Christopher Nolan

30/10/2026

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A Reputation Beyond Merit

Christopher Nolan is the action director of our time, taking over from Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, with his films earning over £3.3 billion up to and including Inception. Oppenheimer alone has made $900m so far. Then we have his most recent film. “The Odyssey has become the highest-grossing film of Christopher Nolan’s career, having made more than US$1bn at the global box office less than a month after its release.” (Guardian) One reason may rest on what Barbara Klinger calls the puzzle film, another on what David Bordwell conceptualises as intensified continuity, and a third on developments in computer-generated imagery (CGI). Nolan’s reputation rests partly on his accepting, and resisting, these aspects of contemporary film.

Let us take the last, first. He is someone who is often drawn to the impossible imagery of CGI, as we find Paris folding over on itself in Inception. “The folding streets were built entirely through CGI, a process so complex that the effort was begun a full eight months before the movie's release.” (MTV) Other key Nolan scenes like the 747 careening into the hangar in Tenet and the opening mid-air scene in The Dark Knight Rises used actual aircraft and locations. There may be a logic to this: when filming the impossible (a folding Paris), accept that the film needs CGI. When offering an event that could easily take place within the laws of physics, try as much as possible to use the existing world and its objects. This can make Nolan’s films more apparently authentic than most contemporary action thrillers.

If this takes care of the computer imagery, but what about the puzzles? According to Klinger, “Puzzle films typically display several of the following characteristics: mature subject matter; a complex, atypical, multilayered narrative (that experiments with temporal order, for example); a confusion of objective and subjective realms; a visually dense style; an ending that depends on a reversal or surprise that makes viewers reevaluate their experience with the text; and the presence of an initially occult meaning that requires re-viewing to uncover the text's mysteries.” (Beyond the Multiplex) Memento can seem confusing on a first viewing; clear on a second. Its forward-moving black-and-white sequences and backwards-moving colour scenes give the story an initially complicated form, one that means we aren’t only unravelling the story, but also the strategies involved in its telling.

This leaves intensified continuity, with many contemporary films relying on faster cutting, multiple camera lenses and greater camera movement. As Bordwell says, “Just as it is unlikely that today’s director will build an entire film out of long takes, it’s virtually unthinkable to shoot the bulk of a film with a 50mm lens…” (The Way Hollywood Tells It). No matter how good the story, no matter how engaging the performances, there is also a very assertive visual augmentation. To this, we can add developments in sound. “If you watch old movies,” sound mixer Matthew Price says, “you might hear some sound effects here and there but now they go nuts: somebody’s walking across the room in a leather jacket, you hear the zippers clink and the creak of the leather and every footstep is right in your face.” (Guardian) Nolan indeed goes nuts: “He wants to grab the audience by the lapels and pull them toward the screen”, Nolan’s sound designer Richard King says, “and not allow the watching of his films to be a passive experience.” (Guardian) The Irish Film Institute would play Tenet at 4, projectionist Richard Markey says, because 6 was “ridiculously loud”. “The more expensive movies have got, the more of a bombardment they become on your senses.” (Guardian)

All of these factors make watching a Nolan film feel like a new experience, new next to earlier action and disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Terminator. It is partly why he is seen as the new Spielberg, the new Cameron — the auteur of the box office. Nolan’s films don’t only make a lot of money; he is making films quite unlike those in the forties and fifties, even the seventies and eighties. But what if all this newness indicates that Nolan isn’t so good with the old stuff — characterisation, scene construction, acoustic specificity and delineating narrative? In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne and his butler/mentor are discussing access to a plane, and the camera whirls around the room in a 360-degree shot. A moment later, characters Harvey Dent and Rachael are on the street and notice a ballet performance has been cancelled as they look at a newspaper clipping saying Wayne has absconded with the entire ballet company on his yacht. The first shot makes little sense as it spins around while giving us no new information. The second shot does, as the film then cuts to Wayne and the ballet company on a yacht in the ocean. The camera moving in on the clipping might be as old as Hitchcock, but nobody would say the shot is pointless. We know exactly why the camera is doing what it is doing. It is giving us information. For Nolan to be a new filmmaker in the strictest sense, he would need to give to that first shot the purpose of the latter, without just aping Hitchcock. Even that 360-degree camera movement owes a debt to the master, who used it so well in Vertigo as time dissolves in the intensity of the kiss he shows.

