The first line of Homer’s Odyssey can be roughly translated as, “Tell me, O Muse, of that many-talented man.” This seems apt for Christopher Nolan, the Anglo-American director of the latest screen incarnation, who has deftly steered his way through an extraordinary 28-year career. Beginning with 1998’s Following, a microbudget black-and-white psychological thriller, he has made a series of pictures that have disobeyed all the rules that contemporary Hollywood appears to abide by (number one: dumb it down) and yet have been remarkably consistent critical and commercial successes.
His 13th feature, The Odyssey, represents Nolan’s most ambitious and potentially divisive film to date. While he is a filmmaker who refuses to be pigeonholed in one particular genre or mode, his most accomplished and successful works have been time-jumping, intellectually demanding tales that have deconstructed such wellworn genres as the superhero picture (his “Dark Knight” Batman trilogy, 2005–2012), the war movie (2017’s Dunkirk), the espionage thriller (2020’s Tenet) and the biopic (2023’s Oppenheimer).
This has been done with such assurance and innovation that Nolan has won two Oscars and become an extraordinarily wealthy man. Box office receipts have also been considerable. The Dark Knight alone grossed over $1bn in 2008, setting new records for the superhero genre, and Oppenheimer—on the face of it, not the most commercial prospect, as a three-hour, partially black-and-white biopic of the nuclear physicist J Robert Oppenheimer—made $975m. Even the relative flop Tenet, which suffered from being released mid-pandemic, still made $365m, a number many lesser filmmakers would kill for.
One reason for Nolan’s cultlike reputation is his canny use of the proprietary format Imax, which he chose to adopt at a time when most other filmmakers were plumping for the more modish 3D format. The latter is now largely dead (Avatar pictures notwithstanding), whereas Nolan’s pictures are designed for cinema exhibition on the largest possible screens, befitting their epic natures. His dedication to Imax is considerable. Not only did he originate its mainstream use with The Dark Knight, but The Odyssey is the first film to have been entirely filmed in the format, necessitating the invention of a wholly new camera. This has, unsurprisingly, led to vast excitement from cineastes. When tickets went on sale in June—after an early release as long ago as last July—there were queues of an hour to purchase them.
Nolan’s standing with both critics and audiences is practically unprecedented. There are many other filmmakers whose latest pictures are not so much reviewed as garlanded, but few of those enjoy anything like the same frenzied adoration from fans. It must therefore have been an unpleasant shock, in the run-up to The Odyssey’s cinematic release, for him to find himself the target of attack, even ridicule, when the film’s final trailer was released.
Some on the right, whipped up by Elon Musk, criticised the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, on the historically spurious—or simply racist—grounds that the face that launched a thousand ships could not have been a black one. Many of the same naysayers complained that the trans actor Elliot Page had been cast as Achilles (in fact, Page plays Elpenor, the youngest member of Odysseus’s crew). Others took a more intellectual approach, criticising both Nolan’s apparent use of Emily Wilson’s much-praised but demotic 2017 translation as the basis for his script, and suggesting that the cast’s omnipresent American accents and distractingly slangy dialogue (“daddy” and “dad”, for example, rather than father) took some credibility away from the picture.
The director has, as usual, taken the criticism robustly, as he did when detractors of Oppenheimer—including his rival for the title of premier blockbuster director du jour, James Cameron—suggested that the picture had erred by not depicting the atomic bombs, which the eponymous physicist had helped create, being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a recent interview with Time, he said of his critics that, “Hopefully they’ll enjoy the film, even if they don’t agree with everything. We had a lot of scientists complain about Interstellar. But you just don’t want people to think that you took it on frivolously.”
Nolan has always been a guarded, at times self-consciously enigmatic figure
There has been little frivolity in Nolan’s career which, after Following, swiftly gathered momentum with his breakthrough hit Memento (2000). While hardly Stanley Kubrick when it comes to personal privacy, he has always been a guarded, at times self-consciously enigmatic figure, leaving his wife and creative partner, Emma Thomas, to offer compensatory warmth and charm when discussing their projects in public. It was speculated in the industry that, despite multiple nominations, the reason why he had to wait until Oppenheimer for his first Academy Awards was that he had never bothered endearing himself to his peers on the rubber-chicken, baby-kissing circuit. One producer called him “a cold guy who makes cold films”.
The insult clearly rankled. Discussing the picture he would like to have regarded as his magnum opus, 2014’s space odyssey Interstellar, Nolan remarked to Timothée Chalamet—whom he cast in a small role in that picture—that “some of the responses were a bit sniffy from critics. There was a sense of people not quite being ready for it from me.” I remember my first viewing of Interstellar and feeling mystified by it. It seemed as if Nolan had seen Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris, taken notes, thrown them all together in a blender, added a hefty dollop of Borges and then slathered on an organ-and-strings score from Hans Zimmer that gave the whole project suitably heavenly heft. It was clearly another significant work from a major filmmaker. But had I enjoyed it? That was quite another question.
