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A Brief Defense of Tenet’s Worst Line


Elizabeth Debicki uttering “including my son” gets at the root of Christopher Nolan’s whole ethos.

It’s uttered during a pensive scene in which the Protagonist (John David Washington), Neil (Robert Pattinson), and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) reckon with what could happen if the villainous Sator’s (Kenneth Branagh) time-bending plot comes to pass. “Including my son?” is a centering and clarifying moment for a person whose priorities are jumbled and confused after incurring an injury in backwards-time. Think of the harrowing rally scene in Oppenheimer in which Cillian Murphy’s titular character has a vision of the bomb’s destruction across a crowd of American patriots, a woman’s face peeling off as she screams in horror.

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