YMMV / Tenet

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: There's room for plenty of this but a prominent example is if Priya is a Punch-Clock Hero, a Knight Templar, or a flat-out villain.
• Awesome Music: Ludwig Göransson brought his A-game.
  • RAINY NIGHT IN TALLINN starts out with a chaotic orchestral opening before a powerful bass drop moves into a frantic guitar and drums piece. It lends a lot of urgency to the opening opera fight scene.
  • POSTERITY is an incredibly eerie piece that fits the film's mind-bending climax very well.
  • The film's theme by Travis Scott, THE PLAN is a strange, fascinating hip-hop piece that makes good use of Scott's signature Autotune vocals to create a trippy, ethereal feel.
• Base-Breaking Character: Andrei Sator is either seen as a genuinely menacing threat that also doubles as a horrifying example of Domestic Abuse or a cartoony, one-note villain that is too over the top even for a Christopher Nolan movie.
• Better on DVD: This is a film that basically demands re-watches, and benefits greatly from it; numerous fans have admitted since its digital HD release that things become clearer the more they watch the film. Furthermore, there's a subtitles option, too, which helps in scenes where dialogue may be difficult to hear (a relatively common complaint).
• Catharsis Factor: Sator is a sadistic villain with no redeeming qualities and an abuser to Kat. It's very poetic when Kat shot him dead in the climax.
• Complete Monster: Andrei Sator, dying of cancer, intends to take the entire world with him out of spite. Forming a "bargain with the Devil", Andrei pressured art dealer Katherine "Kat" Barton into marrying him and having a son. Abusive to Kat, she begged for a chance to leave him, with Andrei only assenting if she left their son forever just to hurt her. Andrei beats a man to death with a gold bar for touching his gold supply, later tortures Kat to push the Protagonist into giving him information, and uses inversion to place himself back when he forced Kat to stay with him, intending on ending everything that ever was with the Algorithm at the time when he felt his life was perfect.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mahir and Ives both only appear for certain segments of the film, but are among the most popular Tenet members among the audience.
• Epileptic Trees: After the movie is shown worldwide as of September 2020, viewers had many question on Neil's relationship with the Protagonist and Kat and Max with the reveal that Neil has been inverted the whole time leading some to believe he's actually the adult version of Max, Kat and Sator's son.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Great! The plan to invert the entire world has been foiled! Except that this plan was set into motion because the future Earth has been polluted to hell and there's no indication that this particular problem will be solved.
• Fanfic Fuel: The numerous operations Tenet has conducted prior to the Protagonist joining their ranks following the Kyiv opera house siege.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The movie refers each line of the Sator Square, a latin word square made of five lines which forms a palindrome as a whole. Its words are Sator, Arepo (an unseen character), Tenet, Opera (the opening scene's setting), and Rotas (Sator's company, fitting as it's also Sator spelled backwards).
  • One character correctly identifies the description of inverted objects as being like Feynman's conception of the positron as a time-reversed electron. This is in fact one of the standard interpretations of antimatter. That idea is brought up further when it is mentioned that touching your inverted double results in annihilation. However antimatter is a real thing that has been studied and it’s never been seen to possess reversed causality, reversed entropy, or ontological knowledge of how an antimatter particle originated.
  • Matter-antimatter annihilation is analogous to what happens at the turnstiles: a particle turns back in time, looking to an observer like the particle and antiparticle met and disappeared.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film is currently enjoying lots of success and has garnered quite a sizable fanbase in India, which isn't anything new for Nolan as his films have always had quite the popularity there, but this time doubly so thanks to the presence of Dimple Kapadia, a very well known and respected Bollywood actress who has an impressive 50 years of film credits, with this being her first Hollywood role.
• Ho Yay: So much of it between Neil and the Protagonist, leading to them having tons of fanarts and Doujinshi.
• Love to Hate: Andrei Sator can count thanks to being a major threat, monstrously despicable, and being performed by a very intimidating Kenneth Branagh.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • The Protagonist himself is the secret leader of the titular organization in the future. Ensuring his own past self's recruitment by a seemingly suicidal test, the Protagonist sends his counterpart on a quest to stop the evil Andrei Sator from using the Algorithm to end the world. Even making a pact with a notorious Arms Dealer and allowing his past self and underlings to fight Sator and his men in public spaces, the Protagonist eventually uncovers Sator's full scheme to launch one final decisive battle against his forces. Stopping Sator even as it costs the sacrifice of his best friend Neil, the Protagonist saves the world and accepts his role as Tenet's founder.
  • Neil is a veteran agent of Tenet, recruited by the Protagonist's future self to prevent the activation of the Algorithm by Andrei Sator. Neil is assigned to guide the past Protagonist, often withholding information which strains Protagonist's trust. Assisting in several heists, it is Neil's idea to ram a plane into a building as a diversion. Neil is eventually revealed to be the mysterious inverted assailant who saved the Protagonist before his recruitment into Tenet via a fake Cyanide Pill to serve as a Secret Test of Character. While succeeding in disarming Sator's device, it's also revealed Neil will perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save his comrades during the operation, calmly leaving to face his fate.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • People who enjoyed "Rainy Day in Tallinn" mix the music together with action/intense scenes like this.
  • "[X] amount of dislikes are actually likes because they were inverted."
  • "That part is a little dramatic."
  • "Christopher Nolan saved cinema!" ^Explanation A phrase used to mock the fact that Tenet ended up predictably underperforming at the box office due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. While most big tentpole movies were either delayed to the following year or released straight to digital to cut losses, Nolan was insistent on having Tenet release in the summer of 2020 which caused many to start mocking him as having a big ego, thinking audiences would go out en masse to see the movie in theaters despite the health risks.
