I really enjoy Christopher Nolan movies (those I’ve seen.) Inception is my all-time favorite standalone movie, and I love the deep themes and fascinating situations of Interstellar and The Prestige. A movie automatically earns points in my mind if it made me think. After all, those movies are getting harder and harder to come by these days where most of the stuff out there is mass-produced, cliche-ridden garbage.
The latest Christopher Nolan piece I saw was Tenet.
And boy did I really have to think about it – puzzle over it for days, even. I always have to focus hard on time travel and mull it over a lot. But you don’t even realize this movie is a time travel one until halfway through, so you’re constantly on the edge of your seat trying to figure it out. Plus, it’s not quiiiite time travel.
What I plan to talk about is Neil’s character and interaction with the idea of fate/predestination.
But first, I’ve got to explain some things plot and character things or none of this will make sense. So please bear with me.
A Quick Summary
The premise of Tenet is that people in the future created a machine that allows you to experience, and act in, time… backwards. The movie is pretty much a mirror of itself – the chiastic story structure done very literally. Sometimes the characters are moving forward at times, and sometimes they’ve moving backwards. Those going one way see those on the other side acting in reverse.
Our hero has no name but ‘the Protagonist.’ He is a CIA agent recruited by a mysterious group called TENET after he proves that he’d sooner die than betray his team and give up his secrets.
I will warn you right now, the movie is very complicated. I had to watch two YouTube explanation videos with timelines (I need the visual layout) after the movie before I understood it fully. Here’s a Wikipedia summary, too.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
The plot goal is to retrieve pieces of ‘the Algorithm’ and hide them so that people in the future can’t create a world-destroying weapon. It’s more or less a typical MacGuffin. The time-reversing machines, called ‘the turnstiles,’ were created by a future scientist so she could hide these weapon pieces in the past.
But several side plots become woven into the story, including conflict between a brutal weapons dealer and his absued wife, whom the Protagonist takes pity on, as well as mystery surrounding several unexplainable events and the man known as Neil who is assigned to the Protagonist as his handler. There’s also a masked stranger who intervenes at the beginning of the story to save the Protagonist’s life, identifiable only by a red cord with a washer hanging off his backpack.
During the final battle, the Protagonist sees a dead soldier wearing that same keychain. Moments later, he is saved from death again as the soldier (functioning in reverse time) leaps up and takes a bullet for him.
Neil, also a POV character, glimpses a mysterious figure sneaking around one of the time turnstiles during that final battle as he works to help the Protagonist and a TENET captain named Ives.
At the end, the Protagonist, Neil, and Ives convene with the pieces of the Algorithm and resolve to split up, hide their pieces, and never meet again.
But then Neil refuses.
He says he needs to go back to the turnstile and reverse himself to go back to the battle. He was the mysterious figure he saw sneaking around – his future self that had reversed their time. What’s more, as he turns his back to the Protagonist to leave, we see that he is wearing the red string keychain. It’s been Neil all along guarding the Protagonist. It’s also strongly hinted that he is Max, the son of the abused wife, and he tells the Protagonist that they’ll meet again — one day in the future when the Protagonist starts the TENET group and recruits the grown-up Neil to send him back in time.
Yes, I know. It hurts your head. I have serious respect for Nolan and his ability to write and keep such plots consistent. Plus, all of the cool easter eggs he hides in the story – such as how ‘Neil’ is the last four letters of ‘Maximillien’ in reverse, or how ‘the red string’ is an idea from East Asian mythology that says red strings connect people who are destined to meet no matter what. (Thank you, movie analyzers of the internet for pointing these out.)
In fact, destiny and fate are a key theme of the movie – and what I am here to talk about after that long-winded explanation that doesn’t even start to scratch the surface of this multi-layered story.
Fate and Surrender
When Neil tells the Protagonist that he chooses to go back (and die taking a bullet for him,) the Protagonist immediately asks, what if Neil didn’t? What if he could change his future? The Protagonist obviously doesn’t want his brother-in-arms to die.
But Neil is resolved. He believes strongly in the existence of fate – curious but perhaps necessary to give himself a sense of order, since he’s a timeline-hopping character who has to be careful and precise with every action so as not to accidentally erase himself or the future he comes from. Thus, when he sees himself going to get killed in battle, he refuses to try and change that, deciding that it’s fated to happen, and if he dies, he dies.
It’s both sad and sweet – he’s doing it to save his friend. It’s also very interesting to contemplate.
After all, Christians don’t believe in fate.
(Calvinists hold to predestination, but that’s different than the eastern-mythology concept of an almost-personified fate. I’ll also tell you right now that my stance on predestination is that I believe God is all-knowing and outside of time. As my worldview teacher put it, all of human existence and our one-directional timeline is like a string in God’s hands that He can hold and look at from any angle or distance He wants. Or like a book the author already has planned out from start to finish in their head, but can jump to any moment in its timeline and ‘be’ in it. Thus He knows who will choose Him and who won’t. But He also grants us the free will to choose or reject, and does so out of love for us, making us more than preprogrammed robots. Free will and God’s omniscience work together in an incredible harmony that is impossible for limited, time-bound man to fully grasp.)
