A director with potential, spoiled by big budgets. This has pushed him into dull blockbuster territory. He gets too tangled up in uninteresting narratives and the styling of his films is bland, but there's simply no escaping his work.
Movies
Nolan never managed to allocate the extra budget for his following films in any meaningful way.
It was only a matter of time before Christopher Nolan would do a real time travel flick. He's the king of modern blockbusters and a real sucker for twisty/serious narratives. Tenet is pretty much what I expected it to be, including all the things I don't like about Nolan's films. But coming from him, it's certainly not his worst. A secret agent is recruited to prevent a third world war. While he presumes a nuclear threat, our world is actually under attack from the future. They devised a way to give objects negative entropy, effectively letting them go backwards in time. A fun plot device that runs through the remainder of the film. Nolan is oldskool. It's probably why he's generally revered, but for a contemporary blockbuster director I don't think it's a plus. The action scenes look rather dull, the score feels outdated, the pompous and convoluted story telling slows things down and Tenet doesn't do anything spectacular with the time travel element. Just a mediocre blockbuster, at least the pacing was a better better compared to his other work.Read all
Nolan's latest is a 3-hour biopic, and that's about all there is to it. The biopic is one of the most generic and stuffy genres out there, and Nolan does very little to update or even reinvent it. It's a little disappointing that films like this are still being made in 2023, it's even sadder that they end up being one of the biggest-grossing hits of the year. Oppenheimer is the guy who led the project that created the atomic bomb, a weapon that gave Japan its biggest trauma of the century. Part of the film deals with the creation and the bomb, though most of the runtime is spent on the background of Oppenheimer and the political fallout of his creation. The performances are decent, but other than that it's a pretty bland film. There's nothing too bad or out of line, but also nothing that stands out or makes this a memorable experience. Apart from the finale maybe, which peaks around the 120-minute mark. The final hour is just one big outro that made me think Nolan should watch some Shaw Brow movies before he starts a new film. I'd be disappointed, but I didn't expect too much from this film to begin with.Read all
