It’s been one hell of a turnaround for director Christopher Nolan over the last three years, but particularly last year when the filmmaker produced arguably his best film to date in Oppenheimer.
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In a film set during the height of World War II with the Allies fighting the combined forces of Germany and Japan, the United States government moves forward with the Manhattan Project, a mission to create a bomb big enough to end the War.
They decided to seek the help of Robert Oppenheimer played by Cillian Murphy, to develop the world’s first-ever atomic bomb. Oppenheimer is up for major award consideration as well as topping our list for the best film of 2023.
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The turnaround is quite remarkable because just three years earlier, Nolan released one of his most panned films in his filmography the 2020 film, Tenet. It was a film starring John David Washington about an unnamed CIA agent known simply as “The Protagonist” who rescues an exposed spy and captures a strange artifact.
After the mission is confirmed to be a test, the Protagonist discovers that the true mission is to prevent the sale of a strange new weapon that inverts bullets into its victims by moving backward through time. The film that was released at the height of COVID-19 not only suffered from lockdowns but was panned by audiences for its confusing plotlines of the entire year.
The film was described as being too complex for its own good. Even understanding what was happening in the plot did not help audiences understand the film any better. In a recent interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Christopher Nolan defended this criticism of Tenet, saying not everything in the film is meant to be fully understood by viewers.
“You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet, it’s not all comprehensible. It’s a bit like asking me if I know what happens at the end of Inception,” he said. “I have to have my idea of it in order for it to be a valid productive ambiguity, but the point is it’s an ambiguity.”
He added that his experience addressing audiences at screenings of his films as early back as Memento taught him you can’t even tell them that something is ambiguous. They want answers and ambiguity won’t do.
Nolan would later tell The Associated Press that Tenet is about the experience. “The thing with ‘Tenet’ is, I think of all the films I have made, it’s the one that’s very much about the experience of watching films. It’s about watching spy movies in a way. It tries to build on that experience and take it to this very magnified, slightly crazy place. A lot of that is about sound and music and this huge image,” he explained.
Nolan is known for making films with complicated and complex storylines. However, Tenet remains one of Nolan’s most polarizing films in his career as most people either love or hate the movie.
He makes the case that his films are about the overall filmmaking experience of watching and appreciating cinema and argues that the quality of a film should not be judged by whether you understand it or not. He elaborated on this when interviewed last July by HugoDécrypte on YouTube while promoting Oppenheimer.
“But ultimately, the thing about the experience in a movie theater, with an audience, is it should be about mystery. You don’t want to understand the entire story right from the beginning — otherwise, there’s nothing to unfold,” Nolan said.
“And so, you know, really the film of the filmmaker, the job of the filmmaker is to try to be a little bit ahead of the audience — not too far ahead, not too far behind. When you’re behind the audience, the audience is understanding things before you’re explaining them. The audience gets very frustrated in a different way,” he added.
The biggest knock against Tenet was that the film never clarifies the rules of its universe enough to make sense. It plays with elements of time travel and parallel universes but creates human characters devoid of emotion or credibility.
While that is looked at as one of Nolan’s worst efforts by some, Oppenheimer is shaping up to be possibly his most acclaimed and is currently the favorite to win best director at this year’s Academy Awards.
