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Christopher Nolan is by far one of the most successful directors of the last 2 decades. With countless films, across many genres, Christopher Nolan seems to have an obsession with Time. Movies like Momento, The Dark Knight, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer, and pretty much everything else in Nolan's filmography all have a running thread of time, and how it affects his story. But why is it that Christopher Nolan uses Time as such a key aspect of all his movies?
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Muses are an inherently odd concept
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Often romanticized or vilified, the idea is they inform the stories creators want to tell
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They can manifest as characters, ideologies, or in the case of Christopher Nolan, time
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How am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time? But unlike most creators, it's never simply
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a wireframe to build upon as much as it is a tool to tell a complete story
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Throughout his entire filmography, Nolan has eschewed the idea of simple A to Z pacing
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making an alphabet soup that still somehow reads every single time. We were exploring the concept of a dream within a dream
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I kept pushing things. I wanted to go deeper. In true Nolan fashion, let's start with an ending
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It's plain to see from the director's latest offering, Oppenheimer, that the director has always held science and humankind's responsibility
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with its power close to his heart. But just before in 2020, Nolan released Tenet
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One of these bullets is like us, traveling forwards through time. The other one's going backwards
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Can you tell which is which? How about now? The film is more or less a James Bond-esque spy thriller with a science fiction bend
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The key to that twist is the hero's ability to manipulate time's flow and rhythm
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The film often showcases carefully choreographed action set pieces through different perspectives in both character and time
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As is often the case with time travel, some found the logistics questionable
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But given Nolan's history, the logistics of traversing time don't exactly seem to be the point
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People often accuse Nolan of delivering very cold and methodical films. But with Tennant, Nolan was attempting to immerse the audience in a feeling or atmosphere
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We follow our lead, simply credited as protagonist, as he begins to wrestle with heady topics like
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free will and paradoxes. What's happened's happened, which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world
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It's not an excuse to do nothing. These are subjects Nolan has continuously touched on in his decades career more often than not using time and film to drive the ideas home In an interview with NPR in 2020 Nolan said about the manipulation of forward and reverse filmmaking It can gift us with this look at the world we live in
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in a completely different way that never existed before the camera came along
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There's an idea in his beliefs that strikes at celebrating the feeling cinema can give us
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That emphasis on feeling was incredibly evident in Nolan's prior release, Dunkirk
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Centered around the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II, the movie was told through three different perspectives, each one focused on a different
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amount of time. One through line follows the soldiers on a beach for one week, another follows
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a ship at sea for one day, and the final story follows the pilots for one hour. Each story runs
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parallel until they finally come to a head at the film's climax. We, as an audience, are left
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awestruck at Nolan's ability to manipulate our feelings with time and pacing. Nolan's usage of
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time shows us the extent, the moments these people had to go through in order for this
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evacuation to work. That emotional core via a grounded battalion was the logical step following
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the more intimate father-daughter relationship of Interstellar. The film firmly established Nolan
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as a director and writer who saw beauty and magic in science. Instead of ancient amulets or cursed
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gems, the director uses real-world wormholes and supermassive black holes. The overall purpose of
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that magic is so the protagonist can reconnect with and save his daughter. Granted, doing so also
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saves the entire world, but Nolan drives home the idea again and again that our astronaut believes in
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and loves his daughter. While not necessarily, technically time travel is the sense of going from
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point D to A. Our hero instead enters a tesseract where time exists simultaneously, enabling him to
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communicate with his daughter. For all the movie's hard science fiction, it's simply a story about a
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father eschewing what we think are our laws of physics and time to hold his kid's hand
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Time will run differently for us? Yeah. By the time I get back, we might even be the same age
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And that is inherently beautiful despite Nolan fascination with hard science It a perfect evolution from his prior film Inception Where in time in Interstellar was something to be conquered Inception was a film
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with time as a literal and figurative enemy. The story was more or less a heist film where the
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human mind is the vault and ideas are the loot. It's a wholly unique idea. Each sequence has them
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racing against a clock on a continuous countdown, and you could make the argument that the entire
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movie is about Nolan being pulled from his family in order to make movies
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Why would you do this? I freed you from the guild of choosing to leave them
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We're going home to our real children. That idea of lost time was a natural step after The Prestige, a mystery thriller about
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obsession, competition, and the sacrifices people make out of dedication. The movie followed two rival stage magicians, each working on upstaging the other
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While it's not as clearly about time as the rest of his filmography, there must be something
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said about the way time factors into the pair of twin magicians relationship in order to keep the
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illusion that there is only one true person the other twin loses half their life in hiding and
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that's a huge amount of time to not live your true life each has compromised their existence
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their time in order to achieve their goals for the twins time is a sacrifice a tool they use
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that sets them apart from their rivals we had shed half of a full life really which was enough for us
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The Prestige was released in the middle of what would become Nolan's Batman trilogy
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and you'd be mistaken if you didn't think Nolan didn't figure out a way to work his most used
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theme into the internationally famous IP. Began's train sequence, or the ticking bomb of Rises
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the most interesting feature of time in Batman, is Nolan's pacing. The entire trilogy feels like
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it is intentionally eschewing traditional movie timelines, particularly superhero movies. Often, he lets years pass to show us what happens when our hero is gone. It was Nolan, again
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driving home the idea that time is always present and always passing, whether our heroes were there
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or not Where is he What the time What difference does that make Well depending on the time he may be in one spot or several Using time as a tool goes all the way back to Nolan second feature Memento the story of a widower in search of the man
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responsible for his wife's death. The entire film is told backwards. The ending of each scene
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acts as the beginning to the next. Okay, so what am I doing? Oh, I'm chasing this guy
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No? He's chasing me. There are some out-of-time black-and-white segments sprinkled throughout where we learn
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about the man's backstory. Released 23 years ago, the director manipulating time is one vastly
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different from the iconoclast filmmaker we spoke about in Tenet. While the protagonist of Tenet
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was constantly questioning as a means to try and understand, our lead in Memento questions out of
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resignation and need of purpose, an acceptance that there is something wrong with his mind and
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is now forced to scribble notes on Polaroids or give himself an old-fashioned stick-and-poke tattoo
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In Memento, time was akin to punching fog. You could see it, even feel its effects on your damp
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skin, but the battle was and will always be fruitless. I finally found him. How long have
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I been looking? While latter Nolan films have begun to embrace time, his earlier films treated
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the concept as something to rally and wail against. And that's a young creator's line of
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thinking that time is forever trying to stop us. Whether it's passing too quickly to make new
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memories or just trying to yank us out of a dream heist, it's an enemy. But as Nolan has gotten older
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we see his line of thinking turn into using time as a tool, a way for a storyteller to manipulate
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their audience into drastic peaks and valleys. Something to be embraced so we can hold onto
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loved ones a little longer. That might just be Nolan's greatest trick
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His pledge to showing us something ordinary we deal with every day
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His turn in doing something extremely unordinary, like showing us a story backwards, or using
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it as a metaphor for his own familial relationship. But then, in the end, we see that time was always and will always be there, even if we
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just needed film to see it correctly
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