Missed the first and last. Never heard of either. I guess the new one because I haven't really been keeping up on movie news, and the first one.. I don't know why. I thought I had seen all of Nolan's films up through the present. I didn't know he had done something before Memento.
He catapulted to fame with the Batman reboots, especially the Dark Knight. It seems unthinkable now, but superhero movies weren't a big deal until the Spiderman and Batman reboots in the early 2000s. Warners didn't even want to reboot Batman, but Nolan developed the concept all by himself and managed to convince them to let him make it. The Dark Knight is generally regarded as the best superhero movie ever made (at least since the millennium), and its success permitted Nolan to make his dream picture (no pun intended), Inception. He got an unlimited budget and free reign to make it. I still think the Prestige is his best. But anyway. A really great and committed director.
+1. Loved Prestige. Inception is a close second. Dark knight was great as well. Interstellar, Memento, and Tenet were all really cool and mind-bending concepts, especially the last 2.
I haven't seen it yet, but Nolan's films are pretty much all philosophical about the nature of time and memory. I don't know Doctor Who well, but I imagine Nolan's film is probably a very different take on the same premise. Inglourious Basterds and the Dirty Dozen are both World War II films about a ragtag group of soldiers behind enemy lines, but no one could confuse one for the other.
Tenet is very different to things The Doctor has done and personally I think it was very good. The protagonist isn't exactly time travelling rather than moving backwards while everything else moves forwards. It really isn't your typical time travel movie for the most part and was very cleverly made. If you haven't seen it yet I thoroughly recommend it.
And it gets so much more complicated than that. I had to stay sharp the entire length of the movie to understand it. Interaction between things moving forward in time and things moving backwards in time were really cool, especially with the insane post-production.
Some of the reviews for "Tenet" on IMDb are brutal. And helpful. There's too much of a consensus among the 1-star reviews, primarily from Nolan fans, for them not to be valid.
IMDB is just a bunch of temperamental fan boys who rag on anything that is not exactly the way they want it to be. I haven't seen Tenet. It might be absolutely horrendous. But I wouldn't put much stock in IMDB ratings, especially ones for brand new movies. These are the same people who rated the Dark Knight as the best movie *ever made* in the weeks following its release. Buncha dum-dums.
I wish Nolan would return to his roots and make more character driven thrillers. His last few outings for me have not really been hits in my opinion. He is trying to use complex story telling as a substitute for good story telling. I wish he would get back to the type of story telling that made the Prestige and Memento such great films. They were character driven, not plot driven. The characters felt like real people whose decisions made sense, not ones that were just doing things and going places because the plot demanded it. Honestly, Inception was his last good film.
I'm not sure about this. I thought Dunkirk was excellent. I don't think he is using complexity as a substitute. I think he strives to raise philosophical questions with all his movies -- even Batman -- and sometimes he is more interested in that than in individual characters. The Prestige is my favorite film of his, but the characters are hardly multidimensional. They are both limited and controlled by their singular obsessions with conquering the world of magic. The way they play off of and contrast each other is fascinating, but either main character by himself is not really interesting. Dunkirk presents a harrowing experience from multiple levels, time periods, and locations, so there's not a whole lot of time to develop this guy or that guy, but the sum of the experience is coherent and engaging. Sometimes Nolan's reach exceeds his grasp, but Hollywood sure could use more of that kind of failure.
I agree with jmellor. I thought Dunkirk was Nolan's best movie since Inception. Even though I liked Inception better, Dunkirk is still an excellent film to watch.
Dunkirk was the first movie I saw, (as Cambodia had very few cinemas/theaters!) and was one of the best movies Nolan made. However, I haven't seen the rest of his movies and my opinion may change.
Honestly, I thought Dunkirk was pretty boring. In terms of recent war films, 1917 was far and away better. My favorite Nolan films are probably the dark knight and interstellar.
I mean, I do like most of his other films. I think that Prestige and the Dark Knight Trilogy are some of the best movies I've ever watched. But Dunkirk felt like a far cry from Nolan's typical masterful plots and stunning cinematography to me.
The guy who made it must be know loads about films :)