The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

[colinr0380]

I think the ambiguity and the exposition often actually are meant to work in tandem in Nolan for much of the time rather than clashing against each other. The noir plot of Following (with your classic misdirections and double crosses) actually becomes in Memento the main character deluding himself, particularly best shown in that moment about half way through where, after recounting his life story over the phone in multiple scenes, his stream of consciousness monologue is suddenly brought short in its tracks by having forgotten just who he is talking to and why whilst he has been gassing on.

Similarly Inception is obscuring the underlying mission to have someone 'naturally' change their mind on a matter by hiding the subterfuge away under layers of distracting hyperbole, just in visual rather than dialogue terms. The spectacle is the dialectic in that sense. And the dialogue is often used for much the same purpose in a Nolan film (especially Tenet, which is a film that I have come to like a lot more thinking of it less of a world threatening sci-fi thriller than as a noir film, about a woman who capitalises on the situation to be able to both save herself and kill her husband simultaneously), where people constantly talking about their plans is not necessarily something that will work out to plan.

I think the problem well precedes Tenet...

For me it has to be the Insomnia remake takes that honour.

[Mr Sausage]

I tend to discount Insomnia because I don’t know how much of it Nolan wrote, given he’s not credited as writer. It‘s a bad movie, but bad in ways I don’t consider typically Nolan. But, yeah, it does make a blunt redemption story out of the original’s more twisty, ambiguous psychological thriller, but does so in ways that feel typically Hollywood. So much of the film feels like anonymous hackwork.

Nolan wouldn’t fulfill the promise of Memento until six years later with The Prestige. There was a time where it felt like Nolan was using the success of the Batman films to fund riskier personal ventures, and that was exciting.

[colinr0380]

The Insomnia remake mostly fails to me because of what it does with the dog to fabricate the ballistic evidence. And the rather too neatly redemptive ending, both of which the original film handled perfectly already.

Following and Memento feel like his masterpieces still to me. But it is easy to see aspects of those films appearing in Nolan's later ones. I would still stand by my earlier comment about characters obscuring versus characters cathartically ploughing through all the carefully constructed layers of subterfuge and ambiguity as one of the key traits of Nolan (a trait where there is no particular pressure placed upon either side in that equation on who can be the 'hero' and who the 'villain'), but one of the other themes that seems to be getting clearer and clearer in his films is the one relating to women. So many of Nolan's films are superficially all about men performing daring actions and being very physically oriented, but his films regularly capture a sense of female dominance in the 'bigger questions' that both whips on men into doing acts they commit on the woman's behalf, whilst also maintaining a strangely passive lack of responsibility for their role in proceedings as well, of being the force that drives men into doing those same behaviours.

I still have yet to see Oppenheimer (or any of the Batmans!) to see how those would or would not fit the thesis, but see perhaps the main female character of Tenet who basically uses the time travel gimmick and McGuffin of a world-destroying plot as an excuse to be able to kill her powerful and abusive oligarch husband; the final act of Inception where Marion Cotillard's character springs up from the depths of Leonardo Di Caprio's mind to invade his otherwise perfectly planned heist plot; Carrie-Anne Moss in Memento punching herself in the face to create bruises to get him to kill her partner after telling the main character that she is doing this because with his short-term memory loss condition he will not remember and take her word for it. The daughter and female co-astronaut in Interstellar, tugging the main character between their two poles like magnets influencing iron filings. It even goes all the way back to the femme fatale in Nolan's first film Following (though things do not end particularly well for the female character in that particular film!)

That notion could be pushed even further to suggest that it is often only the 'concept' of the female in Nolan's films that works as the motivator for the male characters (the dead wife in Memento as the motivator; the 'abandoned' daughter and co-astronaut in Interstellar, and so on), whilst the actual flesh and blood women, when they do briefly appear, may actually have entirely different goals that the film is at pains to keep obscure!