With the release of the much anticipated Tenet almost upon us, Chris Burns gives us a breakdown of the iconic director Christopher Nolan’s eclectic career.
10 – Following (1998)
It’s interesting to see a Christopher Nolan film wear its influences on its sleeve as much as Following does. Looking like a cross between early Hitchcock and John Cassavettes, it’s a taut but nasty little thriller that feels part French New Wave and part Peeping Tom. For all its obvious amateur energy and self conscious plotting though, there’s a blueprint for the tricky and dark side of Nolan. Following may be the forgotten Nolan entry and the most unremarkable, but everything we’ve come to know with Chris Nolan is in the blood of his debut feature.
9 – Insomnia (2002)
Nolan’s first big studio film with big studio stars was perhaps his audition for Batman Begins and the big leagues that awaited him. Insomnia, though under-seen and often glossed over, is a claustrophobic yet neat thriller with a 90’s cat and mouse sheen to it. Nolan shows early on he can pull the darkness from his actors as both a despairing Al Pacino and Robin Williams traipse through a barren Alaskan wilderness. It’s moody, unsettling and gives us an insight into the heart of darkness that Nolan has perhaps shed slightly as he’s gotten older.
8 – The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
You could ask what happened. Two pretty much perfect films before and then… this?
The Dark Knight Rises looks like Nolan at his least meticulous and controlled. There’s a lot of fun to be had with Rises in its action set pieces and we do get intensely up close and personal with Bruce Wayne once more (still Nolan’s strongest feature of his Batman trilogy) but there is a callousness for logic and a looseness that left the film open to ridicule. From gaping plot holes that feel very un-Nolan to a lack of atmosphere and peril, the finale to The Dark Knight trilogy is by no means a bad film. However, it’s a highly frustrating and bewildering one, considering what came before it.
7 – Memento (2000)
Does Nolan deliberately like to keep us in a state of confusion or is he just always one step ahead of us and simply waiting for us to catch up? For a low budget indie offering, Memento laid the foundations for thrillers and murder mysteries and still, you could argue, has yet to be beaten in terms of its craft and style. As tightly constructed as Inception and as sombre as The Prestige, Memento is a tour de force of independent cinema, it might also be Nolan’s coolest movie. Guy Pearce has never looked better as the tattooed Leonard and the way the film duels with itself through its two separate narratives is still as impressive now as it was 20 years ago.
6 – Dunkirk (2017)
Dunkirk could have so easily been awash with careless patriotism and flag waving bravado – and, sure, it does have its indulgences – but what caught audiences and critics alike back in 2017 was how precise and calculated a film it was. Forgoing most of the sentiment war films can be swamped in, Dunkirk feels more like an exercise in narrative structure and one that’s closely mirrored with Memento and Inception (hello to those multi-layered set pieces again) than it does a film actually telling us the story of Dunkirk as we know it.
It’s said the war and horror genre are so closely aligned and yet rarely do they mix outside of B movie mash ups. But, in typical Nolan fashion, Dunkirk hops genres and thanks to its luscious sound design, beautifully restrained editing and heart stopping tension (sequences of running from gun fire and characters facing the threat of drowning are particularly gruelling sequences) there are times when we feel like we’re in a full blown horror. It’s Nolan’s second shortest film and by far one of his most economical. There’s also the jarring nature of a war film being so preoccupied with story and maybe less fixated on its characters, but somehow in its final few frames, Nolan manages to put the focus back on the young men and their heroics in a scene that’s hits surprisingly hard.
5 – The Prestige (2006)
You’ll often here Nolan diehards say The Prestige is right up there on their ‘best of’ lists. It’s maybe, alongside Memento, the ‘mature’ choice and arguably the overlooked gem of his oeuvre. It’s also, probably along with Memento and Insomnia, the time when Nolan has truly exercised the darkness in him to create a beautifully constructed labyrinth of misery and intrigue. Duelling magicians Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are both on masterful form and Nolan’s, not often used enough, penchant for the downright weird is wonderfully realised. The Prestige features a bombastic yet tragic narrative and David Bowie on electric (no pun intended) form as Nikola Tesla.
There are missteps of course, some characters are underwritten – Nolan has never written a great female character – and the plot developments do require you to take big leaps of faith on occasion. But, jumping from fantasy, drama to science fiction The Prestige keeps the DNA and macabre obsessive nature of Memento yet strays into something bigger and stranger. It’s Nolan’s most underrated and maybe his most surprising.
4 – Inception (2010)
It’s midway through Inception when Ellen Page’s Ariadne asks “Who’s subconscious are we going into exactly?” and It’s about midway through Inception that you understand you’re not only dealing with a different kind of blockbuster, but a different kind of film experience altogether. We had seen this sort of narrative playfulness on display in Memento and these kind of impressive practical effects in The Dark Knight, but both here were implemented with such innovation and confident artistry – this is after all a huge tentpole summer movie where the hero is also essentially the villain.
