Tenet: Christopher Nolan hides Sator Square in new movie

Look, there are loads of small details that probably escaped your notice in Tenet. But this clever one is a whopper. WARNING: Spoilers.

WARNING: Tenet spoilers ahead – sort of, though can a movie as impenetrable as Tenet even be spoiled?

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan is well-known for his love of puzzles and mysteries, so he layers them into his movies.

Tenet is full of them, and in no way are we suggesting we understand the nitty gritty of it – because we don’t. We really, really don’t.

Of course, there are a gazillion different details in Tenet that would make you go, “Whoa!” but there’s one conundrum that is really awesome and cool, even if it may not relate to the story on the whole. Then again, it might, we can’t tell, it’s so confusing.

Behold: the Sator Square.

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

The Sator Square is also known as a Rotas Square and it’s a palindromic word square, a type of acrostic. The earliest example of the Sator Square was found in the ruins of Pompeii.

The arrangement has also appeared in old churches across Europe and anagrams of its letters have formed the first words of Christian prayers while others have attributed magical properties to it.

As you can see in the image below, it contains five five-letter words arranged in a square: SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA and ROTAS.

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The Sator Square found in the ruins of Pompeii.

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Sator is rotas backwards and arepo is opera backwards while tenet is a palindrome, meaning it’s spelt the same forwards as it is backwards.

Tenet, the movie, of course deals with the movement of time, both forwards and backwards, played out through “time inversion”.

We see two set pieces which involve what the movie calls a “temporal pincer” move in which half a combat team moves forwards as normal and the other half of the team is inverted and moves backwards to the same moment.

And then there was the revelation from Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character that the whole movie was a “temporal pincer” move. Ooph, our heads hurt.

Get it? It’s all a palindrome.

Director Christopher Nolan indulged in his love of puzzles in Tenet.

Now, we’re not claiming this discovery for ourselves. Much like the rest of the non-brainiacs in the world, we had never even heard of the Sator Square until combing through the Tenet spoiler boards on Reddit looking for some answers – any answers!

Beyond the title, Tenet – which, some other Redditor pointed out is also the word “ten” backwards and forwards, like the 10-minute countdown in that final sequence – the other four words in the Sator Square also appear in the movie.

Sator is, obviously, the name of Kenneth Branagh’s Russian oligarch Bond villain. Rotas was apparently the name of the security company who guarded the Freeport warehouses in Oslo.

Opera is the opening sequence at the Ukrainian opera house – and the word The Protagonist dropped at dinner with Sator. Arepo is the name of the artist who painted the forged Goyas.

Keen-eyed people on Reddit actually speculated last year that the Sator Square would come into play when a Tenet crew member apparently posted a photo of his wrap gift, which was a version of the Sator Square.

A crew member posted an image of his Tenet wrap gift last year – a Sator Square

But now that the movie is out, we know how it fits into Tenet, even if it’s not 100 per cent clear whether there’s any real significance to it or if it’s just one of those clever things people are really smug about picking up.

Either way, consider our minds blown – albeit not reassembled.

Tenet is cinemas now (excluding Victoria)

Originally published as Tenet: Christopher Nolan hides Sator Square in new movie