What Christians, all across the spectrum between Calvinist and Arminianist, do believe in is a God who is unbound by the constraints of time and thus knows everything we’ll do before we do it, everything that will happen to us. That’s the cool part about salvation – God knew everything we’d ever do and died for all of it. Once we accept that gift, there’s nothing we can do that will not be forgiven, and that’s massively freeing to know.
Knowing we are loved by an omniscient God is also freeing when it comes to our future. God knows what will happen to us. God has a plan for us that we can’t mess up. He is sovereign. It’s not quite fate, but it’s similar. Better, even, because it’s happening for a reason, and it’s in the hands of a loving God.
Despite his belief in fate, Neil still doesn’t stop being an active character. He still tries to change things, such as attempting to warn the Protagonist and Ives before they get into the situation where he has to get shot to save them, since he knows they’re walking into a trap due to him being in reverse time.
He states, “What’s happened, happened. It’s an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world; it’s not an excuse for doing nothing.” Fate and duty go hand-in-hand for him.
It’s the same for Christians. God has a plan for us, but that doesn’t mean we just sit on our butts and wait for something to smack us in the face. In fact, Philippians 2:12-13 orders us to work out our salvation, to give evidence for it by pursuing holiness. This was something I struggled to understand in my teens. What was God’s plan for my life? What was I supposed to do? Go to school, get a job, what, where, when, and all the other questions. I was terrified that I was going to mess it up and end up living an unfufilling, useless life that was somehow wrong because I hadn’t picked the single right path. Until I read the book Just Do Something.
God is all-powerful. You are not going to screw up His plans for you. So get out there. Use wisdom and pursue godliness, but don’t be paralyzed by fear. You have a duty in this world as a Christian, and that means action. Finding God’s will isn’t about reading the tea leaves or trying to line up the dots. Vodie Bauchum has an excellent sermon on that here. Micah 6:8 tells us what God’s will for us is. To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. We have plenty of commands in the Bible – following those is God’s will for you. As long as you stay within those bounds, you have freedom to choose, freedom of will.
Strangely enough, it’s when you believe that your path, your story, is known and written already, that you have the greatest sense of freedom. The pressure’s off of you – though you still need to act, trusting God with the results. You pursue holiness, and God works in you to sanctify you, both things functioning in an incredible harmony. Your free will and God’s omniscience are woven together in an intricate balance that we can’t comprehend, but we have the blessing of knowing that everthing is ultimately in God’s hands.
Geth, of the Leven Thumps series, is also a character who believes strongly in fate. But unlike Neil, he sits back most of the time and events conveniently line up for him because, of course, the author makes it that way. Geth was formerly a hot-tempered young king, but after his ‘Dark Side’ emotions (anger and such) are literally cut off of him, he is content to simply let things happen to him. Eventually, though, he begins to lose his faith in fate as he’s confronted with the evil of the world and things stop going well for him.
His faith was interesting to contemplate in the beginning, for it made me analyze my own – and mine isn’t in an impersonal “fate” but in a personal, and very real, God. However, for Geth, fate was an excuse for passivity. Not so for Neil, and that’s part of what I loved about his character.
There’s a quote attributed to John Quincy Adams: “Duty is ours, results are God’s.” It’s like the analogy of witnessing being like planting seeds. It’s your job to have the conversations, live the life, do the things that will plant the seeds in another’s heart. Whether those seeds take root, and then grow, is not up to you, just as it’s not up to the farmer who spread the seeds in a literal scenario. Only God can make the seeds grow.
Death, Control, and Final Thoughts
Niel’s not afraid of dying because he’s certain it’s going to happen, that it would have always happened no matter what choices he made. But he also takes the actionable step of going back to die, because he cares about his friend.
Your life is not in your hands. It is in God’s. He knows the day and time you will die. So rest secure in that, knowing your death will not come until God lets it. Everything is in His hands, under His control. What happens, will happen. And we should be grateful that we have been granted the gift to act, and work with God, to fufill His plans.
Neil found satisfaction and purpose in working for something outside of him, for holding his life to be of less importance than those of his friends and the rest of the world. It’s not about him; it never is. He is a soldier who does his duty and is content.
In the same way, we should do our duty and not constantly try to be in control of our lives and our futures. We should not be, as both TobyMac and Strings & Heart sing, backseat drivers. Let God drive and direct. Give Him control, and surrender. Sit back and enjoy the view out the window. Stop asking ‘are we there yet’ and focus on controling the one thing you can – your behavior. You’ll get there when you get there, and no sooner.
It’s very freeing. There’s no need to worry or fret. Yes, one should use wisdom and plan for the future. God doesn’t call us to be pleasure-seeking, live-for-the-now creatures. Instead we should be like soldiers, who do lay plans and strategize, but work for the mission, focus in the moment, and know when to just double down and follow orders.
Shine bright as is your duty, friends, and do not fear the future, for it is held by the saving, loving God, by our King who is not safe, but is good.
And if your head is hurting like mine is from trying to comprehend what being outside of time is like, and how free will and foreknowledge work in harmony, then just know it’s further proof of how limited we are – and conversely how great and powerful our Creator is.
Thank you for bearing through such a long post.
Until next time,
Cheers.
Cover image created in Canva
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