In Tenet, Christopher Nolan has masterfully crafted what may well be his most divisive movie yet. A sci-fi epic that lacks in character work and emotional core, but which excels in thought provocation and spectacle. The film moves at a breakneck pace and overwhelms audiences with visuals and audio that is, at times, incomprehensible in the best way that word can get used in regards to film.
Unless you have watched the film at least half a dozen times and have consumed all of the behind the scenes videos and information, it is near impossible to spot absolutely everything in the film and to find every detail, reference, and easter egg within.
"Look At Me!"
To this day, many will name The Dark Knight as Christopher Nolan's masterpiece, a claim that is hard to argue against. Whether deliberate or not, the iconic film has a reference in Tenet through villain Andrei Sator.
To his wife, whom he has trapped in a relationship with him, Sator screams, "Look at me!" to her. In The Dark Knight, this very same line gets uttered by the Joker to the captured fake Batman he proceeds to kill. The shifting tone from calm to fury is similar, and it is hard to imagine that the two lines could be so similar by accident.
The Red String
One of the most critical recurring details in the movie is the red string attached to a mystery man's backpack. It pops up twice in the film and gets revealed to be on the backpack of Neil.
The second time it pops up, it gets made clear to the audience that the man with the red string is dead, but is springing back to life with an inverted bullet and unlocks the door for the Protagonist and Ives, with Neil's backpack later getting shown. The easier to miss moment, though, is at the start of the movie, where the red string is visible on the mystery man who saves the Protagonist at the opera house.
The Hamilton Watches
For Tenet, Hamilton was asked to craft special, secret watches. Specifically, a customized version of their Khaki Navy BelowZero watch for the movie, and they delivered with them, having them both in the movie and for commercial sale.
They pop up late in the movie as a part of the climactic temporal pincer movement, and one detail about them on the Protagonist, Ives, Neil, and the other soldiers is that depending on which of the two teams the person is in, their watch will be red or blue, continuing the use of these colors to help convey the time concept.
Mini Palindromes
The palindromic element of Tenet was the source of much anticipation, fascination, and speculation going into the film, with there being many moments involving the concept throughout.
As it pertains to the main characters, there are a few minor palindromic references in the film. The plane that Neil and the Protagonist get crashed is a 747, a number palindrome. On top of that, audiences get treated to John David Washington's Protagonist doing pull-ups, also a palindrome.
Andrei Sator = Viktor Cherevin
Kenneth Branagh is an exceptional actor and filmmaker who has performed numerous impressive roles ranging from Shakespeare's work to murder mysteries to blockbuster action.
He appears in Tenet as wealthy Russian Andrei Sator intent on pretty much destroying the world. This core description can get applied to another Branagh villain, Viktor Cherevin, from Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, who is also a wealthy Russian villain.
Sator Square
Sticking with the subjects of Sator as well as that of the palindrome, before the film's release, some fans pointed to the famous Latin Sator Square as a possible way to decipher the movie.
The Sator Square is very evident in the film. Sator is the name of the film's main antagonist Andrei Sator, Arepo is the art forger, Tenet is the organization, Opera is the location of the opening scene with the Protagonist, and Rotas is the security agency at Oslo airport.
Christopher Hitchins
Over the years, Robert Pattinson has proved himself time and time again as one of the finest working actors today and a real talent who deserves the mainstream acclaim that he finally seems to be getting.
Robert Pattinson is known for having done a range of accents, avoiding his natural one. For this film, Pattinson had admitted to doing a version of Christopher Hitchens' voice, a famous British polemic and socio-economic critic.
Sator's Cyanide Pill
Near the start of the film, the Protagonist gets captured, and to not get tortured into giving up CIA secrets, he opts instead to kill himself by way of a CIA issued cyanide pill.
Later in the film, audiences see Sator has one of these pills, intending on using it to trigger the dead man's switch. Of course, the pill the Protagonist took was fake, a test for agents to see their worthiness if they were willing to die for their work; therefore, Sator would not have died.
Inverted Dialogue
Nolan's obsession with the concept of time seems to have reached its pinnacle in this film, with such an incredible amount of ambition placed in the crafting of this movie as it pertains to time inversion.
At the point where fans are first properly get introduced to the turnstile and its capabilities, Sator and Kat are on the other side of it from the Protagonist and are inverted. If you listen, the dialogue is inverted. This is even more impressive in that it is actually spoken backward by the performers, a tumultuous task for Branagh considering his thick Russian accent in the movie.
Inverted Characters
Of course, as it pertains to the main characters of the story, the dialogue is not the only thing that gets inverted as time goes on. At points in the movie, some of the main characters are inverted, while also moving forward.
In the airplane scene, the inverted version, the Protagonist steals an ambulance to escape in. While they drive away, the inverted versions of the Protagonist and Neil, pushing Kat on the stretcher, are behind the ambulance, so both versions of the three characters are in the same shot.