This isn’t to say all filmmakers have to offer clearly motivated shots — great directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Martin Scorsese have all left us musing over a shot’s purpose. But they also want that puzzlement; they wish for us to think about the form as we try to comprehend a character small within the frame, a tracking movement that seems to lead nowhere, or a cut to an object that doesn’t further the story. Nolan is a filmmaker in the tradition of Hitchcock, Leone, Tarantino (and yes, Spielberg and Cameron). Yet at the same time, the impression of being so modern is also what may sometimes be getting in the way of telling a story efficiently with a visual language that allows a viewer to make time and space coherent. If we think of early moments in Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, this should become clearer. Clint Eastwood’s character enters a bar, and it looks like we have a superfluous high angle shot of the stairway. But at the end of the scene, Eastwood asks the barman what is up the stairs, and they go up them. Leone shows us the layout of the town from the balcony as he allows an unmotivated shot to become a motivated one. Equally, a minute later, Eastwood stands in the square, and the film is low-angled for no apparent reason. But in the next shot, we see what was in the background becoming important as the film shows a figure coming out onto this balcony.

There is a similar moment in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where the Nazis come to talk to a French cinema owner, and the film offers a high-angle from the top of the stairs, travelling along the balcony as they leave the building. It is a fine shot that captures an impending threat. It is also well-motivated. It starts with a colleague coming out of his room and watching what is going on below, ending on a cut back to him. Maybe Tarantino could have removed the opening shot and left us wondering if it is a point of view and then confirming it by the cut back — but this is efficient and effective cinema from someone whose favourite director is the Italian maestro: “You don’t go past Leone, you start with Leone.” (IndieWire) Neither Leone nor Tarantino, here, use distinctive shots just because they have the money and resources to do so. This type of ‘distinctiveness’ has now become common. As Bordwell notes: “A 2003 directing manual states in all seriousness, “a good objective for any first-time director would be to move his camera as much as possible to look as hip and MTV-wise as he can.’” (The Way Hollywood Tells It) When Nolan was asked about the difference between his first feature, Following, and his second, Memento, he said: “The easiest way to put it is just to say it was a jump from thousands to millions”, before adding that next he would like to “…make that same kind of jump again, from millions to billions. See, I told you I’m really a very mainstream filmmaker at heart!” (Filmmaker Magazine) He might think he is joking, but to be a mainstream filmmaker is often about putting that money on screen in ever more elaborate production values. The form is dictated by the finance, and the more money, the slicker it looks.

We can contrast the scenes from A Fistful of Dollars and Inglourious Basterds with a clever moment in Tenet. Here, the two main characters, the Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson), are trying to get into a building and discuss how it might be possible. They decide to catapult themselves into the air as a reverse bungee jump. Nolan could have made more of the specifics, as various commentators have questioned the logic of the sequence, and he could have saved us the explanation beforehand about what they are going to do. But this is an audacious moment that comes close to an action sequence which makes sense, and one that gives us an innovative way of scaling a building. Yet, it might be fair to say this is a better idea than an executed action.

