WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Tenet, in select theaters now.

Christopher Nolan's Tenet lives up to its action tag as the movie's Protagonist (John David Washington) goes all out to stop the apocalypse. He partners with the mysterious Neil (Robert Pattinson) to stop the Russian oligarch in the present, Sator (Kenneth Branagh), who's working with an evil society from the future.

With inversion (objects moving backward in time) being a main concept in the movie, one scheme that works for both heroes and villains alike is the "temporal pincer movement." This involves one point in time called the Hypocenter, with one force moving forward towards it, while another moves backward towards it. And while it sounds complicated, it's actually easier to understand when you see how it's used as the driving factor behind a few key moments.

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THE CAR CHASE

The Protagonist wants to stop Sator from stealing some plutonium early on, but he's gotten the villain's wife, Kat, entangled in the plot. This leads to a car chase where Sator wants to ransom her in exchange for the item the Protagonist stole. From there, mind-bending scenes occur with a damaged gray car being inverted, as well as a black jeep driving backward, that could leave viewers confused as to how they're operating in reverse in the real world.

Well, it turns out Sator actually has two teams running the game. One team's in the present moving forward while the other is in reverse coming from the future. The latter has all the knowledge about how the heist will play out so they use this info, gleaned from an interrogation with the Protagonist (who hid the item) and Kat, whom Sator shoots. The inverted Sator and his team then go back in time to get the case that doesn't actually contain plutonium, but a piece of a doomsday device called the Algorithm.

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THE AIRPORT JOB

Early on, the Protagonist and Neil have their colleagues ram a plane into an airport storage facility so they can steal a bogus painting to get Sator to stop blackmailing Kat for selling him the fake. However, they're attacked by a masked soldier who's inverted. He fights the Protagonist and eventually escapes, getting sucked out a cargo door. As it turns out, this is actually the Protagonist suited up and moving backward in time.

After Kat got shot, he and Neil inverted with her to stop the inverted bullet's radiation in her system and have to now use the "time stile" device at the airport so they can all move forward in time again. Luckily, the Protagonist uses his knowledge of the plane crash in the first place to get his new plan in motion. This device is also what allows the Protagonist to travel back during the aforementioned car chase, only to fail to stop Sator from getting the relic. This airport scene is similar in that there are versions of people moving forward and backward at the same time, with the other Protagonist moving forward in the black car to try to rescue Kat.

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THE SOVIET RAID

In the finale, there's a Soviet bunker the Protagonist and his red team must attack to get the Algorithm back. Neil takes his blue squad movie in the opposite direction in time, and as they're inverted, it makes the bunker a Hypocenter. Both teams launch the raid, one with 10 minutes to go and the other counting towards 10 minutes, and it comes to a head when the Protagonist and Ives (another Tenet soldier) meet an access point.

However, the gate's locked, but fortunately,  a corpse on the other side reanimates, taking a bullet meant for the Protagonist before opening the gate and reversing out. He's inverted, which allows the forward-moving Protagonist and Ives to kill Sator's guy and stop the device from going off. It turned out that the inverted soldier's actually a future version of Neil who died there as he had the info on how the battle would end.

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THE ENTIRE MOVIE

In actuality, the entire plot of the movie is actually a time pincer movement because at that point when Neil gives the Protagonist his part of the Algorithm to keep, it's clear what Tenet is. Neil has to become inverted and die, while the Protagonist moves forward using startling information from Neil that he will actually go on to start Tenet in the future, recruit Neil and send these soldiers back.

To put it simply, the older Protagonist is the mastermind, using pawns to attack backward in time to the Soviet mission, while the younger Protagonist moves forward from the opening scene at the opera raid to the moment Neil tells him of his destiny. The future version of the Protagonist knew how it would all end, so he's simply putting the pieces on the board for when his younger self gets wind of what Sator is plotting. Neil learned what to do in the future and his job was to guide the Protagonist to save the world and then form the Tenet organization, which, of course, is what leads to the saving of the world in this closed loop.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Tenet stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branaugh, Dimple Kapadia, Martin Donovan, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Himesh Patel, Clémence Poésy, Denzil Smith and Michael Caine. The film arrives in theaters in select U.S. cities Sept. 3.

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