Just attempted to watch "Tenet," directed by Christopher Nolan, which made me realize how there is a pretty fine line between challenging your audience in an engaging way, and then creating such a complicated world that ends up alienating any sort of natural enjoyment of the story.
I spent most of the movie with my eyebrows creased, thinking back on the previous scene trying to retain any information that was thrown at me, and in the meantime, not actually understanding the current information because I'm too perplexed digesting the last scene. It made for an increasing amount of frustration minute by minute.
This also makes it difficult for any real development for empathy towards the characters. Especially when all they talk about are these fast-paced conversations that often just feel there's a lot of subtext you're supposed to be getting, but you just aren't.
And here's the thing-- you don't need to understand all the jargon and details to enjoy a heavily science-fiction plot. Christoper Nolan himself very well accomplished this with Interstellar and Inception, which is why I was so disappointed to see him miss the mark with Tenet. When you intertwine core and universal human emotions, the story could really be anything and any sort of made-up world. You can give your audience that emotional climax without them having intellectually understood everything. And that's exactly what was missing from Tenet-- a throughline of emotional meaning that could help glide people through even when they didn't understand all the sci-fi details.
Or maybe I lack the intelligence for a Christopher Nolan plot. Who's to say, really!