Director Spotlight: Christopher Nolan
In advance of Tenet, we give you an all-Nolan DYLA
Depending on where you live, you might finally be getting the chance to see Christopher Nolan’s latest mind-bender. Many movie theaters across the country are tentatively reopening this weekend in advance of Tenet’s September 3rd U.S. release date. Originally supposed to open in July, Tenet was pushed back numerous times due to the pandemic, but now it is hitting the big screen as theaters have put safety guidelines in place for returning audiences.
What is Tenet about, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours, but we’re ecstatic for a new original blockbuster from possibly the signature mainstream director of the 21st century. Nolan has delivered hit after hit over the last 20 years, so we wrote about a few that are available to stream right now. Make sure you check out our top 5 Christopher Nolan movies ranking below as well.
Drew recommends…
Inception (streaming on Amazon Prime)
I’m highly anticipating Tenet, but I don’t know how Christopher Nolan could ever surpass his own brilliant precedent when it comes to original big-budget filmmaking. Released 10 years ago last month, Inception is just about the zenith for innovative summer blockbusters.
Nolan’s films compel you to lean forward and pay attention, which is the opposite of so many big-budget Hollywood movies that you can mindlessly half-watch. He assumes his viewers are intelligent enough to keep up with the events and ideas he is putting up on screen. Inception may be the ultimate example of this. Here is a movie that creates dreamworlds within dreamworlds and then expects you to follow the complex story of professional thieves that infiltrate a person’s subconscious in order to implant an idea.
As we are cutting between dream layers, Nolan is playing with different genres in exciting ways. Inception is a heist movie of the mind, but it also incorporates elements of sci-fi, action, espionage, and film noir into the mix. At times it seems like Nolan is injecting all of his major film influences -- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, James Bond movies -- into the screenplay he worked on for 10 years. Before he made The Dark Knight and The Prestige, the notion that a movie about “dream stealers” would become an Oscar-winning box-office sensation probably seemed far-fetched, but fortunately Warner Bros. trusted Nolan’s ambitious vision.
All of this genre mixing and (literally) layered storytelling still wouldn’t have made Inception a runaway success if Nolan hadn’t gone big with the visual spectacle. I still remember watching the trailer in awe of the scene where the cityscape folds back on itself. I couldn’t believe Nolan had essentially been given a blank check to make something this breathtaking and grand out of an original story. And he seized the opportunity to make a movie about guilt, obsession, and the subconscious that also happened to feature shootouts in the snow, a train thundering through city streets, and hand-to-hand combat in a zero-gravity rotating hotel hallway, all set to Hans Zimmer’s incredible booming score.
However, as with all of Nolan’s work, there is meaning beneath the entertaining spectacle. While there are many theories about the film, my favorite (confirmed by the director himself) is that Inception is a movie about making movies. Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) is the director that assembles a creative team, with Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as the producer, Ariadne (Ellen Page) as the production designer, Eames (Tom Hardy) as the actor, and, if you want to go even further, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), as the audience, since Fischer is the target they are incepting with an idea.
You can quibble with certain things in Inception. Does every little plot point make complete sense? I don’t really know, but that has never mattered all that much to me. The experience of watching this movie, whether for the first time in theaters or the many times I’ve seen it since, has always been exhilarating and engaging on many levels. After that famously ambiguous cut to black at the end, I’m always left spellbound at the power of those special few original movies that can thrill and transport me time and again.
Insomnia (streaming on HBO Max)
The following has been re-published from an October 2019 newsletter
Before he went on to helm the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan got his first studio movie shot with Insomnia in 2002. After impressing moviegoers with Memento, his low-budget mind-bender, they gave him the keys to a picture starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hillary Swank. Nolan made the studio their money back on this one, and then he officially stepped into the big leagues three years later with Batman Begins.
Insomnia is mostly a by-the-numbers detective thriller (it’s also the only one of Nolan’s movies where he doesn’t have a screenplay credit), but Nolan does a remarkable job depicting a foggy, atmospheric Alaska where the sun only sets for a couple hours a day. This is what exacerbates Detective Will Dormer’s (Pacino) insomnia as he slowly unravels while investigating a murder in a small Alaskan town. Dormer eyes Robin Williams’ Walter Finch, a local crime writer, with suspicion. It’s one of Williams’ darker and creepier roles, when he was proving he could expand beyond the comedy genius the world already knew. Pacino and Williams make for an unexpected tandem, but they balance each other well on screen.
Insomnia isn’t likely to blow you away, but if you love a good mystery involving detectives solving a crime, you could do much, much worse. You’ve got a young director honing his craft before he went on to bigger things and a cast of three Academy Award-winning actors. Plus, the Alaska setting makes for a nice little twist on the conventional detective thriller.
Billy recommends…
Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (streaming on Hulu and HBO Max)
I am cheating a bit, but this feels like the responsible way to talk about this part of Christopher Nolan’s career. The fanboy culture surrounding Nolan started with Batman Begins and became frankly unbearable at times post-The Dark Knight.
Batman Begins tells the origin story of our most famous superhero by creating an art house worthy addition to a genre that had not been figured out fully at the time. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is a tragic figure that uses his symbol before himself in an attempt to create something that becomes legend. Nolan distorts time during the first 40 or so minutes of this movie by creating a sequence of beginnings at different stages of Wayne’s life, almost ignoring who Bruce Wayne is completely while using the symbol as the crux of the story. This leads into a linear story structure that Nolan almost always seems to fight back against. Distorting time forces the viewer to focus and invest more, allowing the lead into a simple structure to have more weight when the character needs to be the main focus. This is where The Dark Knight takes full advantage of all the work Batman Begins did.
There is no time distortion gimmick here. This is a heist movie set in the superhero genre where our hero isn’t the most important part. Our villain, The Joker (Heath Ledger), is the crux of this story. In a way The Joker is exactly what Bruce Wayne wants the Batman to be: A pure symbol. Instead of distorting physical time, Nolan decides to distort the origin of our villain. Creating 3 separate, probably false, stories that make this unstoppable force all the more terrifying because he is unknown. The Joker sees the power of the Batman symbol and his main goal is to get rid of that hope by trying to out Bruce Wayne as Batman. If he can link the two then the symbol loses all meaning.
Every Nolan tale will have a distortion of time or thought. Creating a universe of movies that are endlessly entertaining, yet exhausting at the same time. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight succeed because this almost always entertaining yet simple superhero genre is given new life because Nolan never completely goes by the numbers. He is at his best when he adopts a genre that needs new life thrusted into it, and these movies are some of the best we have ever seen.
Top 5 Christopher Nolan movies
Drew:
Memento
Inception
The Dark Knight
The Prestige
Interstellar
Billy:
Dunkirk
The Dark Knight
Inception
Memento
Batman Begins