Tenet ending explained: What happens with the algorithm?

Tenet ending explained: What happens with the algorithm?

Still image from Tenet (Image via HBOmax)
Still image from Tenet (Image via HBOmax)

Tenet, the most recent hallucinogenic science fiction film from Christopher Nolan, the director of Inception and Instellar, presents a distinctive perspective on the cliched genre of time travel films.

At the movie's end, Ives splits the algorithm into three parts between him, Neil, and the Protagonist. Neil gives his part to the protagonist, while Ives takes his to be hidden in time. Neil also reveals that, eventually, the protagonist will use time travel to initiate the events of the entire film.

Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki, Robert Pattinson, John David Washington, and others star in the sci-fi action thriller Tenet, which premiered in 2020 and has the most perplexing ending.

John David Washington plays the lead role of the protagonist, a CIA agent hired by the enigmatic Tenet organization. He finds out that a conflict is going on in the future, where people and things can "invert," or change the direction of their entropy flow, to travel backward in time rather than forwards.

Tenet, also developed in the future, is an organization formed to prevent adversaries from detonating a weapon of mass destruction that would destroy both the past and the present.


Tenet: How is an Algorithm capable of ending the world?

Protagonist and Barbara in Tenet (mage via Warner Bros. Pictures)
Protagonist and Barbara in Tenet (mage via Warner Bros. Pictures)

A futuristic technology, the Algorithm, can reverse the planet's total entropy. If it were to become active, it would wipe out time, the past, and everyone who has ever existed or will exist.

The Algorithm would turn the tide around, causing everything to flow oppositely. The laws of physics that govern life on Earth would instantly violate and destroy everything.

An unidentified female scientist created the Algorithm. When she realized the diverse effects of her invention, she divided it into nine parts and used inversion to conceal each part back in time. Sator reassembles these parts with the aid of an unidentified future group.


What happens in the final scenes of the Tenet?

Neil and the Protagonist in Tenet (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)
Neil and the Protagonist in Tenet (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)

Ultimately, the protagonists, Neil (Robert Pattinson) and Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki) use the troops to travel back in time to prevent Sator from activating the algorithm. The Tenet military employs the temporal pincer maneuver as Kat pretends to be her former self on the yacht in Vietnam.

Upon arriving at the Algorithm room, the protagonist and Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) find a locked gate. At the same time, one of Sator's goons tries to bury the device, and an inverted soldier wearing a red string on his backpack offers himself as a sacrifice to open the gate and enable the two to seize the Algorithm.

In addition, Kat murders Sator before he can end his own life and leaves the area. Neil, Ives, and the protagonist split the algorithm and separate.


How did the Sator discover the hidden nine pieces of the algorithm?

Sator and algorithm (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)
Sator and algorithm (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)

They made all nine broken algorithm pieces into physical objects, which could make up the final formula when brought together. At the start of the movie Tenet, the ninth component of the algorithm is absent. The fact that Kenneth Branagh's Sator has found the other eight pieces suggests that whoever he works for has also been able to locate them.


Why does Sator want to get hold of the algorithm?

Decoding the algorithm (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)
Decoding the algorithm (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)

In the future, Kenneth Branagh's character, Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, communicates with an unidentified organization. Sator intends to activate the Algorithm, a doomsday device that will reverse the planet's entropy.

He has incurable pancreatic cancer and thinks that no one should be allowed to live if he cannot survive. Sator goes back in time to their most blissful vacation in Vietnam with Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), intending to pass away there in peace and activate the doomsday bomb using a dead man's switch connected to his heartbeat.


Why do people from the future want to destroy the past?

End scene of Tenet (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)
End scene of Tenet (Image via Warner Bros. Pictures)

Since people are to blame for all that has been destroyed in the future, an unidentified organization is collaborating with Sator to murder everyone alive in the past. Future generations think that stopping Earth's entropy increase will halt global warming.

They face the grandfather paradox, forced to choose between destroying their forebears and endangering their existence, with no other options for survival.

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