This could be a useful way of looking at Nolan’s films: they are both expositional and action-filled, ideas-based and yet offering viewers plenty of excitement. However, a danger of having lots of ideas is how a filmmaker conveys them, and Nolan often works with a binary system of exposition and manifestation. Sometimes this works very well, and maybe never better than during the opening of The Prestige. Here, magic coordinator and engineer John Cutter (Michael Caine) explains to a young girl that every magic trick consists of three parts: the pledge, with the magician showing you an ordinary thing like a bird, a deck of cards, or a man. The magician then offers the turn. He takes this ordinary thing and does something extraordinary — like make it disappear. But that isn’t enough. Nobody is inclined to clap because of this. What matters is the prestige: you bring the missing thing back. Nolan doesn’t just set up the film well in this sequence. He also dramatises it and anticipates later events as Cutter tells the story to what we will later discover is the daughter of one of the main characters, Borden (Christian Bale). The scene also illustrates the trick and its potential failings in a crosscut, one with Alfred and his rival Angier (Hugh Jackman). The expositional is contained by the dramatic while also anticipating later narrative information, info that isn’t just a way of giving the viewer details about the next scene.

In Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, the exposition often precedes the drama, but doesn’t especially anticipate or augment it. Near the beginning of Inception, key ‘extractor’ Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explains to a wealthy businessman what he does: not only can he extract thoughts, but also incept them: “once an idea takes hold of the brain”, he says, “it is almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks…” This is offered in standard shot/reverse shot and, though it anticipates aspects of the story that will hinge on his wife’s suicide when an idea takes hold in her mind, it lacks the immediacy or dramatic effectiveness evident at the beginning of The Prestige.

As the budgets became bigger, did Nolan lose some of that effectiveness, making what amounts to Bondian films with more brilliance, yet also more confusion? Tom Shone invokes Kubrick, as he says Nolan speaks with the “…calm certainty of things he has known his entire life” (Guardian). Yet while the comparisons to Kubrick have been frequent, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw wonders if, while “Nolan is occasionally described as the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick's mantle…it is tempting to say that Nolan is the new Lewis Gilbert, director of The Spy Who Loved Me.” (Guardian)

Imagine a Bond film where the evil villain wants to take over the world but is dying and, instead of vanquishing the son, Bond tries to take over the son’s mind, and we have a film close to Inception. Tenet is even closer to a Bond movie, with a Russian oligarch capable of doing more than taking over the world – he can destroy it backwards. He has the capacity to invert entropy: making objects go into reverse. Tenet has the sort of plot that would have Bond downing a few too many martinis in bewilderment, and Q struggling to keep up. But in its combination of exposition, evil villainy and action set-pieces, Nolan adds a patina of theoretical physics to the sort of temporal reversal that has long been practised in literature: Alejo Carpentier’s ‘Journey Back to the Source’, Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, and ‘Time’s Arrow’ by Martin Amis. In Nolan’s example, time doesn’t only reverse; it moves backwards and forward simultaneously, leading to some mind-bending action scenes where characters are fighting into the future and others fighting into the past, all the while fighting each other.

Nolan takes ideas by Richard Feynman, and what Feynman calls anti-matter, and applies them not just to an electron, but to characters and objects. It especially seems to draw on Nolan’s Memento: the movement forward in time past in black and white, and backwards in time present in colour. But in the earlier film it was a non-diegetic conceit; now it becomes a diegetic adventure. Before, it was something the film was doing to us as viewers; in Tenet it is part of the very story.

Discussing the book Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Tom Boniface-Webb says the author, Robbie B. H. Goh, “introduces Nolan as an epistemic filmmaker, interested in the limits of human knowledge and how this affects major moral decisions.” (Senses of Cinema) But while film and philosophy have become a major area of discussion in film studies over recent decades, one important dimension of it is that a filmmaker is philosophical with images; they aren’t philosophical because they discuss philosophical issues. If a filmmaker uses philosophy as a narrative conceit, rather than as an exploratory question, the enquiry is subsumed by the plot. When Descartes offers his evil genius hypothesis, Nietzsche his eternal return, or Plutarch the ship of Theseus, they do so not because they want to tell a story, but that they wish to reveal a problem their conceit opens up. Perhaps very few filmmakers are philosophical in this sense: they are storytellers chiefly. But a properly philosophical filmmaker will retain the importance of the conceit as they develop their narrative. The point of the conceit is to develop the thought experiment; it isn’t to use it as a premise for narrative event. In this sense, Stalker, Her, 1985’s The Fly and Hidden Life are far more philosophical than any of Nolan’s films, where the idea is less integrated into the film’s exploration.