The final hour of Inception goes down as one of Nolan’s best passages of cinema. It’s multi-layered set piece finale is not only a mesmerising display of stunt work and choreography but the story structure carries such emotional heft – something which Nolan delves into further later on his career much more explicitly. Inception left audiences wowed in 2010, but watch it again today and you still feel the same way.
3 – The Dark Knight (2008)
The Dark Knight had reached iconic status before it even hit cinemas. Back in 2008, Warner Bros’ viral marketing campaign for Nolan’s superhero sequel was as groundbreaking as the film that followed and changed how movie marketing works to this day. It was almost like the film itself couldn’t fail. And it didn’t.
There’s an aura to The Dark Knight that gives it an untouchable feel; there’s the ultimate performance Nolan has ever gotten out of an actor in Heath Ledger’s legendary Joker, a gloomy exploration into duality and anarchy never seen before in a superhero film, and a truck chase set piece that still to this day feels iconoclastic. The Dark Knight not only became the most talked about film of 2008 but arguably the most influential film of the decade.
However, for all it’s creative spark, there’s also a playbook feel to it on occasion and there’s times where it’s almost entangled in its own grand ideas and you can feel Chris and Jonah Nolan writing themselves out of each ingenious set piece as they pass by – the finale on the boats is bloated and mishandled, if impressively concocted.
The Dark Knight may well be looked upon as Nolan’s ultimate achievement when the curtain falls on his career and no would take issue with that. What’s most interesting is that it’s a film that shows Nolan figuring out how to convey and condense his ideas on a huge scale. This is to varying degrees of success – similar to a film coming up on this list, it’s ambitious as hell and mainly successful.
2 – Batman Begins (2005)
It was a long wait for Batman to make his return to the screen after Joel Schumacher‘s infamous Batman and Robin – it was 8 years in fact until Nolan’s version hit cinemas.
Audiences were desperate to see the new, serious and stylish incarnation of the Bat, and yet almost an hour into Batman Begins… and still no sign of Batman, why?
We were made to wait because unlike any other film maker who has dealt with Batman, Nolan knew the crux of the story was really about the man behind the mask, Bruce Wayne.
By the time Bruce puts on the cowl we understand everything about him from his method to his madness.
Nolan’s first Batman film is a rigid examination of a tormented, angry and lost man and yet
the ridiculous, flamboyant side of Batman – the things you usually have to suspend your disbelief for: the Bat Cave, the car, the gadgets and the concept of the Batsuit itself are all effortlessly justified and rationalised.
Nolan’s two biggest achievements with his Batman trilogy were making us engage with and care for Bruce Wayne, a character so often marginalised in his own stories, and making everything in this Gotham City feel real and authentic. Is it better than The Dark Knight? It’s smaller in intellect and in ideas but up until it’s admittedly slightly shaky finale, Batman Begins is a bold, brilliant and still unrivalled dissection of the the superhero psyche.
1 – Interstellar (2014)
The heart of Nolan’s filmography is his most sneered and laughed at. It’s his biggest, most ambitious but undoubtedly his most misunderstood film. For all it’s clunky dialogue and erratic storytelling there’s a hushed spirituality and an ethereal softness in its visuals and a surprise poignancy in its overriding message of regret and ultimately, love.
However, it’s naysayers will always point to its final act. It’s accused of being big, messy and unintelligible and in some ways it’s guilty of all those things and the question is, has Nolan every truly got to grips with ending his films? For a filmmaker with so many ideas, wrapping them all up in a bow and boxing them up with a message isn’t easy. Interstellar though has a last act that feels complete, is experiential and brazenly emotional.
The ‘bookcase’ segment will always be Nolan’s albatross but it’s a joyous metaphysical sequence that’s as as reckless as it is fun and, crucially, free of cynicism. It’s poignant, nostalgic, sad and it feels like Nolan at his least self conscious.
Then there’s Hans Zimmer’s iconic score. The assault on our senses that is Interstellar would be perhaps be sorely lacking without Zimmer’s organ led symphony, and it’s the score that helps make interstellar feel like an operatic experience.
Whereas The Dark Knight trilogy examines societal and political strife, Inception and Dunkirk revolve around men out of time, while Memento, Following, Insomnia and The Prestige see Nolan indulging his demons and weirding nightmare narratives, Interstellar is about love and what we would do for it. The story of an absent father battling time and space to get back to his children was originally written with Spielberg in mind and it is tough to imagine how something so sentimental would attach itself to Nolan, but Nolan IS an emotional film maker – the concept that he isn’t is one of the biggest misconceptions about him.
The sequence in which Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper watches his children grow up over 20 years over video message is absolutely heart wrenching and the best scene Nolan has ever put to film. Nolan’s finest scene is not any of his incredibly mind bending, stomach churning set pieces but of a man crying in front of a television.The DNA of who Nolan is as a director flows through that scene and throughout Interstellar.
So It’s maybe controversial, it’s maybe derided and loved in equal measure, but it’s also an undeniably spectacular experience
Words by Chris Burns