The Dark Knight (2008)

USA / UK, 152 minutes

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer, Bob Kane

Photography: Wally Pfister

Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

Editor: Lee Smith

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Ritchie Coster, Chin Han, Nestor Carbonell, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall, Patrick Leahy

I have no problem calling The Dark Knight the best Batman movie ever made—by miles, even. I just think we might need to call on Scott McCloud for some analysis of why no Batman movie has ever worked as well as most Batman comics—is it the space between the panels? (If McCloud has done so already, someone please point me there.) In command of a princely budget, shot on location in Chicago, Hong Kong, and London, The Dark Knight is committed to being a high-tech thriller like director Michael Mann makes. Lots of gadgets, stunts, special effects, chase scenes (involving a Lamborghini, fat-wheeled motorcycles, and semitrucks marked “SLaughter Is the Best Medicine”), fistfights, gunplay, and tedious orchestral music from Hans Zimmer, with a giant swirling story about Gotham City and the chaos the Joker (Heath Ledger) unleashes there with bank robberies, hospital demolitions, assassinations, so on so forth. The Dark Knight is also rich with movie stars: Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and the Democratic senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy

I’m also happy to call Heath Ledger the best Joker of all and even to consider this performance possibly his greatest. But that’s more because his career was cut short in 2008, when he died at the age of 28. It’s hard to say where he would be now, still in his 40s. He rewrote the whole approach to the Joker but I’m pretty sure, given his willingness to take on a risky role and make it great like he did in Brokeback Mountain, that The Dark Knight and his Joker would be in competition with other performances by now. The big boffo attack of The Dark Knight continues to impress, but Ledger’s performance, embedded in it as the unsettling center of gravity, is one of a kind. The rest of the movie seemed kind of boring to me on my third time through. I’m still happy to call it one of the greatest superhero movies, but this might be a good place to wonder about the general utility of superhero movies.

Batman Begins (2005)

USA / UK, 140 minutes

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Bob Kane, David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan

Photography: Wally Pfister

Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

Editor: Lee Smith

Cast: Christopher Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Morgan Freeman, Linus Roache, Gus Lewis, Ken Watanabe, Mark Boone Junior

On my second look at Batman Begins in recent days—I saw it when it was new in 2005—I was a little surprised to realize it wasn’t exactly the movie I thought it was. I had the impression it was an adaptation of the Frank Miller / David Mazzucchelli series, later a graphic novel, Batman: Year One. It’s fair to say Year One is an influence—how many Batman productions have we seen since 1987 that include details of the murder of Bruce Wayne’s father and mother in a back-alley stickup, Bruce witnessing it, Bruce going single-minded OCD on it and swearing eternal vigilance against crime and violence? A lot, is the correct answer. “A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen. I shall become a BAT!” Also: “I am vengeance, I am the night, I am Batman.” These are the kinds of things the original Batman told himself for motivation, and they echo on today.