Nolan perhaps is aware of the problem, saying that when he was editing Interstellar he was hit by “a brick wall of exposition”, an issue that he never quite resolved and that shows up elsewhere too. In Tenet, various characters become expositional hubs, people who explain chunks of plot so the viewer can begin to comprehend the purpose of the next piece of action. In one scene, an arms dealer explains to the central character why the villain is such a powerful force in the industry. She says Sator (Kenneth Branagh) has all nine pieces of the Algorithm, which he can use to destroy the world. But not if those in the future manage to wrest it from him. There is a lot more exposition than this, and plenty of other characters get to explain too: the villain’s wife explains why she is still with her husband, the villain explains why he is evil, Neil explains theoretical physics. If we now have the clumsy but necessary neologism mansplaining, then Nolan is the master of cinesplaining: telling us what we are about to see in the action.

This suggests that Nolan isn’t quite the master action filmmaker he is generally credited as being, and just because we see clearly the signs of newness in the intensified continuity, in the presence of the puzzle, and in the utilisation and resistance to the problem of CGI, these aren’t quite enough to use Nolan as a model for where the action film should be, and certainly not to use him as the last word in philosophical filmmaking. He is an ambitious director, someone who wants to take the blockbuster to places few other directors have been willing to take it. However, we should keep in mind that where he is taking it needn’t be a lesson to others. Aren’t there other, more skilful filmmakers like Hitchcock and Leone out there if we are to learn the lessons of a master? As it is, Nolan has a reputation beyond merit, no matter the box office returns. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Christopher Nolan

A Reputation Beyond Merit

Christopher Nolan is the action director of our time, taking over from Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, with his films earning over £3.3 billion up to and including Inception. Oppenheimer alone has made $900m so far. Then we have his most recent film. “The Odyssey has become the highest-grossing film of Christopher Nolan’s career, having made more than US$1bn at the global box office less than a month after its release.” (Guardian) One reason may rest on what Barbara Klinger calls the puzzle film, another on what David Bordwell conceptualises as intensified continuity, and a third on developments in computer-generated imagery (CGI). Nolan’s reputation rests partly on his accepting, and resisting, these aspects of contemporary film.

Let us take the last, first. He is someone who is often drawn to the impossible imagery of CGI, as we find Paris folding over on itself in Inception. “The folding streets were built entirely through CGI, a process so complex that the effort was begun a full eight months before the movie's release.” (MTV) Other key Nolan scenes like the 747 careening into the hangar in Tenet and the opening mid-air scene in The Dark Knight Rises used actual aircraft and locations. There may be a logic to this: when filming the impossible (a folding Paris), accept that the film needs CGI. When offering an event that could easily take place within the laws of physics, try as much as possible to use the existing world and its objects. This can make Nolan’s films more apparently authentic than most contemporary action thrillers.

If this takes care of the computer imagery, but what about the puzzles? According to Klinger, “Puzzle films typically display several of the following characteristics: mature subject matter; a complex, atypical, multilayered narrative (that experiments with temporal order, for example); a confusion of objective and subjective realms; a visually dense style; an ending that depends on a reversal or surprise that makes viewers reevaluate their experience with the text; and the presence of an initially occult meaning that requires re-viewing to uncover the text's mysteries.” (Beyond the Multiplex) Memento can seem confusing on a first viewing; clear on a second. Its forward-moving black-and-white sequences and backwards-moving colour scenes give the story an initially complicated form, one that means we aren’t only unravelling the story, but also the strategies involved in its telling.

