9 THE FINAL BATTLE
Nick de Semlyen: Tenet concludes with what resembles a futuristic corporate paintball game, two colour-coded units trotting into a giant quarry to do battle with an enemy force that frankly appears to be invisible. (Except for, that is, Sator’s chief henchman, the bloke with the bounceroutside-wetherspoons vibe, who is fiddling with the final time-stone in the underground cavern.)
James Dyer: Sator, having been aided and funded by forces from our future, has finally laid hands on the ninth piece of The Algorithm — a device created to permanently reverse the natural flow of time, thus wiping out our ‘forwards’ universe. With the device being assembled in Stalsk-12 — the Soviet-era city glimpsed in Sator’s flashback — the forces of Tenet converge to retrieve it. The red team attacks in linear time while the blue team reverses and attacks from the future, closing the temporal pincer movement. The result is a particularly funky firefight which happens forwards and backwards simultaneously, allowing, at one point, the blue team to un-explode a building just before the red team re-explodes it. During the battle with Sator’s future forces, Ives and The Protagonist manage to retrieve The Algorithm, but only with the help of Neil, who begins reversed on the blue team, uses a turnstile at the site to change his momentum forward mid-battle in order to rescue them both from the explosion, and then re-inverts after the battle so that he can position himself behind the locked gate, unlocking it at the precise moment to sacrifice himself and allow them to retrieve the device.
Nick de Semlyen: It’s one of the more confusing denouements in blockbuster history — Saving Private Ryan meets Primer — and so disorientating that it requires a whiteboard summit beforehand to bring The Protagonist and us up to speed. But the notion of forward and reverse soldiers working in tandem is so audacious and original that it’s hard not to grin as you’re watching it, even if you have no idea why that building is de-exploding, or how many Robert Pattinsons are on the field. Think of it like that bit at the end of You Only Live Twice where the ninjas storm the volcano lair, except with fewer white cats and more paradoxes pertaining to temporal determinism.