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 the main character to kill her partner for her after telling him that she is doing this because with our hero's short-term memory loss condition he will not remember and take her word for how she got those bruises. 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 lost wife in Inception; 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 all along that the films have often been at pains to keep obscure!

[Tudwell]

Man, I really just love this movie. I've seen it twice now and I liked it even more the second time. Of all the Nolan films I've seen (and I guess at this point I've seen everything except Insomnia), this is the one whose world I love being in the most, the one I love thinking about the most, the one I'm most excited to watch again even though I've seen it twice in the last month and a half.

What struck me this second time through was how tactile the film is. You're not just watching a boat on the sea - you feel every slap of the waves against the hull. You're not just watching the Trojans drag the horse into their city - you feel in every muscle fiber the effort of hauling such a load. It's remarkable. I don't watch too many films in the theater, so maybe I'm simply missing out on other similar experiences, but I can't say I've ever seen a film before that felt quite this physically immersive. And it really adds to the sense of loss and diminution as Odysseus's recounting of his adventures goes on. I've seen people complain that his men are not characterized at all and so there's no real sense of connection to them, no sense of loss or mourning when they die - and it's true there's not much characterization (basically none outside of Eurylochus) but I feel it's made up for in a way by the sheer physicality of the journey. You may not see much of any one man or what's going on inside his head, but you're right there with them all as their boat is crumbling, as the oars are snapped or the Laestrygonians are hacking away. That's a kind of connection in itself, and by the time they all reach the island of the sun god, you don't need any conventional characterization at all to feel just how weary and worn down they are.

I think this tactility helps with the sense of scale as well. Some have criticized the film for not feeling epic enough and sure, you never see hundreds of ships massed at the Trojan beach or thousands of soldiers marching on the city or whatever - but you don't need to. You're there. You're right there next to Odysseus as the horror at Troy unfolds and that's enough. For me, at least.

The other thing that stuck out to me this second time through was just how much Odysseus sounds like a modern rationalist skeptic in his flashbacks on the sea - and how he has to let go of all that when sailing from Calypso's island. In order to return home, he has to give himself over to these forces he's always felt himself master of. The death of the rational ego and a coming home to the (divine) order of the world. There's a spiritual dimension to his journey that I've seen fairly few commentators actually mention or engage with, even those who clearly loved the film. (And it makes the criticism that Nolan removed the gods from the story feel ridiculous to me. We may not see them as corporeal or personalized beings but the reality of their existence is clear as day to everyone in the film beyond Odysseus and the final stage of his journey home is pretty much explicitly framed as a repudiation of his former skepticism regarding these divine forces.)

I suppose I'll end this post by saying that however blunt Nolan's thematic development can be, that final image of the burning horse feels so powerful and multifaceted. We're lamenting the end of the Odysseus's Bronze Age and the calamities that have ravaged it, but we're also looking with hope toward the future. That last scene, that last shot in particular, zooms out - this is not just a story of one civilization's decline, it's a story about the process of cultural decay and renewal. The seeds of the Trojan Horse's destruction are planted right inside it - it brings about its own end and (eventually) the end of the moral rot that it both inspires and is representative of. All things must pass, even death and destruction and the end of the civilization. It's a move that makes the film feel truly mythic to me, a story not just of one culture but of how culture itself dies and is reborn. How all of us are a part of the perpetual cosmic cycle of death and rebirth. (It may not be a particularly deep exploration of that stuff, but on top of the visceral physical and psychological journey of the film, it's a rather powerful way to cap it all for me personally. And maybe I'm reading a bit too much eastern "wheel of Dharma" type stuff into a film by a guy who seems like a pretty solid Western liberal materialist, but it feels like it's really there to me, in this particular film, whether it reflects Nolan's own sense of the cosmos or not.)

Anyway, I could probably find plenty more to say, but I'll leave it at that. Hell of a film that really balances the immediate pleasures of a large-scale action epic and meditations on more abstract thematic material (in a way that some prior Nolan films strive for but that, to me, don't quite dig deep enough, like The Dark Knight or Inception).

[hearthesilence]

I almost skipped this movie because friends of mine wanted to see it on IMAX and nothing else, and it's a real fucking pain getting tickets. (We ended up getting seats in the back, and honestly, I think this was the best vantage point. This wasn't like, say, Gravity where immersion was key and it seemed ideal to fill your entire field of vision with its deep and distant long shots. There were just far too many close-ups to make sitting closer appealing to me.)

I'm pretty much with the previous takes that this was okay but with weaknesses the respective viewer usually associates with Nolan's work. Re: the action sequences, I didn't like the closing action scenes either. I get the sense quick, close-up handheld shots tend to work better with clumsy, messy brawls because not only does it mirror that physical action, the lack of coherence is readily acceptable because it's the definition of what we're seeing. Fights in slick action scenes tend to be strategic and visibly choreographed - it may ostensibly appear in the moment, but they're not just a violent show of emotion, the fight is moving the story along with something resembling planned, specific goals, so any loss in clarity in how that action's depicted can be real problem.

But zedz's further comments on the action scenes (not just the hand-to-hand combat scenes) touched on something that I found lacking - a sense of poetry in the way the visuals were composed. I was thinking about Christopher Frayling’s description of Stanley Kubrick as being “relentlessly logical,” and he’s famously shown that, going to great lengths to nail down all the details so that 2001 could be a wholly credible vision of the future or that Barry Lyndon can perfectly reflect living in the 18th century, etc. All of that requires an enormous amount of work and research, but when he goes on to shoot everything, the visuals are infused with startling imagination. (This even extends to sound - few people would think to score space ships with Strauss waltzes.) No surprise, this is largely what made Kubrick a distinctive photographer before. Given the source material and the production design in Nolan’s film, the compositions could be a little disappointing and too often prosaic, and simply getting everything on 70mm IMAX film wasn’t going to change that. (Great picture quality though, no doubt about that.)

Some have knocked the dialogue - I wasn't bothered too much by the content of the dialogue but once in awhile I didn't like the way it was deployed with the editing. (FWIW, I even enjoyed the anachronistic sarcasm Matt Damon displayed in at least one scene.) I think it's commendable that Nolan experiments with the editing in his films even if I don't find it particularly radical, but at least early on in the film, they could be tedious with too many flashbacks that were merely illustrative of dialogue just spoken by a character. Sometimes it was the reverse where immediately after he showed us something, a character would then spell it out in a line of dialogue. I do agree with an earlier comment that the best moments tried to put a scene across through pure visual storytelling. (Abstract sound as well. The scene with the sirens had a cheeky effect where they plugged one side of the audio and then the other to mimic the wax.)

Re: the dog, I don't think it looked malfunctioning to me. I don't wish this on anyone, but if you've ever been with a very sick and dying dog who is essentially saying goodbye to its owner, convulsing despite being paralyzed from age and disease can look just like that. It's like wishing they can wag their tail and jump up like they used to but their body can only fail them. It's a very sad sight.

Even though there were specific actions along the way that determined the fates of Odysseus's men, there was also a feeling that it was a brutal, unforgiving punishment for their heinous crimes against humanity - that is, it wasn't just their gods responding to relatively petty deeds like eating one of their cows to prevent starvation, it was something fated to happen if one were to believe it was a just universe with moral consequences. I'm not completely sure it would play that way if I were to see it again, but at least to me, it's suggested in memory by the signs of guilt built up over the course of the film, and it's especially effective when you play it off the scene with the sirens and how his description of what he heard can be reinterpreted through that guilt and those crimes. (In retrospect, that might be my favorite scene, though Anne Hathaway's scenes were pretty strong too.)