This leaves intensified continuity, with many contemporary films relying on faster cutting, multiple camera lenses and greater camera movement. As Bordwell says, “Just as it is unlikely that today’s director will build an entire film out of long takes, it’s virtually unthinkable to shoot the bulk of a film with a 50mm lens…” (The Way Hollywood Tells It). No matter how good the story, no matter how engaging the performances, there is also a very assertive visual augmentation. To this, we can add developments in sound. “If you watch old movies,” sound mixer Matthew Price says, “you might hear some sound effects here and there but now they go nuts: somebody’s walking across the room in a leather jacket, you hear the zippers clink and the creak of the leather and every footstep is right in your face.” (Guardian) Nolan indeed goes nuts: “He wants to grab the audience by the lapels and pull them toward the screen”, Nolan’s sound designer Richard King says, “and not allow the watching of his films to be a passive experience.” (Guardian) The Irish Film Institute would play Tenet at 4, projectionist Richard Markey says, because 6 was “ridiculously loud”. “The more expensive movies have got, the more of a bombardment they become on your senses.” (Guardian)

All of these factors make watching a Nolan film feel like a new experience, new next to earlier action and disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Terminator. It is partly why he is seen as the new Spielberg, the new Cameron — the auteur of the box office. Nolan’s films don’t only make a lot of money; he is making films quite unlike those in the forties and fifties, even the seventies and eighties. But what if all this newness indicates that Nolan isn’t so good with the old stuff — characterisation, scene construction, acoustic specificity and delineating narrative? In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne and his butler/mentor are discussing access to a plane, and the camera whirls around the room in a 360-degree shot. A moment later, characters Harvey Dent and Rachael are on the street and notice a ballet performance has been cancelled as they look at a newspaper clipping saying Wayne has absconded with the entire ballet company on his yacht. The first shot makes little sense as it spins around while giving us no new information. The second shot does, as the film then cuts to Wayne and the ballet company on a yacht in the ocean. The camera moving in on the clipping might be as old as Hitchcock, but nobody would say the shot is pointless. We know exactly why the camera is doing what it is doing. It is giving us information. For Nolan to be a new filmmaker in the strictest sense, he would need to give to that first shot the purpose of the latter, without just aping Hitchcock. Even that 360-degree camera movement owes a debt to the master, who used it so well in Vertigo as time dissolves in the intensity of the kiss he shows.

This isn’t to say all filmmakers have to offer clearly motivated shots — great directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Martin Scorsese have all left us musing over a shot’s purpose. But they also want that puzzlement; they wish for us to think about the form as we try to comprehend a character small within the frame, a tracking movement that seems to lead nowhere, or a cut to an object that doesn’t further the story. Nolan is a filmmaker in the tradition of Hitchcock, Leone, Tarantino (and yes, Spielberg and Cameron). Yet at the same time, the impression of being so modern is also what may sometimes be getting in the way of telling a story efficiently with a visual language that allows a viewer to make time and space coherent. If we think of early moments in Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, this should become clearer. Clint Eastwood’s character enters a bar, and it looks like we have a superfluous high angle shot of the stairway. But at the end of the scene, Eastwood asks the barman what is up the stairs, and they go up them. Leone shows us the layout of the town from the balcony as he allows an unmotivated shot to become a motivated one. Equally, a minute later, Eastwood stands in the square, and the film is low-angled for no apparent reason. But in the next shot, we see what was in the background becoming important as the film shows a figure coming out onto this balcony.

