As the Christopher Nolan fanboy that I am, I found myself recently rewatching the British director's intense, time-altering spy thriller Tenet. Knowing how the story would end helps realize that the film was intended to be watched at least twice.
Much like in other time-altering movies Tenet plays on the idea what happens has already happened. Meaning, that when a character goes back in time to change something or stop an event from occurring it is most likely he himself made it happen in the first place by altering the timeline. Most famously when a T-800 series robot travels from a dystopian future back in time to the 1980s to stop Sarah Connor from conceiving her son John Connor, he is in fact helping the events to unfold. John David Washington, just named Protagonist in the film, and his ally Robert Pattinson rely heavily on this time paradox theory to stop the end of the world from happening in the near future.
The film's ending explains how The Protagonist is really the man who set the whole plan in motion in the future. Hiring Robert Pattinson to travel to the past and help him on his first mission even if it means sending him to certain death. Obviously, it is impossible to watch the film in reverse as it would be illegible and thus just gibberish but if we follow Nolan's logic it would be possible. Similar to the blue team and the red team at the end of the film, one who is in the present and the other that is set to fight the battle in reverse time, we would be able to watch it in reverse and still make sense. Still with me?
This time paradox theory, as mindboggling and entertaining as it may be, has been debunked by physicists. First off, it is impossible to travel back in time, not only in reality but in theory too. The past is set in stone. Scientists argue that if anything you can travel to the future, but never into the past. Physics just don't work that way. Secondly, we have the actual paradox that time travel would create. As Doctor Bruce Banner explains it during Avengers: Endgame, if you travel to the past that past becomes your new present and your present becomes a future that ceases to exist. You're creating a new history, a new timeline, therefore the incident that is bound to happen never did and you're Protagonist's travel to the past becomes pointless as he has already altered reality. If anything, you're creating a new timeline, a theory accepted by Dragon Ball Z fans, where Trunks travels from the future but knows that his reality, his future, is doomed. His only mission is to alter the past of another timeline and hope to change the present there.
Ignoring the paradox created in theory and also the scientific impossibility in practice, the film is tremendously entertaining. A true mindfuck that only a genius director like Christopher Nolan could have pulled off.
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