Like every Christopher Nolan film, Tenet takes a few watches, and even then, most people won't catch every detail. Here are a few things you missed.
In Tenet, Christopher Nolan has seemingly gone his most Nolan-esque, with the movie being nothing short of an entertaining, thrilling spectacle that has divided critics and audiences due to its confusing nature and emotional distance it chose to go. The film is hard to follow and can be overwhelming, both in the sensory aspect and in the plot itself, with the concept of time inversion.
Due to all of this confusion, and the breakneck speed at which the film moves, it is easy to miss a lot of what is going on in the movie. This includes little hidden details, of which there are many evident throughout the film.
The use of blue and red is prominent throughout the film, the most apparent being in the turnstile room, when audiences finally get let in on how the machine works with the time inversion.
However, there are far more moments in the film that show this symbolism. The color of the time on the watches during the final temporal pincer movement is separated with red moving forward, blue backward, the opening credits with the Warner Brothers, and Syncopy logos red and blue, and in other details, like Kat's dress and the armbands.
This is a bit of a cheat, but the fact of the matter is audiences who see Tenet once are lucky to understand maybe 80 percent of the movie and will only spot 60 to 70 percent of the details throughout.
Critical pieces of dialogue hidden by the sound mixing, moments of practical effects on screen with people moving forward and backward in the same frame, and even crucial moments, like Neil being the one with the red string at the start and end of the movie, can get easily missed.
The Sator Square was something that got brought up a lot in the build-up to the movie by fans, obviously for the fact that TENET sits in the middle of the square.
It is a famous five-word two-dimensional Latin palindrome containing the words SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, and ROTAS. All of these words are crucial in Tenet. Sator is the name of the villain, Andrei Sator, Arepo is the name of the Spanish art forger whose work of Goya Kat sold to Sator, Tenet is the organization, opera is the place of the opening scene, and Rotas is the security at the freeport.
At the start of the movie, following the opera scene, The Protagonist gets captured and desperately tries to kill himself with a cyanide pill so as not to give away any C.I.A. secrets and information to his captors.
The Protagonist succeeds in this, however, it turns out the cyanide capsules are fake, only putting the user in a coma. Later, Sator reveals his cyanide pill, which he got from the C.I.A. to trigger the dead man's switch, so as it turns out, Sator's was a fake.
At one point during the film, there is a newspaper shown on screen detailing the plane crash that had occurred at Oslo airport at the hands of Neil and The Protagonist.
On the paper, there is an article written by Akane Kashiwazaki - not only is this a character in the anime film Feel The Wind, but Kashiwazaki was the second assistant accountant for Tenet.
Christopher Nolan uses a lot of the same performers multiple times in his filmography, with the likes of Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cottilard, and more, all appearing in numerous films.
This continued in Tenet, with Michael Caine and Kenneth Branagh, but also with Jeremy Theobald, who Nolan fans may recognize in the scene with Michael Caine, as he was the lead in Nolan's feature debut, Following.
How people move in between the inverted and forward-moving timeline seems to relate directly to Maxwell's Daemon thought experiment.
The experiment, from physicist James Charles Maxwell, suggests how the second law of thermodynamics could get violated with a door between two compartments of gas, just like how there is a door between two timelines. The organization of Tenet seems to have some idea of this also, as on the wall of Laura's office lies a diagram of Maxwell's Demon.
Frequent Nolan collaborator, Hans Zimmer, was unavailable to do this film due to his commitments on the upcoming film Dune, and so Ludwig Görranson stepped in and did a fantastic, if not loud, job at it.
To coincide with the inversion of time, there are points in the film where the score plays backward, just like how people move and speak backward, and it is impressive.
There are many meanings of Tenet throughout the movie - it is part of the Sator Square, it is the name of the organization which The Protagonist creates, and it is also a palindrome that says "ten," forward and backward.
This is a brilliant detail, as in the climax of the movement, the temporal pincer movement performed to get the algorithm gets done in 10 minutes, with one team moving 10 minutes forward, and the other 10 minutes inverted.
It's a classic move for a director to show up in a subtle cameo in his own films, Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino perhaps being two of the more well-known directors who did/do so, but Nolan avoided such a thing up until Tenet, where he has an unnoticeable cameo.
As a part of the score, Gõrranson wanted to feature manipulated breathing as a part of it, and it is done brilliantly. This breathing is done by none other than Christopher Nolan, himself.