More than a decade later, many now believe Interstellar to be Nolan’s best, or at least most resonant, film. It has enjoyed a particular afterlife on TikTok, where Zimmer’s music soundtracks a million memes, and a lucrative re-release for its 10-year anniversary showed the degree of affection in which it is held. There are obvious parallels with The Odyssey, too: a heroic character goes on a long, perilous journey, hellbent on returning to his family against insurmountable odds, and en route encounters wonders—and dangers—he could never have imagined. Several of the cast appear in both films, including Nolan’s Odysseus, Matt Damon, his Penelope, Anne Hathaway, and Bill Irwin, who played an amiable robot, Tars, in the earlier film, and the rather less-than-amiable Cyclops, Polyphemus, in the new picture. This contributes to a sense of Nolan as being someone who likes not only to work with the same collaborators consistently (some might even say persistently) but to create an overarching intellectual framework within his pictures that makes his dazzled, dizzy viewers believe that Sir Christopher is an extremely clever man indeed.
Intelligence in a film director is a strange quality. While there are probably—naming no names—a few auteurs who are, like Bertie Wooster, “intellectually somewhat negligible”, many more are ferociously gifted , their pictures unapologetically cerebral. Sometimes, this is an appreciable thing; at other times, you leave their latest offering wondering whether you’re simply too limited to understand the workings of a great mind—or whether the great mind hasn’t done enough to render itself relatable.
Nolan’s intellectual bona fides are not up for debate. From the ingenious backwards narrative construction of Memento, through the way in which the Batman films became a sustained metaphor for an America struggling to define itself against the rise of foreign and domestic terrorism, to the apocalyptic moral quandaries posed in Oppenheimer, any Nolan film is going to be seriously smart. That these pictures also lack humour is a byproduct of his genius.
Nolan’s many defenders, if this is pointed out to them, adamantly compare him to Kubrick, another supposedly serious cinematic maestro, but this is nonsense. Kubrick’s pictures are almost always shot through with mordant, jet-black humour, from the looming nuclear apocalypse of Dr Strangelove (1964) to Tom Cruise trying and failing to get laid in Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Nolan, meanwhile, conducts himself and his work with appropriate gravity. Actors talk, almost dazedly, of life-changing experiences on his sets, where mobile phones are banned, but few ever discuss it in terms of fun. It was not for nothing that, when Robert Downey Jr was welcoming his fellow Oppenheimer star Emily Blunt to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the bonding moments he mentioned was that “We survived Nolan”.
Still, if it’s fun you’re looking for, other options are available. And it is to Nolan’s credit that the icily cerebral qualities of his films are not simply window dressing but instead imbued in their very DNA. It was said of the late Tom Stoppard that his plays gave audiences the experience of believing themselves to be cleverer for a few hours and that, when they left the theatre, the magic dissipated along with the applause. Much the same is true of Nolan, whose formally adventurous films deal with complex philosophical, scientific and political issues at a level few other directors have ever come near. Whether or not you are a fan of his final Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), for instance, it is now clear that its examination of mob violence and populism prefigures the Maga movement and the rise of Trump. These are not qualities possessed by, say, Joel Schumacher’s lurid Batman and Robin (1997).
Nolan deserves credit, undoubtedly, for challenging audiences, who show up in their hundreds of millions to gasp at whatever rabbit he has produced from his hat. (It is appropriate that the film where he explicitly dealt with illusion and artifice, 2006’s The Prestige, is also his last picture to exist on a smaller scale.) Like Spielberg, Cameron and a few other living filmmakers, he is the star of his films, far more than any of his actors. (It is no accident that the posters of The Odyssey boast of “a Christopher Nolan film” in far larger letters than the names of the supposed stars.) Yet, unlike Spielberg or Cameron, his films refuse to offer happy endings, sentiment or comic relief. Most of them conclude with a moment of grim or hardwon compromise: think of Tom Hardy’s heroic pilot in Dunkirk, scuttling his Spitfire after saving the lives of countless men and being dragged off by the Germans for his pains; Christian Bale’s disgraced Batman on the run after taking the fall for murder in The Dark Knight; or Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer coming to terms with the Pandora’s Box that he has opened.
Cinema does not need to be facile or comfortable and, admirably, Nolan has achieved his success without (much) compromise. I can only think of a handful of crass or studio-imposed moments from his oeuvre, such as when Gary Oldman’s Lieutenant Gordon—an otherwise finely judged performance—is made to cheer like a teenager when he does something heroic at the conclusion of Batman Begins: a clear exhortation to the audience to do the same.
