Dunkirk (2017)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
DOP: Hoyte van Hoytema
Cast: Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh

Film follows the events in French port Dunkirk where allied soldiers are surrounded by the German army and attacked from the air by the Luftwaffe during second world war.  If you have a cursory knowledge of second world war, you will know how it ended with many of the troops rescued and that is not really a spoiler.

The last film that I liked from Nolan was Inception and that was a long time ago. He is someone whose speciality is in having convoluted narrative techniques. Building interesting characters have never really been his forte. In his last film, Interstellar, he tried to make it about characters and it miserably failed (Murphhhhhh!). In Dunkirk, he is playing to his strengths by not trying to establish many/any characters and we are straight away put into their situations and follow from there. There is also his trademark narrative flourishes and that is essential for the storytelling as well. From the beginning itself three timeliness are introduced: first one from Dunkirk beach one week ago, second one from a civilian yacht called up for action from one day ago and the third one with three fighter pilots defending the rescue mission from one hour ago. We jump from these timeliness throughout the film and they converge at its climax very effectively. Filmmaker trusts his audience to make note of it and those who don't can still enjoy it as a minor twist.

It would've been easier for him to have us

invest too much into the characters and leave us hanging, wondering about their fate. But this is purely about the war situation they are in and it is glorious. It is a no-nonsense treatment like it was for Mad Max: Fury Road. Some might complain about the lack of blood and flying limbs  (PG-13), unlike Saving Private Ryan, but it anyway manages to convey the danger and fear without any of that (Hans Zimmer, bro). As for Saving Private Ryan, what good is all the violence in first thirty minutes if you are following up that with a sappy feel-good story. The color tone and the cinematography feel is similar to how it was for in Interstellar during that sea and tidal tsunami scene. It was also very refreshing to see realistic looking firing and explosions, especially during the dogfights.

Overall it is a stunning watch and do see it at the widest screen near you with the best sound system. Some British critics have called it Nolan's best film till date and I wouldn't go that far. He still tries to shoehorn some character arc resolutions and clichéd tension building scenes which were not really necessary. At one hour forty five minutes, there isn't any flab to it and it is a shame that intervals are mandatory in Indian cinema theatres. I'll certainly be trying to catch it again at the cinemas.

PS: Waiting for Tom Hardy in Nazi PoW camp sequel directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Rating: 4.75/5

Interstellar (2014)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers:  Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Cast:       Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine

The Earth has become almost uninhabitable due to plunder of resources by mankind and the resulting shortage in food supply. Cooper, an ex-pilot who trained at NASA many years ago, is living as a farmer with his two children and their grand-dad. Possessing still an inquisitive mind, he discovers a secret NASA site with the help of his daughter. There he learns that Earth won’t be habitable for much long and his children’s generation will be its last if they are not able to populate another Earth like planet. They have discovered a wormhole near Saturn and he is invited to go on for a mission which involves travelling through the wormhole to another galaxy in order to check the habitats of potential Earth-like planets. They have two plans-Plan A is solving an equation as they travel which will help in migration of people to the potentially habitable planet or failing, that Plan B, which means using the samples they are taking with them to produce man-kind there. Cooper obviously prefers the former plan since he wants to save his children he is leaving behind along with all the humans that are left on Earth. Problem with their near-light speed travel is that they will age much slower than people in Earth because of Time Dilation.

I caught Inception on the second day of its release and saw it again twice on big screen subsequently. Difference between then and now is that I am not arsed about Christopher Nolan anymore. He is overrated by all and sundry these days and I didn't find his Dark Knight trilogy to be all that. Since Inception, he also served as executive producer for ‘Man of Steel’ and ‘Transcendence’, two very average films. So I wasn't expecting much from Interstellar and was prepared to be pleasantly surprised if it turned out to be any good. The factors mentioned above were not the only reasons for my pessimism. With, ‘Interstellar’ he is dabbling with the sci-fi genre for the first time. Some people might call ‘Inception’ a sci-fi film but in my opinion it was more of a fantasy action film centered on a very interesting idea about which they were not obligated to explain whether it is scientifically possible. In ‘Interstellar’, he is supposed to deal with things that are theoretically possible based on the known laws of our universe or other credible scientific postulations. The problem with that is, for a film with such big ambitions, how are you going to do the expositions without it feeling just that to the audience. He did them seamlessly in his films like ‘Memento’, ‘Inception’ and ‘The Prestige’, but those were more related to the suspension of disbelief by the audience and keeping up with the narrative techniques. All these films had very suspect scientific rationale behind their central ideas (creating duplicates in The Prestige for eg) but we were not bothered by it since we were caught up in figuring out the brilliant and complex narrative methods he was using. Another problem with him handling a sci-fi film for me is that all my favourite ones from this genre deals with existential questions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner etc) and Nolan is not someone who creates rich characters that we care for. The only one that I cared particularly care for was Guy Pearce’s Leonard in ‘Memento’, which I rate as his best film.

So was I pleasantly surprised by Interstellar? The answer is a big fucking NO!!! As expected expositions were terrible, especially in the first half. Did I care for any of the characters? The answer is again as you might expect: N-fucking-O. The only interesting character in the film was TARS and it was a fucking robot. In a film whose central idea is a protagonist who is conflicted by choosing between trying to save his children or instead stand for the greater good my saving the species-I only cared for a robot. You may say that the most interesting character in 2001: A Space Odyssey was also a robot called Hal-9000. Yes that is true, but it/him was the central character in that story. Did Interstellar touch upon all the sci-fi/Hollywood film clichés? Reluctant hero-check, an Icarus like figure who backstabs the crew-check, token black man in the crew-check, token romance angle-check, a big deception by a father figure-check. I was laughing my arse off (not literally) when Anne Hathaway’s character started theorizing about love as a rationale for picking the next target planet since that is where her boyfriend went. Give me a fucking break! Also the set-piece action/thrill sequences felt like Nolan doing them by numbers so that audience don't get too bored.

