I AM BECOME DULL

I'll never understand the weird sycophancy and hype surrounding director/writer Christopher Nolan and his vacuous collection of movies. It must be a sort of mass hysteria/hypnosis encouraged by various amorphous blobs of the internet that think if they shout the words 'genius' and 'master' loud enough the rest of the world will be stupid enough to believe it. I personally never have.

Comparisons of Nolan to directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and David Lean seem utterly preposterous to me which I say with all humility as someone who has spent a good proportion of his life devoted to studying the history of film. Nolan for me is the U2 of mainstream cinema - bland, colourless, and somehow able to promote the myth that he is some great arbiter of deep and profound truths. Well, Bono most certainly isn't and neither is Nono, I mean Nolan.

The British/American director's pseudo attempts to be a Tyson DeGrasse/Tarkovsky mainstream auteur in recent years have left me feeling as if I still have a big hunk of undigested beef stuck in my mental tract. Those who've similarly struggled to get through the laborious behemoths 'Inception' (2010), 'Interstellar' (2014) or the woefully abysmal 'Tenet' (2020) will know exactly what I'm talking about. This "savior of cinema" so-called seems quite the opposite to my mind creating oversized, underwritten cinematic spectacles that totter and wobble precariously from their vertiginous heights but never collapse sufficiently for the illusion of their supposed greatness to properly shatter so the masses might actually witness the Oz-like charlatan standing behind the screen.

I actually got some of the best sleep of my life watching 'The Dark Knight' (2008) which surprised me as the reviews across the board hailed it to be some kind of undisputable masterpiece and the greatest superhero film of the genre ever made. Clearly none of these people had ever seen Richard Donner's 'Superman' (1978) written by Mario Puzo which has heart, charm and sincerity all the things I find to be sorely lacking in Nolan's Batman trilogy. Perhaps that was the point.

Back when I was a student studying film at College there were a hundred Christopher Nolan types studying alongside me. They were perfectly acceptable, no-nonsense and ambitious NPCs with a bank clerk approach to making their student films and a predictable taste in cinema that seemed borrowed from a compilation of 'best of lists' found in Empire Magazine or Sight and Sound film critic polls. Mention 'The Swimmer', 'The Hustler' or 'One Eyed Jacks' to these guys however and they would have absolutely no idea.  

Another feature of the Christopher Nolan types is that they would often wear suits to college lectures as if they were attending a business meeting. Perhaps if some of these clones had chosen to be producers or moneymen bankrolling other people's great projects we might not suffer their weirdly sterile Jurassic-sized movies.

Even Sam Mendes (the ultimate 'safety first' director after Ron Howard) is a better director than Nolan. Proof in point being his recent '1917' WW1 project which was a far more successful war movie than the strangely unmoving and forgettable 'Dunkirk' could ever hope to be. Re-creating scenes with your expensive toys does not a great film make let alone a masterpiece. Once again Mendes's film had the heart that Nolan's clearly lacked. Perhaps he locked his away somewhere in a safety deposit box, saving it for the time he wants to sweep the board at the Oscars or maybe his latest feature 'Oppenheimer' is the emotional masterpiece the world has been waiting for. I doubt it.

But more than the bland, grey, one-tone look of his films it's his moribund B-Movie screenplays I find most objectionable with absolute clunkers being fired out by marquee A-list actors that lack any sense of conviction or craft. Nolan may be proficient at the technical side of organizing his shots with his vast crews but he has a tin ear when it comes to dialogue. And if it's not the dialogue then it's his superficial quoting of others great words that rings shallow and untrue. The repetition of Dylan Thomas's iconic poem 'Do Not Go Gentle' repeated not twice, but three times by Michael Caine in 'Interstellar' has still got me sperging all these many years later.

And just to prove I'm not the only one who has these major reservations about Nolan and his movies,  Christopher Preist, author of 'The Prestige' which the director adapted into what may be his best (or at least half-decent) commercial film feels similarly about his many shortcomings.

“I don’t like his other work; I think its shallow and badly written. I mean, I’ve got kids who like superheroes, and they think the Batman films are boring and pretentious. What he’s trying to be is some kind of modern Kubrick. And I think he’d be better off being a modern Hitchcock, basically. A maker of well-made films like Memento and The Prestige. These (current) blockbusters are just embarrassing. To the world he’s this great, innovative filmmaker; to me, he was a kid who wanted to get into Hollywood.”

In conclusion and to maintain a balance of fairness in what may be perceived as a negative analysis of Nolan's ability as a director/writer I should at least mention one thing that's good about him.

A defender of shooting on film and famously resisting the ever-growing influence of digital, Nolan has played a significant part in trying to protect the legacy of celluloid. Naturally, I applaud this geek heroism of course and yet it seems ironic to me that he would be so devoted to the more organic side of the filmmaking process as his films appear to be as cold and lifeless as AI and his scripts may well have just been written by ChatGPT.

With Nolan's latest effort 'Oppenheimer' opening this weekend at cinemas across the globe I've decided to sit this one out (fool me twice etc) and will watch instead John Adam's incredible opera 'Doctor Atomic' based on the same subject. Personally, I think it takes a maverick to deal with such a colossal subject. Someone like David Lynch would have been ideal or even Woody Allen but that would be subversive and Nolan is anything but.

In the end, I'm reminded of the theoretical physicist's most iconic interview in which Oppenheimer famously quoted the Indian deity Vishnu's warning "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds".

Well, Nolan may himself not be a destroyer of worlds (words maybe ^^) but he definitely has become dull.

I suspect he always was.