There is a similar moment in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, where the Nazis come to talk to a French cinema owner, and the film offers a high-angle from the top of the stairs, travelling along the balcony as they leave the building. It is a fine shot that captures an impending threat. It is also well-motivated. It starts with a colleague coming out of his room and watching what is going on below, ending on a cut back to him. Maybe Tarantino could have removed the opening shot and left us wondering if it is a point of view and then confirming it by the cut back — but this is efficient and effective cinema from someone whose favourite director is the Italian maestro: “You don’t go past Leone, you start with Leone.” (IndieWire) Neither Leone nor Tarantino, here, use distinctive shots just because they have the money and resources to do so. This type of ‘distinctiveness’ has now become common. As Bordwell notes: “A 2003 directing manual states in all seriousness, “a good objective for any first-time director would be to move his camera as much as possible to look as hip and MTV-wise as he can.’” (The Way Hollywood Tells It) When Nolan was asked about the difference between his first feature, Following, and his second, Memento, he said: “The easiest way to put it is just to say it was a jump from thousands to millions”, before adding that next he would like to “…make that same kind of jump again, from millions to billions. See, I told you I’m really a very mainstream filmmaker at heart!” (Filmmaker Magazine) He might think he is joking, but to be a mainstream filmmaker is often about putting that money on screen in ever more elaborate production values. The form is dictated by the finance, and the more money, the slicker it looks.

We can contrast the scenes from A Fistful of Dollars and Inglourious Basterds with a clever moment in Tenet. Here, the two main characters, the Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson), are trying to get into a building and discuss how it might be possible. They decide to catapult themselves into the air as a reverse bungee jump. Nolan could have made more of the specifics, as various commentators have questioned the logic of the sequence, and he could have saved us the explanation beforehand about what they are going to do. But this is an audacious moment that comes close to an action sequence which makes sense, and one that gives us an innovative way of scaling a building. Yet, it might be fair to say this is a better idea than an executed action.

This could be a useful way of looking at Nolan’s films: they are both expositional and action-filled, ideas-based and yet offering viewers plenty of excitement. However, a danger of having lots of ideas is how a filmmaker conveys them, and Nolan often works with a binary system of exposition and manifestation. Sometimes this works very well, and maybe never better than during the opening of The Prestige. Here, magic coordinator and engineer John Cutter (Michael Caine) explains to a young girl that every magic trick consists of three parts: the pledge, with the magician showing you an ordinary thing like a bird, a deck of cards, or a man. The magician then offers the turn. He takes this ordinary thing and does something extraordinary — like make it disappear. But that isn’t enough. Nobody is inclined to clap because of this. What matters is the prestige: you bring the missing thing back. Nolan doesn’t just set up the film well in this sequence. He also dramatises it and anticipates later events as Cutter tells the story to what we will later discover is the daughter of one of the main characters, Borden (Christian Bale). The scene also illustrates the trick and its potential failings in a crosscut, one with Alfred and his rival Angier (Hugh Jackman). The expositional is contained by the dramatic while also anticipating later narrative information, info that isn’t just a way of giving the viewer details about the next scene.

In Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, the exposition often precedes the drama, but doesn’t especially anticipate or augment it. Near the beginning of Inception, key ‘extractor’ Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explains to a wealthy businessman what he does: not only can he extract thoughts, but also incept them: “once an idea takes hold of the brain”, he says, “it is almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks…” This is offered in standard shot/reverse shot and, though it anticipates aspects of the story that will hinge on his wife’s suicide when an idea takes hold in her mind, it lacks the immediacy or dramatic effectiveness evident at the beginning of The Prestige.

As the budgets became bigger, did Nolan lose some of that effectiveness, making what amounts to Bondian films with more brilliance, yet also more confusion? Tom Shone invokes Kubrick, as he says Nolan speaks with the “…calm certainty of things he has known his entire life” (Guardian). Yet while the comparisons to Kubrick have been frequent, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw wonders if, while “Nolan is occasionally described as the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick's mantle…it is tempting to say that Nolan is the new Lewis Gilbert, director of The Spy Who Loved Me.” (Guardian)

