Tenet = Backgammon

Christopher Nolan's latest movie is a pretty great adaptation of the ancient board game, but it sure is confusing.

Backgammon is an ancient game. There are records of it stretching back nearly 5,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. My girlfriend Rachel and I play it regularly though we only started playing a few months ago and are far from experts.

The concept is fairly simple. Each player has 15 pieces—checkers, also sometimes called “men”—and the point of the game is to move those pieces from their starting positions onto your side and then off the board (bearing off). Players roll a pair of dice and use the outcome of the dice roll to move their checkers. Rolling a 5 and a 4, for instance, would allow you to move one piece 5 spaces and another 4, or one piece 9 spaces. Single pieces can be captured by an enemy piece and sent to the center of the board.

Here’s what the board looks like at the start of a game:

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What’s interesting about Backgammon is that each player is moving their checkers in the opposite direction. So while I’m moving all my white pieces toward me, Rachel is moving all her pieces toward her. This forms a cross-current, of sorts. I’m moving my white pieces counter-clockwise; Rachel moves her red pieces clockwise toward her. (See image below).

This is exactly how time travel works in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, a movie which I quite liked and saw twice in theaters despite the global pandemic. In fact, it’s the only movie I’ve been to since the shutdowns began, which makes me incredibly sad. Going to the movies was actually pretty great in some ways. Social distancing in a movie theater? Nobody crowding your arm-rest? Sign me up! But it was sad to see how empty everything was, and how few movies there are to see.

In any case, spoilers follow.

Tenet is a strange, at times hard-to-follow film that’s very much the product of Christopher Nolan, a director who relishes making confusing, hard-to-follow (and sometimes hard to hear) movies. Since we don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on in the beginning, by the time we start getting answers we’re already a few steps behind. Since the movie dashes along from one big action scene to another at a rather brisk pace, it can be hard to catch one’s breath long enough to make sense of everything.

The basic premise of the movie is that the people of the future, now facing catastrophic events set in motion by people in the past (our present), are plotting to destroy the very trajectory of our time. They want to quite literally reverse time so that humanity can make a temporal U-turn and save itself from ruin—destroying our world (and time) in the process.

Time travel in Tenet doesn’t work in the same way as movies like Twelve Monkeys or Back To The Future. To go back in time, one doesn’t simply time-hop via DeLorean. You have to enter a reverse time-stream and travel back in real time through it. As you travel in this reverse stream, you experience reverse entropy and everything about the world around you appears to move in reverse. Hot is cold, cold is hot (but thankfully up is still up and down is still down). It’s unsettling, disorienting and dangerous, and you can only travel back in real-time, so no going back to dinosaur days. You’d die of old age first.

Basically, you’re moving one way around the time-board; or you’re moving around the opposite direction. Like this:

Backgammon, like Tenet, is essentially a palindrome—words spelled the same forward and backward like madam or racecar or wow. Backgammon is a palindromic board game.

Unlike Backgammon, in which pieces can only move one direction or the other, in Tenet people can exit the reverse time-stream and re-enter the normal, forward-moving time-stream. Tenet’s villain, Sator, uses this ability to always get the jump on his enemies. He can send part of his team backwards in time (not back in time, backwards in time) and another forward and they can communicate and get the jump on their enemies. At some point anyone moving in reverse can re-emerge back in time and then move forward back to the point in time they jumped into the other stream.

The Protagonist is able to travel back in time and emerge many days earlier in an attempt to save Kat from a reverse bullet wound and use Sator’s own tactics against him, running a “temporal pincer movement” in an attempt to stop him from destroying the world with a powerful bomb that he’s crafted together from the future.

Verdict

Tenet is intentionally opaque and hard to track. Some of this is conceptual; much is technical. Nolan’s sound-editing often results in painfully loud sound effects and muffled dialogue. And while some things are explained to us, like the reverse bullet, these still fail to really make much sense within the framework and rules the movie establishes for time travel.

Many of the weird moments in the film are explained via story. We don’t know why there are bullet holes in the glass window in the art storage facility at the airport or who the masked assailants are, but we find out later when we discover it’s the Protagonist and Neil, making their way to the time travel chamber in reverse—not leaving it, as it first appears. Why do the bullets move backwards through the window and into the gun? Because they’re being fired in the reverse time-stream out of the gun. We see it all one way, and then later we see it again with an entirely new perspective.

This all makes sense within the movie’s internal logic.

The reverse bullet is a different matter. The Protagonist and the scientist explaining the reverse bullet it to him are both able to pick it up just by “willing” it off the table. How is this possible?

There was no reverse scene of either of them traveling backward in time shooting up the board or dropping a bullet on the table. The bullet may be moving back in time but even in reverse, physics is still a thing. A reverse bullet still requires someone to have dropped it in the future for it to reverse-fall up off the table into someone’s hand.

While I do think the idea of a reverse time-stream is fascinating and a really cool twist on time travel—and one that leads to some truly unique fight and chase scenes—the rest leaves something to be desired. The premise itself—that a nefarious future humanity is trying to reverse time streams in order to somehow save themselves—is a bit wobbly.

Then again, as we learned in The Dark Knight, Nolan isn’t terribly concerned with plot holes so long as the movie is thought-provoking, looks good and is exciting enough to keep us on the edge of our seats.

Tenet does all this rather well, plot holes be damned. And you really can’t show up to a time-travel movie and expect to walk away without a few plot holes or bits that just don’t quite make sense. The time travel paradox will always nag at our brains.

It’s also one of those rare Nolan films with a happy ending, which I enjoyed. Too many of Nolan’s films leave me glum and gloomy.

And hey, a movie version of backgammon-as-time-travel is pretty neat.

Did you enjoy Tenet? Let me know in the comments—and thanks for reading!

And if you haven’t played backgammon before, consider picking up a board. It’s a fun game for two players and not at all hard to learn—though very difficult to master. (Full disclosure: that’s an affiliate link—if you click it and buy the game, I’ll get a small cut. I’ll include these from time to time in posts, but always as tastefully as possible and only with relevant goodies).

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