  • "Now what's the next step of your master plan?" "Crashing this plane... But not from the air; don't be so dramatic."^Explanation In The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan and crew crashed a small plane in flight. In Tenet, they crashed a larger plane, a 747, but instead kept it grounded as they taxied the craft right into a building. Naturally, people noticed how Nolan escalated in one department while scaling back in another.
  • "I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago."
  • "I'm watching Tenet the way it was meant to be seen."^Explanation Nolan announced the film would still be first released only in theaters, claiming a premiere on streaming would be sub-standard from the way the film was meant to be seen. Some people then started making parodies of other ways to watch Tenet, like on a cell phone or a PSP.
  • The movie's less-than-stellar audio regarding the dialogue has proven to be immensely difficult for Nolan to live down, resulting in videos such as this and more serious ones like this.
  • "I'm the protagonist."
  • Neil's blonde hair and dress sense given him a striking resemblance to Christopher Nolan, leading many to joke that Pattinson was actually playing Nolan the whole time or expect that to be the film's twist.
  • The fact that the film's arc words are "we live in a twilight world" has led fans to joke that Nolan included that line as a deliberate reference to The Twilight Saga and to needle Robert Pattinson given his very well known dislike of the films. Though given how Neil never actually says the words, it's probably safe to say that Nolan cut him some slack.
• Narm:
  • The Protagonist's fight with himself in Oslo. Although John David Washington went all out with his difficult stunts and using no CGI effects, some find the scene's final result tends to be clumsy or, in general, unintentionally funny.
  • "I ordered my hot sauce an hour ago."
• Nightmare Fuel: Most viewers would agree that Andrei Sator is easily the scariest character in the movie. Every scene with him is loaded with the maximum tension possible. The man is pretty much what you'd expect from a psychopathic Domestic Abuser and Ax-Crazy with the explicit intent of committing omnicide. He is, along with the Joker, one of Nolan's most frightening and evil villains. And, like the Joker, his evil is accentuated by an incredibly unnerving Leitmotif, courtesy of composer Ludwig Göransson, which goes from ominous ambiance to a horrific mix of an Inception-style Drone of Dread and a distorted, strangled wheezing.
• One-Scene Wonder: Michael Caine as The Team Benefactor for Tenet.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Set against the backdrop of a war that threatens total annihilation of everything that ever lived, the story is really that of a woman stuck in an abusive marriage whose husband holds their child as bait to keep her in the marriage. Thankfully, things do actually end well for Kat.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The opening half hour has been criticized as the weakest section of the movie as it's more or less an extended Info Dump. The second half, however, has been praised as moviegoers have mentioned that everything starts to make sense around that point.
• So Okay, It's Average: Generally seen as a solid film, though most agree that it's far from Nolan's best, being too confusing and not living up to its hype. Still, most agree that the action's great and the overall scope suitably epic. And while some feel the characters and story aren't super well developed (not an uncommon criticism in Nolan's work), they're generally seen as interesting enough.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Anomalous materials with strange properties which could cause the end of the world, an unscrupulous global conspiracy with massive resources and military-grade gear using some of those materials in order to prevent an apocalypse, and another conspiracy which goal is to trigger said apocalypse... TENET is basically an unofficial SCP Foundation movie adaptation. Not only are time manipulation and objects from the future actually part of the SCP Foundation canon, the main threat of the film (a device known as the Algorithm) is similar to SCP-2700, which is designed to cause a "YK-Class Entropic Annihilation Event."
  • To C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet, a Tabletop RPG with Time Travel mechanics whose larger narrative is about two time-traveling factions where one wants to ensure the complex Stable Time Loop across humanity's history that leads to their victory happens, and the other wants to break free from what consider the former's tyranny over the timeline. In the game's context, the movie plays like a quest restricted to a much more limited form of Time Travel, but still featuring heavy usage of Retroactive Preparation, Retroactive Precognition, I Know You Know I Know, Tricked Out Time, and Scry vs. Scry on all sides, all while making sure any Stable Time Loop remain closed, especially those where the player characters cross their past selves' paths, and causing numerous headache-inducing situations as you get used to four-dimensional thinking.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • John David Washington describes the movie as one to Inception, in the sense that they're "related by marriage". Both films see the Experienced Protagonist recruited for a mission with higher stakes than any they have undertaken before: Cobb is a freelance corporate spy working for the highest bidder, and only works for Saito for his own interests, whereas Tenet's Protagonist is a CIA agent whose recruitment by Tenet hinged on him protecting his colleagues and facing death as a result. Both are entangled with their respective story's plot device in different ways: Cobb is an experienced "extractor" who infiltrates his targets' dreams regularly via the PASIV system, while the Protagonist first sees an inverted object in motion before he's formally introduced to the phenomena, only becoming acclimated to it as the film goes on. Finally, both films end differently: while Cobb may (not?) have returned to a normal life with his kids at the end of Inception, Tenet's Protagonist certainly does not return to being a CIA agent, instead embracing his role as the founder of Tenet (and to an extent, Kat's guardian angel from afar).
  • In ways it could also function as one to Interstellar, as both deal with the nature of time in similar ways. But whilst Interstellar saves most of the time-related consequences for the third act, Tenet is about it from the start. They also both involve a group being tasked with Saving the World and contain a central Fire-Forged Friends relationship as well as a platonic relation between a man and a woman. Finally, both films feature a circumstance that results in a parent not being able to be around to raise their child as part of the narrative and a desire for this parent to protect and be there for their child despite this (Kat being the parent here, Cooper being the parent in Interstellar).

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