, and the overall audio aspect of the video.

Tenet was one of the better movies put out in 2020. I know there was alot of gripe against it but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The more I watch it, the more it starts to unravel. Now if we can figure out why....

Still trying to wrap my head around this movie.

Some were already too common but the last one and sir Michael theories are new to me, good ones.

I think the scientist studying the entropy items is the scientist that develops the algorithm. Similar to how finding the piece of the Terminator actually lead to the creation of the advanced terminators. She was given technology that advanced her by leaps and bounds from where she should have been and would have allowed her to make technological advancements much much sooner than she should or could have.

Maybe you're right: Sir Michael CoSBY SBY backwards is YBS, which sounds exactly like Ives

I've watched the film several times now and the person on the phone sounds a lot like Robert Pattinson doing an east coast American accent.

Another great video too btw and love your work Paul, keep it up, one of the best theory, spoiler, and review channels on yt.

"Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers Show, i'm your host Paul and tomorrow i gonna watch TENET for the first time." I see what you did there!

Christopher Nolan is an epic director because he makes movies that don't give you answers. It's like he jumpstarts our creativity with an awesome foundation. Inception: Was it really all a dream? Is it still a dream? We'll never know. Dark Knight Trilogy: Does Gotham get a Robin/Knightwing? Does Bruce ever return to Gotham? We'll never know. Tenet: Almost every aspect of the movie is a giant question, to which the answers... we'll never know. I love it and hate it... but he keeps me coming back for more.

1:59 character name is barbara - movie credits is ultimate authority

I thought I had a really good grasp on the story, my only confusion was as to what the heck was going on in the first 20 minutes and who "hired" the villain. Having watched this video I am now way more confused than I was before which seems highly appropriate. Great movie.

So my wife and I noticed that the scientist (Laura/Barbara) appears about 4-6 months pregnant. So I took that with Priya saying generations, as she teaching this all to her kid. Although I think I like your theory of “Laura/Barbara “ being the one since she has hands on experience a bit better😄 Cheers!

Great video!

The more I think about the more I'm convinced Neil's intention was to save his mother. And sator doesn't want things to change.

I love this movie and each additional viewing, I think I less than before. Great detail and awesome video. I am curious I you and other content creators receive cliff notes on easter eggs and clues?

yea. im pretty sure im absolutely OBSESSED with tenet.

No one: LITERALLY no one: Ives: CowBOY SHITe!

Blue and red are a huge part of the movie everyone seems to talk about, but what about the black and yellow also shown everywhere in the film

You must be really smart. This movie is so complex. You seem to understand the whole thing. I was so confused when I finished it

Sator had the same pill at the end of the movie which the protagonist had taken in the beginning of the movie. So even if he had taken it, he would have not died. So he never knew that CIA was playing him from the beginning...

I just realised that both Ives and Micahel Crosby have the same colour of eyes.........BLIND BLOWN

Love that you did a video on this movie! It’s my favorite movie!

consciousness and materialism is the temporal pincer. every moment possibilities are blooming and dying

I just finished tenet next Tuesday and I'm going to review it yesterday

For me, the only way to keep the world running "forward", is that the characters keep on that neverending loop, being the Protagonist recruiting himself, saving Kat, Max going to the past to help the Protagonist, and Kat killing Sator before he detonates the algorythm. Free will and destiny are crushed with this, but.. The world needed to be saved

Several things: I only got to watch part of the movie yesterday. It started from somewhere around where The Protagonist and Neil are meeting together and planning to enter Sanjay's apartment. I didn't understand the whole plot of Sator having a "dead man's switch" that's linked to a wearable fitness tracker. Just thinking about my own fitness tracker in real life, the battery runs out from time to time. It's hard to imagine how you could physically recharge it without covering up the sensor that tracks your heart rate. So, even if Sator took it off to recharge it, would that be interpreted as him dying or having no heart rate until the recharging was finished? I read somewhere else that Sator's heart rate dropping to zero wouldn't have "detonated" the algorithm (assuming it's an explosive device). If you think about it, he'd have to die at a point when the whole algorithm was assembled. So, the point this person made was that there was never any danger of his death triggering an apocalyptic event. It was just meant to reveal the GPS coordinates of the fully assembled algorithm device so that the future could receive an e-mail or a text message with its location. Then, my brain gets fried, because at that point of the movie, Sator is not physically in Stalsk-12 during the temporal pincer maneuver. Wouldn't the GPS from the tracker just send out his location in Vietnam where he died? Did the muscle guy (Volkov?) have the fitness tracker at that point? Plus, Tenet already knew the fully assembled algorithm was going to be buried in Stalsk-12, so it's weird that they would have to plan a whole military raid when they could have waited for Sator's man to throw the device down a shaft and cause it to be buried underground (unless they didn't want to spend the time digging it up?). I thought Priya was the future scientist, mainly because of her age or her gray hair and the way that inverse time travel works in the movie. They don't really say how physical aging works for the time travelers when they're moving in the inverse direction, but it would've taken a while for someone in a future time (using 2020 or 2021 as a starting point) to travel back to a point before the collapse of the Soviet Union (early 1990s?). She could have said "generations" because it's so vague. That sounds like at least two generations, which could happen in 40 years or less. Once she made the inversion, it would seem like she "died" from the perspective of a timeline that would keep flowing forward in the normal direction of the timeline we understand. Or just disappeared. And then, she didn't make it back, because of her death in the past in one of the closing scenes. Some people say that would cause a paradox and not allow her future self to reach the point of time when she inverted, but it was only her past self who made the inverted trip back in time, if that makes sense. She also refers to the algorithm as "plutonium." Pluto used to be considered the ninth planet in our solar system? How would anybody who didn't invent the algorithm know the total number of parts? Then, I really don't understand what The Protagonist did or should do after the scene where the algorithm is split three ways. Wouldn't he need to invert again and hide the algorithm further in the past? Maybe the ninth piece was hidden in multiple places (Kiev opera house and Estonia?). I didn't see the opening scenes at the opera. So, no matter where he hides it, someone was always going to find it. But the cyanide pill could have been real and a way to prevent him from being the one who disclosed the alternate location in Estonia (although that happens anyway). It seems like there has to be a version of him who's going to live in the timeline that moves forward so that he can eventually be the founder of Tenet (if he is the real founder). I could see Neil being Max. Not because of the convoluted spelling of Maximillien. Similar to Priya, if a version of him is recruited in The Protagonist's future, he would age into a grown man by traveling through an inverse timeline to help The Protagonist's past self carry out the plot of the movie. Other than that, it just seems too convenient that all of these turnstiles have been built in exactly the places where major plot events are going to take place. Do people other than Tenet agents and Sator know what they are? Has anyone accidentally walked through one of them and caused a temporal paradox?

Awesome video as always 👌

Really nice. Can you do a breakdown of Coherences (Coherencec; 2013) intercepting dimensions?

Never heard the scientist theory .. love it!