The Greatest Film Ever Made (In My Opinion)

To me it's between Dunkirk or Memento!

Chris Nolan is an interesting director to me. He has all the makings of a great director but I don't think he is one. Yet one cannot deny that his films seem to have an extraordinarily passionate following and most directors could only dream of capturing the public imagination the way he has with the majority of his films.

Personally I have mixed feelings about his filmography as a whole though. On the one hand I admire films such as Memento and The Dark Knight, films with genuine thematic depth, but I'm also completely indifferent towards several of his other films including the likes of Insomnia, Inception and Interstellar.

I think there was another thread on her discussing The Prestige and I have to say that in my opinion, The Prestige is a textbook example of all style and no substance. The whole film essentially consists of a series of intricate narrative tricks that serve as adrenaline pumps and while that may seem inventive and innovative the first time around, it becomes tedious very quickly on repeated viewings. And significantly, the whole film doesn’t add up to anything beyond a series of gimmicks. There isn’t any real thematic depth here so why on earth should anyone care about any of it.

And the same goes for his much-acclaimed Inception. I'm most certainly in the minority in this one but I felt that Inception was a complete misfire. It's a film that is so desperate to sound smart that it comes off as tediously portentous but also, dare I say, sophomoric. It seems to me that Chris Nolan, one fine afternoon, picked up Sigmund Freud's "the Interpretation of Dreams" and decided to make a James Bond film around it with all the supporting characters acting as guest lecturers. Sadly I for one do not think that that makes great cinema.

In the case of Memento, there is genuine substance behind all those narrative gimmicks (unlike the Prestige). It’s about a very simple idea – a human being’s inability to be honest with himself about himself (something also alluded to in Kurosawa's Rashomon for those of you who have seen that film). With Memento, Nolan crafted a very simple and compelling study of self-delusion. It was interesting, challenging and was something approaching profundity (but not quite).

In The Dark Knight, he channelled into a very sensitive subject matter at the time – America’s War against Terror. The film depicts Batman responding to the Joker’s heinous acts of terror precisely as America responded to 9/11 – with extraordinary renditions (kidnapping of foreign citizens), coercive interrogations, warrantless surveillance. The most avid comic book readers can tell you that, stripped of all gadgets and costumes, the reason why the Batman-Joker conflict is so poetic at its core is because fundamentally, it's not a battle of strength, but of ideals (which we're all too familiar with today with the middle-east war and all). And the key question raised in the comics was "how does a man with principles win against a man with no principles, a man who has no value for anything including his own life?." In the Dark Knight, the question gets rephrased to how do you fight blind all-consuming terror through democratic institutions and is it necessary that sometimes, in order to preserve democratic values against terrorism, you have to betray them.

The Dark Knight was the first definitive post 9/11 film that doesn't go out of its way to zap the zeitgeist in primitively Bush-bashing fashion as have so many contemporary fiction and nonfiction filmmakers with a chip on their left shoulders. Rather it tells a darker, a more mature and an almost tragic story of how terror will always win because it has no rules. It is the story of the failure of the Bush-administration in its quest to fight terror whilst resigning to the fate that there is no victory in sight, only corruption. It also displays a director at the peak of his craft. There is chilling moment in the Dark Knight when the Joker leans outside of a police car and shakes his head in glee like a dog enjoying the winds of chaos blowing against his face. No scene from any of his other films even compares to the vision and artistry of this short segment of film. It baffles me that the director who made this film is the same one who went on to make Inception 2 years later.

And then we have Interstellar, a film that I find very difficult to take seriously (which is rather ironic because he directed his Batman films as if it's MacBeth). Interstellar is Chris Nolan's response to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But whilst Kubrick's film was distinctly about God and about a human being creating/becoming his own God (inspired by Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Nolan's film is about how love is what makes us human (and in the film it quite literally saves the future of the race). And in the painful conclusion to the film, he "philosophises" (to use the word loosely) that love is what transcends the fabric of spacetime itself and it's what allows Mr. Mcconaughey to communicate with his daughter when he's trapped between higher dimensions (whatever that means). And you think to yourself, did I just sit here for 2 1/2 hours only for the film to conclude by saying that although the equations of General Relativity break down beyond the event horizon of a blackhole, love between 2 human beings has the "power" to "escape" the blackhole's gravity allowing them to communicate with eachother across enormous spatial and temporal distances? With all due respect to Chris Nolan, this is the sort of thought that would probably earn a gold star if a girl of 10 came up with it but would (and should) be ridiculed for its sheer stupidity if an acclaimed film-maker thought it up.

I absolutely loath films where love is depicted as this mystical, spiritual, metaphysical connection between 2 human beings whereas in reality it's an utterly solitary fixation. Love is series of chemical imbalances in your body caused by excess hormone production. There's nothing mystical about it, it's very physical. If I inject you with a giant dose of oxytocin, you will literally feel like you're in love with the thing right in front of you (it could be your wife or it could be your dog) and if I treat you with a session of electroshock therapy that sucks all the oxytocin out of your brain, you'll feel like you can never love again. To equate love between human beings to some special signal that connects spatially/temporally separated events is to give hormone changes in human beings a privileged role in determining the grand structure of the universe which is something I cannot take seriously. I'm all for artistic abstractions but there is a limit to how far you can take an idea before it becomes downright ridiculous. Interstellar crosses that line and then some. Maybe if Nolan had read a little more Freud, he would've made a decent film here.