For the rest of the time, a sort of detachment dominates his work. Nolan talked convincingly of how emotional an experience Interstellar, in particular, was in its creation, but this also sits at odds with the extraordinary formal control of his pictures. Nolan’s universe is every bit as stylised as Wes Anderson’s, but because it draws less attention to itself, its recurrent tropes—water, glass, fire, men in dark suits—are less remarked upon. Still, they are undeniably there, along with his most significant cinematic debt.
The fervent desire of some to canonise Nolan as the new Kubrick is surely misplaced. Instead, he is far closer to David Lean, who has himself been relatively neglected in comparison to the likes of Hitchcock and Kubrick. If Nolan’s two great cinematic touchstones, returned to over and over again, are 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lawrence of Arabia, then it is no insult to Nolan to suggest that his pictures cleave closer to the literate anguish of Lean’s film than the esoteric wonder of Kubrick’s. Nolan’s films may be demanding and, in the last acts of Interstellar and Tenet, positively loopy, but they never fully commit to the blast of pure sensation offered by 2001. Even at their most unrestrained, they feel as if they have been made by a pensive English don on sabbatical, not a hip Hollywood filmmaker.
There is another, less recognised touchstone, too. In 2023, Nolan remarked to Sight and Sound that “the cinema of Nicolas Roeg, in particular, the editing rhythms and the way he used things other than narrative and chronological progression… that all started to click with me.” Roeg, unaccountably, has started to recede from memory eight years after his death in 2018, but he had a remarkable run of form between 1970 and 1983 that produced such pictures as Performance, Don’t Look Now, Bad Timing (a particular Nolan favourite) and Eureka. Roeg also cast Nolan’s idol David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, to which the younger director paid canny homage when he featured Bowie in the role of Nikola Tesla in The Prestige: the original man who fell to earth.
If a brave studio had given Nicolas Roeg a blockbuster budget, he might have produced something like ‘Inception’ or ‘Dunkirk’
Roeg’s combination of time-fracturing chronologies, big stars cast against type (see Gene Hackman as a taciturn gold prospector in Eureka, or Mick Jagger doing whatever the hell he does in Performance) and warped takes on the genre movie influenced Nolan perhaps more than any other director. If a brave studio had given Roeg a blockbuster budget, he might have produced something like Inception or Dunkirk. He could even have come up with Tenet, perhaps Nolan’s strangest and most experimental picture: a James Bond deconstruction in blurry primary colours, where technically stunning action scenes take place with precisely no audience engagement whatsoever, and where the lead is (intentionally) such a cipher that he is only known as The Protagonist. This is not so very far from Performance, a similar pisstake of the British gangster film, heavily layered through Borgesian identity-switching and the pervasive sense that a viewer’s expectations will be not so much challenged as upended completely.
The allusive richness of Nolan’s cinema veers close to pretension, and at times embraces it shamelessly. Curiously, he has declined as a screenwriter since his early days—his first Oscar nomination was for writing rather than directing Memento—and, at his weakest, relies heavily on gnomic repetition of portentous phrases, rather than on sparky or memorable dialogue. (The snatches of conversation heard in The Odyssey previews have hardly inspired confidence in his latest script, either.)
Set against this, he has always been a director with a real eye for visuals—no wonder that six of his films have been nominated for the Oscar for Best Cinematography, with Wally Pfister winning for Inception and then his successor Hoyte van Hoytema winning for Oppenheimer. And his musical collaborations with Hans Zimmer and, latterly, Ludwig Göransson have produced some of the most memorable and influential film scores of the past couple of decades. Intriguingly, Göransson’s music for The Odyssey has been composed without recourse to an orchestra, instead using period-specific instruments such as lyres and gongs. All of this suggests a director not just willing but near desperate to push the envelope and offer audiences something different, for which he should be commended.
In a promotional interview for his new film, Nolan was asked by 60 Minutes where he saw his place in posterity. He replied: “I’d love to feel I added something to the body of work of all the filmmakers I have admired, and the great film history that’s developing. If I can play some part in moving the language forward somehow, that would be a great thing to be remembered for.” This is a typically modest statement from a director so embedded in the contemporary Hollywood industry that he is the incumbent president of the Directors Guild of America, but can also be parsed as justifying his place in the canon.
Nolan may not quite be the Homeric hero he so clearly wishes to be, but he has displayed a similar level of cunning—some might call it opportunism—to the Ithacan king. He constructs his very own Trojan horses, smuggling often deeply avant-garde concerns into his pictures via the palatable medium of mainstream entertainment; in the arduous, eventful (although always on budget and on time) shooting schedules for his pictures, he resembles Odysseus aboard his ship, cajoling or exhorting his men.
Should he manage to negotiate his latest picture around the Scylla of the critics and the Charybdis of paying audiences to come out on top once again, few would begrudge him the satisfaction of a similarly triumphant return to home and hearth, even as the vengeful deities of AI and streaming services threaten the industry that he loves.
