Christopher Nomansland
If you’d asked me at eighteen who my favourite film director was, I would have answered before you had even finished the question. Chris Nolan.
The man had successfully salvaged the Batman franchise from some truly dark days. His previous films were one of my first gateways into more challenging, auteur-lite cinema. And sure, I found Memento completely inexplicable, but I felt extremely smart watching it, and for me, that was enough.
And then The Dark Knight came out, and blew everyone away. I’m somewhat shocked to realise that I’ve never written about this film on my blog before, but to be honest, I don’t have anything new to add to the discourse. It was a masterpiece, it is a masterpiece, Heath Ledger.
And just two years later, he followed that up with Inception, the film he’d really wanted to make all along. He’s said several times that his major motivation for signing on to direct Batman was so he could use it as a stepping stone to getting Hollywood funding for his own projects. Nolan had first envisioned a dream-heist movie as a sixteen year old, which really lit a fire for me, who turned sixteen in the aftermath of Inception’s impact.
And it really did have an impact. Inception captured the zeitgeist in a way that very few films have done since. Impassioned arguments about whether Cobb was dreaming at the film’s end; insane behind the scenes footage of entire sets which could be turned upside down; the suffix -ception being added to everything was the joke du jour. I may be misremembering, but this also seemed to coincide with the birth of YouTube film criticism, and so amateurs could join professional film critics in dissecting and discussing the work of Chris Nolan, the man who had combined intelligent, technical filmmaking with the Hollywood blockbuster. The man who could do no wrong.
Then came 2012: The Dark Knight Rises. Ah, not quite the climax we were hoping for. But an excellent soundtrack, Anne Hathaway in a catsuit, and the arrival onto centre stage of Tom Hardy as Bane were more than enough for me.
2014: Interstellar. My god, what a film. Having watched it back recently, it’s a lot more coherent than I remember. The soundtrack is perfect, the visuals are mesmerising. The tidal wave planet fed directly into my childhood fear of tsunamis, making that scene a heart-thumper for me in particular. But it was at this point, perhaps as I started to view films a little more critically, that a small voice in my head was telling me that the parts just didn’t quite add up. That having a surprise cameo by METT DEHMEN as a once-brave astronaut who turns bad, and having his name be Mann (do you get it? DO YOU GET IT???) was, well, not amazing. That maybe it was unrealistic to expect a moviegoer to interpret vague references to fifth-dimensional beings saving the day by transmitting across time and space the coordinates crucial to solving an equation to time travel into the hand of a wristwatch. That perhaps as the crucial plot point of the entire film, this was slightly…tenuous. And that perhaps it would’ve been good if a member of the extremely skilled creative team around Chris Nolan could’ve told him that.
But who cares, right? The film is a thrilling, beautiful ride. It made box office millions while making people think. This is good.
2017: Dunkirk. And here is where I fell off the bandwagon. So many people were calling Dunkirk a triumph, and I just didn’t understand it. Yes, the cinematography looks nice. I like the shot attached to the wing of the plane as it goes down, yes, lovely. But is this a good film? Sure, Chris Nolan’s latest time conceit, having three stories which progress simultaneously over an hour, a day and a week is all very unconventional, but does that make it a better film? Sure, it’s populated with Nolan’s standard cast of A-list actors, but is there any effort made to make any of them characters? Can you, reading this, honestly name any character traits of any of the characters in Dunkirk? And without that, what did we have? A noisy, bland, technically brilliant, filmically cold movie.
It felt as if, like many soldiers in 1941, I had missed the boat when it came to Dunkirk.
Which brings us to 2020, that most auspicious of years. And let me tell you now, compared to Tenet, the rest of 2020 was a breeze.
Just warning you now: there will be no nuance to this section. Tenet was honest-to-god one of the most atrocious films I have seen in my life. It was an utter catastrophe; a maddeningly confusing labyrinth on par with something Kafka would think up. Tenet is a shit-stain on cinema.
Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but the path this film took from conception to screen seems exceptionally obvious. Chris Nolan, perhaps sitting in his Nolanmobile, thinks up another ingenious time-gimmick. What if people could travel through time backwards? Nice one, Nolan! He thinks to himself. Typewriter at the ready, his fingers spring to the keys.
Hold on, he thinks. Should I invite my brother Jonathan, who has by coincidence co-written all of my better scripts? No.
And so the process began. You can imagine the studio heads salivating at a film concept so Chris-Nolan that it comes across as parody. This is a sure. Fire. Moneyspinner. No one disturb Chris. He’s writing another SmartFilm™.
According to Wikipedia, Chris was bouncing around the ideas for Tenet in his head for almost a decade before the film was finally made. Meaning, the conception of this film coincided neatly with Inception (2010). Meaning, Chris Nolan probably had the idea at the same time, or during, Inception, yet kept making Inception. Why? Because Inception is a much, much better concept.
But that’s not to say backwards-time-travelling is a bad concept. Far from it. In fact, part of why this film is so disastrous is what it could have been, if someone, anyone, had dared to suggest that having dialogue screamed backwards might not be a great demonstration of backwards-time. That of all the action set-pieces to demonstrate backwards-time, an extremely mundane car chase might not be the best. That perhaps Chris should’ve at least shown the script to one fucking person to see if it made any sense whatsoever.
But they clearly didn’t. So in September I sat and watched another world-class group of actors lurching their way through stilted, pedestrian dialogue and a number of ugly, formulaic action scenes, and I was sad.
The actors monotone their way through the script like a Wes Anderson film, with none of the style. They have clearly been explicitly told to minimise emotion, and half the time you can’t even hear it due to the terrible sound-mixing. The transition between scenes is incredibly lazy. A scene set on a Yacht on the Amalfi coast will just begin, out of nowhere, with no change to the parched, bleached colour scheme. No real meaning is attributed to this location, it’s just somewhere a mega-rich Russian billionnaire would probably hang out. Said Russian billionnaire is a laughably accented Kenneth Branagh, who clearly signed on to this film before reading a script, and now gives his performance the lack of bravado that the role deserves.
Even the twists suck. Of course the masked man from the fight in the first half is actually the MAIN CHARACTER AGAIN, BUT, IN REVERSE!! This was blindingly obvious to anyone who watches Chris Nolan movies, because this is what he does. And what purpose does it serve, to anything? None. This is an M. Night Shaymalan plot twist, but because of Nolan’s much higher cultural capital, he doesn’t get called out for it.
There were several points where the incoherent plot, headache-inducing soundtrack and alien dialogue got too much, and I actually wanted to look away. Most importantly, it is completely, utterly devoid of emotion. Any emotion the characters display is tacked on, like the traits you would select for your Sims; tacked on to characters you simply could not care about to save your life.
It was a bad film. But not only was it bad, it accentuated the flaws which have been existent in Nolan’s work from the beginning. Not only was Tenet bad, it made every other Chris Nolan film worse. Inception was full of stilted, expositional dialogue, but we forgave it. Batman Begins had a stilted, ugly colour palette, but who cares? The Dark Knight Rises had awful sound mixing, but it was so bad it sort of worked in making Bane’s voice memorable. Memento, The Prestige and Interstellar were all incoherent in their own way, but they were entertaining for other reasons. They were good films, all of them, right?
Right?
At the end of the day, yes. To a greater or lesser degree, they are all decent films. Tenet is the first true shocker: in the words of my favourite review, “the cinematic equivalent of pulling out teeth”. So I can’t say I don’t like Nolan as a filmmaker. It’s just disappointing to be this, well, disappointed. The man is clearly a filmmaker of the highest calibre, but he hasn’t made a truly great film for more than a decade. So here I am, stuck in Chris Nomansland.
