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Tenet · written by Christopher Nolan · 2020
Scene 245 of 275 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act three
An unnamed intelligence operative, recruited into a shadow war fought through time-inverted weapons and objects, teams with an enigmatic ally to stop a dying Russian oligarch from using technology gifted by a dying future to erase the present.
The Protagonist in his zone of comfort — a skilled, anonymous field operative, competent and confident inside the Kiev operation.
Broken by torture and 'killed,' he needs a new purpose; Fay offers one that transcends the nation-state loyalties that just got his team killed.
He enters the wholly unfamiliar situation of Tenet — the wind turbine, the password test, and Barbara's proof that time itself can run backward.
Mumbai, London, Oslo, and Amalfi — he adapts to the world of inverted physics and Sator's inner circle, paying costs (Kat's trust, his own safety) to get close to the target.
The Tallinn ambush succeeds — he gets what the mission wanted, extracting the plutonium '241' from the armored convoy.
He pays a heavy price for it — Kat is shot, the material is lost to Sator anyway, and he is left not knowing whether any of it mattered.
Recovered and re-briefed by Priya, he returns to a now-familiar situation — the Tenet operation — but changed, moving to Stalsk-12 with the full picture of what's at stake.
Sator, on the phone with the Protagonist, muses on the future's motives for destroying the present.
Volkov ambushes them at the gate on Sator's orders, wounding Ives.
Neil slips through the turnstile to invert and rejoin the fight.
This scene
Sator speaks into his phone –
SATOR
Your faith is blind. You’re a
fanatic.
PROTAGONIST
(over phone)
What’s more fanatical than trying
to destroy the world?
Kat moves towards Sator, but he raises a finger...
SATOR
I’m not. I’m creating a new one.
Somewhere, sometime, a man in a
crystalline tower throws a switch
and Armageddon is both triggered
and avoided. Entropy inverts the
same way the magnetic poles have
switched 183 times over the
millennia. Now time itself switches
direction.
Sator looks out at the lowering sun...
SATOR (CONT'D)
The same sunshine we’ve basked in
will warm the faces of our
descendants generations from now.
Kat looks at Mahir’s boat. Nothing. She looks to shore, watching the TENDER APPROACHING...