The positives for the film are of course the stunning visuals and Hans Zimmer’s fantastic soundtrack. The technical effort behind the film should be appreciated but Nolan just forgot about the basics. I am a person who is very much interested in Cosmology, theoretical physics principles behind the origin of our galaxies, Big Bang etc and I have watched many episodes of BBC’s horizon documentaries relating to those things. If you want to engage your brain in a thrilling way, you are better off watching those than the three hour long Interstellar. Towards the end of it, Cooper jumps into a black hole and goes back in time to help his daughter solve the equations. As far as I know, our scientists don’t have much idea about what happens after the Event Horizon is crossed because the Standard Model breakdowns and nothing is supposed to escape from it. So the scientific veracity of the things shown after that point in the film might be questionable but it might be a case of him imagining things. But truly, I don’t give two shits about it to crack my head on making sense of the film. The most interesting thing that happened was that the server in the cinema hall, where I watched it, hung up when Cooper was meeting his aged daughter right at the end. When they rebooted it, the film started ten minutes prior to that point which was like us going back in time. But the film was still shit.

I have seen some people comparing it with Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’. Gravity was just a disaster film that happened to be set in near space. The things that went right for that film was its near real time length of ninety minutes which didn’t give us time to think too much about any of its silliness. It didn’t aim to be much more than a cool action flick that is purely a genre film and any weak points that it had, was to do with the back-story bit that they tried to shoe horn with some existentialism thrown in. Interstellar is much more close to the level of Transcendence than even a film like ‘Sunshine’, forget 2001. It is the weakest film that Christopher Nolan has directed so far. It is based on Jonathan Nolan’s story and script and Steven Speilberg was initially supposed to direct it. That may explain some of the sappiness.

Rating: 3/5

Inception (2010)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer:    Christopher Nolan
Cast:       Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy

A thief who steals corporate secrets through use of dream-sharing technology is given the inverse task of planting an idea into the mind of a dying billionaire mogul's son.

It was I think the first and only English film that I managed to watch very close to its release date (second day) after waiting for it with great anticipation since the inception of its viral campaign. Didn't get tickets at Satyam Cinemas and saw it at Devi which is not a very good theater in Chennai. I again saw it at Satyam the next week and when Escape Cinemas opened in Express Avenue, I saw it for a third time which is my highest for any film in terms of big screen viewing. Some idiots will quip that I saw it multiple times because I didn't understand it but they can do one. The basic story is not very hard to understand if you pay attention but when you see it for the first time you will feel the same way way as the characters do when they wake up in the plane. You kind of understand it but is not entirely sure of it. The multiple viewings help to fill the gaps and appreciate the level of details they have carefully woven into it making a convincing narrative. The ambiguous ending gives us the license to speculate. Some viewers were put off by the ambiguity of it but I didn't think it was disingenuous. The fact that the character Mal is doubtful about the reality of it and the conversation they have at the end about the improbability of the world that Cobb believes to be reality should give the viewer enough amount of doubts to support the ambiguity. 

It can be rightly described as the only block buster big budget film from recent times that demands a lot from the viewer and takes their intelligence for granted. Nolan got the backing from the studio to fulfill his vision based on the strength of the performances of his Batman films. I am kind of ambivalent to Nolan these days because he tend to get very overrated by the fanboys and I don't care much for his Batman films. I just wish he uses his time and clout to make more original films like Memento, The Prestige and Inception. A criticism that one could make at Christopher Nolan is that his films don't have many/any memorable character developments and the only one that I cared much for is Guy Pearce's Leonard in Memento. He is all about big ideas and innovative narrative techniques and creating interesting characters is not his forte. Memento has a DVD extra feature in which you can watch the film in chronological order and it is apparently very lame. That just shows how good the direction was for Memento to make a very ordinary story seem genius by the way it is shown to the audience. That said, Seinfeld kind of did it first without resorting to short term memory loss in the Indian trip episode 'The Betrayal'. 

If I were to rank Nolan films as of now the order would be:

1) Memento

2) Inception

3) The Prestige

4) Following

5)Batman Begins

6) Insomnia

7) Dark Knight

8) Dark Knight Rises

Nolan has indicated that he is open to the idea of making another film in the Inception universe and all the actors are signed on if he eventually plan to make it. I am not too sure about it because the main attraction for it was the big idea of it that he presented and if that element of surprise is not there I don't think it will work out.

Rating: 5/5

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers:  Jonathan Nolan,  Christopher Nolan, David S.Goyer, Bob Kane
Cast:      Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Gary Oldman
Eight years on, a new terrorist leader, Bane, overwhelms Gotham's finest, and the Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.

I think how you rate this film will be based on how high you rated Dark Knight. If you loved Dark Knight, I think you will find DKR to be a disappointment. If you didn't rate TDK that highly then you would rate DKR for what it really is- a very well made action film with some story to support. The script is terrible at some places where the characters have to go into great details to explain things and you just realize that it is a terribly done exposition. Some of the plot twists can bee seen from a mile off. Still Nolan has manged to make three films that are better than good in  a genre in which it is very difficult to maintain high standards.

'Batman Begins' is my favorite out of three.

Rating: 3.5/5