Summary — A puzzle-box thriller that's more fun to think about than to watch. Ambitious, cold, and frequently unintelligible.
I respect what Tenet is trying to do. The inverted-time concept produces a handful of genuinely jaw-dropping action sequences — the highway chase, the airport heist, the final raid with two timelines colliding. Nolan is one of the few directors who can pull off practical effects at this scale.
But the movie keeps you at arm's length. The sound mix buries half the dialogue, the protagonist is a name and a function rather than a character, and the romance subplot belongs in a different film. By the third act I had given up trying to track who was going forward and who was going backward.
A three-star movie that thinks it's a four. Worth seeing once on a big screen, then never thinking about again.