As a superhero Batman is a little different, of course, having no superpowers. Well, but he does have the real-world superpower of being obscenely rich. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire and able to afford stuff at will: a Batcave underneath his mansion, a costume with cowl and swirling cape (for standing atop the tallest city towers in high winds, don’t ask me why he isn’t just blown off), the Batmobile, a superior utility belt, the batarang (here looking more like a ninja weapon, the shuriken), of course the bat-signal when Commissioner Gordon needs him and he’s not answering the hotline bat phone, and no burdensome regulation, ever. The origins of most of that stuff is in this version of Batman’s origin, so there’s plenty of bang here for your origin story bat buck.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Somewhere along the line I developed a bad attitude about director and writer hail the auteur Christopher Nolan. I didn’t like Inception, I didn’t like Dunkirk, and I really didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises (is there consensus it’s his worst?). On the other hand, to be fair, there are as many that I do like, at least by parts (the first two Batmans, The Prestige, Interstellar, and especially Memento). But when last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenom went down, famously restoring movies to commercial oomph, I was dubious, especially when I ventured out to see Barbie first. But I finally got around to Nolan’s A-bomb and frankly have to file it with things that make me shrug. It’s long, to start with, it’s packed full of strutting stars (Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh), the sound design is pretentious, and so is the gaudy overall visual strategy, alternating color with black and white because what? Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a stout enough moral being, heart in the right place, all that, much like oh, say, Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures. Murphy mumbles too much but I understand that’s part of the sound design. Points for being reminiscent of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, by my lights the only certifiably great turn in this one, perhaps not surprisingly, is from Robert Downey Jr., who continues to bank the fires on being the best movie actor alive. The picture is arguably worth seeing for his performance alone. But I’ve heard enough disputes now about the historical veracity of Oppenheimer that I felt obliged to not believe any of it. I suspect the things I liked most and didn’t know already were the things that were made up. For a three-hour movie about A-bombs there was only one mushroom cloud. That’s probably for the best, at this point. Even nuclear anxiety isn’t what it used to be. Much too much was clonkingly obvious, like the quote attributed to “Oppie” out of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It came to remind me of Samuel L. Jackson’s faux Bible quote in Pulp Fiction. I won’t go so far as to call the fatally self-serious Oppenheimer out and out bad. But I’m willing to say it’s 85% mediocre.

Tenet (2020)

Of course I had to look up reviewers and websites I read regularly when I am confused before I could even think of trying to make sense of Christopher Nolan's giant headfuck valentine to action movies, one of the larger cultural artifacts lost in the pandemic, although likely that is temporary. A 70-mm version made the rounds last summer, but I suspect we still have to wait until after next year before it might be safe enough to see movies with crowds again so it will likely be back. I went ahead and looked at it on TV. I thought of James Bond while watching it and so did Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending, Steven Rubio at Steven Rubio's Online Life, and Brian Tellerico at RogerEbert.com. Start with that. I'm not a big fan of Bond movies but it's fair to say with Tenet that "ultimately its pleasures are the pleasures of the chase followed by the fistfight, interspersed with scenes of craftily sneaking into secure locations." That's Brayton, who by the way argues even the high concept of the movie is lucid. Everyone seems to agree on the rousing action scenes, as abstracted as they are minus lucid narrative context, but the view that this movie makes sense is more a minority one—I was lost most of the time, and Rubio and Tallerico seemed nearly as befuddled as me, not to mention hordes of commenters on the internet. The concept of Tenet (please note how it reads the same backward and forward) rests on a technology that can reverse entropy (I know: yeah, right), enabling access to a timestream that moves from future to past, instead of only past to future as we all normally experience it. What that means for the movie in practical terms is that in the big action sequences with helicopters some things are moving forward and some are moving backward (most obviously, lots of un-explosions). Nailing down the conflict in this story is a problem I'm not sure Tenet ever solves. We're told we are under attack from the future, with some chatter about the time-travel grandfather paradox, but I didn't catch much explanation beyond that so I will have to leave it at that. I'm not ready yet to resort to YouTube. Between Nolan's big budget and the amazing fat soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson there's plenty to gape at and it is often somehow even thrilling. But the ongoing lack of narrative clarity combined with the long running time was wearying. Will it make more sense another time? Maybe when the pandemic is over I can go see it in full theatrical glory and then adjourn for coffee and pie and a long conversation. I resent movies that require multiple viewings as basically incompetent on their face, but there's also a few I've grown ever more fond of after second and third and more viewings (In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr., and Yi Yi, for example). Jury's still out on this one, and not just for me. I already know it expects us to work hard.

