#Tenet timeline free
Goods arriving at a free port are either taxed lightly or not at all and all goods there are generally regarded as being still outside the country. What is a Free Port?Ī Free Port is essentially a place where goods can remain outside the normal customs and tax jurisdictions of the country they’re in. Closed cities appeared on no maps and their existence was a closely-guarded secret. Within the closed cities would be classified installations (most notably related to the Soviet nuclear programme) and the housing for the people who worked their and their families. Essentially invisible, they would have no direct address or transport links, being referred to often by codes referring to adjacent settlements. All of those words appear in the film: Tenet is the title, Sator the villain, opera the opening sequence, Arepo the forger, and Rotas the name of Sator’s company.Ĭlosed Cities – including Stalask 12, where Branagh’s Sator first made contact with the future as a young man, and where the final battle takes place – date primarily back to the Cold War, and were cities in which sensitive operations were carried out and to which travel was restricted. The Sator Square is a famous palindromic square that dates back about two thousand years, it is the words Rotas, Opera, Tenet, Arepo, Sator and is the same read backwards, forwards, up to down or left to right. What’s the Sator Square, and what’s that got to do with Tenet? Ultimately, the film ends on the same day it begins – the film's timeline, just like its title, is a palindrome, you see. Overall, it’s set (roughly) in the present day, but the start of the film isn’t necessarily the start of the story – The Protagonist’s investigation into Sator ( Kenneth Branagh) goes forward a few days, and then the story reverses on itself as the characters ‘invert’ themselves into the past, resulting in a climactic battle that takes place around the same time as the beginning. Today, tomorrow, yesterday, and a number of points in-between. And, as The Protagonist ( John David Washington) comes to learn, Tenet is the name given to the secret organisation tasked with preventing the temporal apocalypse.