Imagine a Bond film where the evil villain wants to take over the world but is dying and, instead of vanquishing the son, Bond tries to take over the son’s mind, and we have a film close to Inception. Tenet is even closer to a Bond movie, with a Russian oligarch capable of doing more than taking over the world – he can destroy it backwards. He has the capacity to invert entropy: making objects go into reverse. Tenet has the sort of plot that would have Bond downing a few too many martinis in bewilderment, and Q struggling to keep up. But in its combination of exposition, evil villainy and action set-pieces, Nolan adds a patina of theoretical physics to the sort of temporal reversal that has long been practised in literature: Alejo Carpentier’s ‘Journey Back to the Source’, Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, and ‘Time’s Arrow’ by Martin Amis. In Nolan’s example, time doesn’t only reverse; it moves backwards and forward simultaneously, leading to some mind-bending action scenes where characters are fighting into the future and others fighting into the past, all the while fighting each other.

Nolan takes ideas by Richard Feynman, and what Feynman calls anti-matter, and applies them not just to an electron, but to characters and objects. It especially seems to draw on Nolan’s Memento: the movement forward in time past in black and white, and backwards in time present in colour. But in the earlier film it was a non-diegetic conceit; now it becomes a diegetic adventure. Before, it was something the film was doing to us as viewers; in Tenet it is part of the very story.

Discussing the book Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Tom Boniface-Webb says the author, Robbie B. H. Goh, “introduces Nolan as an epistemic filmmaker, interested in the limits of human knowledge and how this affects major moral decisions.” (Senses of Cinema) But while film and philosophy have become a major area of discussion in film studies over recent decades, one important dimension of it is that a filmmaker is philosophical with images; they aren’t philosophical because they discuss philosophical issues. If a filmmaker uses philosophy as a narrative conceit, rather than as an exploratory question, the enquiry is subsumed by the plot. When Descartes offers his evil genius hypothesis, Nietzsche his eternal return, or Plutarch the ship of Theseus, they do so not because they want to tell a story, but that they wish to reveal a problem their conceit opens up. Perhaps very few filmmakers are philosophical in this sense: they are storytellers chiefly. But a properly philosophical filmmaker will retain the importance of the conceit as they develop their narrative. The point of the conceit is to develop the thought experiment; it isn’t to use it as a premise for narrative event. In this sense, Stalker, Her, 1985’s The Fly and Hidden Life are far more philosophical than any of Nolan’s films, where the idea is less integrated into the film’s exploration.

Nolan perhaps is aware of the problem, saying that when he was editing Interstellar he was hit by “a brick wall of exposition”, an issue that he never quite resolved and that shows up elsewhere too. In Tenet, various characters become expositional hubs, people who explain chunks of plot so the viewer can begin to comprehend the purpose of the next piece of action. In one scene, an arms dealer explains to the central character why the villain is such a powerful force in the industry. She says Sator (Kenneth Branagh) has all nine pieces of the Algorithm, which he can use to destroy the world. But not if those in the future manage to wrest it from him. There is a lot more exposition than this, and plenty of other characters get to explain too: the villain’s wife explains why she is still with her husband, the villain explains why he is evil, Neil explains theoretical physics. If we now have the clumsy but necessary neologism mansplaining, then Nolan is the master of cinesplaining: telling us what we are about to see in the action.

This suggests that Nolan isn’t quite the master action filmmaker he is generally credited as being, and just because we see clearly the signs of newness in the intensified continuity, in the presence of the puzzle, and in the utilisation and resistance to the problem of CGI, these aren’t quite enough to use Nolan as a model for where the action film should be, and certainly not to use him as the last word in philosophical filmmaking. He is an ambitious director, someone who wants to take the blockbuster to places few other directors have been willing to take it. However, we should keep in mind that where he is taking it needn’t be a lesson to others. Aren’t there other, more skilful filmmakers like Hitchcock and Leone out there if we are to learn the lessons of a master? As it is, Nolan has a reputation beyond merit, no matter the box office returns. 


© Tony McKibbin