Dunkirk (2017)

Since approximately Saving Private Ryan, big-name directors taking turns at World War II shows has become a bit of a rite of passage (so make that since the 50th anniversary of D-Day). A partial list would include Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor), Roman Polanski (The Pianist), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), and Robert Zemeckis (Allied). Clint Eastwood made two in one year (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) and even John Woo made one (Windtalkers). Still, it was surprising to me that director and writer Christopher Nolan had any interest in the subject, given the indie / superhero bent of his career. But apparently he has been nursing a screenplay for some 25 years. In many ways it shows. Dunkirk is full of a big bushel basket of ambitious everything—blood, sweat, tears, maybe one or two kitchen sinks—but it's missing one thing: narrative clarity. With all the Dark Knight business he retailed for years it might be easy to forget that Nolan is a British citizen. That's evident here, and he is obviously stirred by the British effort at Dunkirk. He pretty much assumes we care as much as he does, and that's where he's starting from. If you don't know much about Dunkirk the historical event and key battle of World War II—which I didn't, lazybones me, assuming the movie would fill me in—then you might find yourself somewhat at sea like all the imperiled people in the movie. It also doesn't help that Dunkirk is treated like one of those things so big it can only be told with the stories of multiple otherwise unconnected people. I never felt like I 100% grasped everything I was looking at—who these people were, what exactly was happening to them specifically, and what happened to my compassion. The battle scenes are tremendous, yes, particularly the aerial engagements, but tremendous battle scenes are not enough. The deaths can be horrible and there were touching displays of human kindness, but horrible deaths and touching human kindness are also not enough. The notable lack of clarity in Dunkirk, in fact, was unexpected partly because I thought one of the few worthwhile points about the otherwise incoherent mess of Interstellar was Nolan's ability to visually communicate experiences of relativity without getting that confusing. I was dubious about Dunkirk from the start, but when word of mouth got to me that it was Nolan's masterpiece I thought I had to take a look. As far as I'm concerned, The Dark Knight and then Memento are still the ones by him to beat. As World War II movies go, I think I even like Allied better, though it's not nearly as self-serious.

Memento (2000)

USA, 113 minutes
Director/writer: Christopher Nolan
Photography: Wally Pfister
Cast: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

I often find discussions of film noir a little frustrating because I'm never sure what exactly are the terms of consensus—noir would appear to be something less than a genre and yet something more than a style. In the end perhaps it's best thought of as one of those things, like the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography in 1964, that we know when we see. Thus, if one can forgive Memento for being filmed in color (mostly) and for being made outside of the time period 1945-1959, I'd like to just go ahead and submit it as one of the better examples of film noir around. Certainly the five main points that Wikipedia tells us the French critics rely on are present in sufficient quantity and quality, bullet-pointed for easy consideration: oneiric (that means dreamlike), strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. It's also preoccupied with crime and the criminal underworld, another typical feature. The utterly ingenious narrative strategy does set it apart from much that most of us have seen before —rhythmic bite-size pieces that move sequentially backward through time, alternating with slowly clarifying flashback interludes (shot in a gauzy black and white). It's essentially the point of view of our hero, Leonard, who has suffered since the murder of his wife from a condition of chronic short-term memory loss—he can't remember people he has met or things that have happened even an hour earlier. In spite of this, Leonard has set himself to finding his wife's killer, making endless notes to himself, even tattooing himself, to keep the facts of the case as intact in his mind as possible. But the shadowy figures in his life (even including himself, eventually) find it child's play to manipulate and cruelly use him. Watching movies is very often a kind of dreaming, but I've seen few that come as close to the experience of the dreams we have at night (outside of David Lynch, a discussion for another time). (I should note, as long as I'm inside these parentheses, that noir has seen other experiments in shuffling up time sequences, such as Kubrick's The Killing, and also that another famous noir, The Big Sleep, demonstrated it's not critically important to understand every point of a plot as it unfolds, or even for that plot to cohere.) Indeed, Memento is often baffling the first time through even as the kinetics keep one in thrall. Upon closer examination, however, it does all pretty much fits together, which ultimately produces an experience both overwhelming and unsettling, and deeply undermining of surprising depths of psychic certainty. In fact, every time I see it still I seem to take more away from it and come away more impressed—with the movie, not human beings. And if that's not noir, I don't know what is.