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Of time, space and life...


Tenet (2020)

This is another movie in which one may go in and come out of the theatre asking, "what was that all about?" It is about time travel and would make sense if one has a little background about time, space and bending time. Viewers of Interstellar should be at a better place understanding the flow and the plot of the story. They would not find it too confusing.

Time and space have fascinated man since the beginning from the Hindu tradition to the Greeks right down to modern thinkers. Time is just an arbitrary human construct to keep track of earth's rotation around the sun as to plan seasonal preparation of agricultural activities. It went on to permeate all over our day to day activities. Our mass occupies space and seems to move together with time. Somewhere interspersed in all these is life. And it is all moving forward in an ever-expanding universe, or is it?

In an alternative universe, time could be moving backwards as seen here in Tenet, the movie. A palindrome in its title (and some of the characters) suggests that events in life can be altered by moving forward or backwards as and when the situation warrants. In this film, Armageddon is averted when the Protagonist travels through time to get hold of an algorithm that can potentially destroy the world. 

This is a cerebral offering for those who are looking for something beyond poetic justice and lovey-dovey display tear-inducing display of emotion pathognomonic of Tinseltown. 

(P.S. A curious mind would still be puzzled. If an alternate universe where everything moves backwards and the Protagonist had to don an oxygen mask as even respiration is reversed, wouldn't all bodily functions be changed? Heart sucking blood into the heart, bile fluids retrograde into the liver parenchyma and reverse peristalsis in the human body just like the bullet being sucked back into the pistol barrel!)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 


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