FINALLY got around to watching
Tenet last night since it popped up on HBO Max. 8.5/10
After hearing some feedback about this movie and the sound mix, I decided to watch it with captions which I believe helped quite a bit! Plus my daughter was sleeping so I didn't want to ramp up my Bose because Nolan movies tend to be very loud and orchestral.
Overall, this movie is like trying to tell your friend at a bar about a really cool story you read, but you are slightly buzzed and sometimes you aren't very coherent, but in the end you manage to tie it up and it overall you get your point across. The movie itself is great if you aren't actively trying to figure it out, but you really don't realize that until the end that it will try its best to make sense in the final scenes. It REALLY makes you pay attention to the exposition and clues it gives you, and none of the main characters do anything, including check their pulses, without some consequence for the end game of the film.
I put this in the same vein as films like Edge of Tomorrow,Oblivion, 2001, etc. which are heady science fiction pieces that might be a little too smart for their own good at times but deliver when it matters. Nolan just has an effortless style to him and the pacing can be breakneck at times but he manages to fit a lot into the 2 hour 30 minute runtime. Some things still don't quite make sense to me, but if you think about the ending of the film and work backwards it makes much more sense which I guess was the point.