Christopher Nolan’s Reach Always Exceeds His Grasp

Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff

Christopher Nolan is the most important film director since Steven Spielberg for many reasons, but the most obvious reason was made apparent once again this past weekend; only he could have made a dense movie about a physicist open to more than 80 million dollars domestically.

The age of movie stars being considered “openers” is pretty much over; only a handful of actors, if that, can make people go see a movie by themselves in 2023 (That list, I think, is Dicaprio, Cruise, Denzel, and Ryan Reynolds. Margot Robbie may be on the list after the smash success of Barbie).

But we now have a handful of directors who are now “openers,” with Nolan headlining the list (which includes Jordan Peele, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and maybe Greta Gerwig).

Does Oppenheimer open to even $40 million with any other director besides Nolan?

Spielberg was the only director opener we have ever had before the Chris Nolan era. But star directors may be our path forward to make the movie theater experience important again. Nolan understands home theaters cannot create the IMAX experience with visuals and audio. Nolan also understands that CGI does not make movies special; AI can probably make it easy to do the most complicated CGI effects from your home office within the next five years.

Hopefully, more directors will be inspired by Nolan to make the movie theater experience exceptional again. I think movies like Top Gun: Maverick were inspired by Nolan movies to make them as authentic as possible, to make audiences go “Woah.”

That’s the path forward for Hollywood.

Now, Nolan is the most important director we have today, but as much as I love him, he is not the best, as Oppenheimer made evident. Oppenheimer had several special aspects to it: Cillian Murphy’s performance, the Trinity test scenes, and the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, just to name a few.

But it takes a skilled director to make dense subject material easy to understand. Not only is Nolan not good at that, but it would be hard to argue he does not like his movies being hard to understand. Tenet is a movie I still don’t understand, having seen it three times with subtitles on. His most recent movies also have sound mixing issues, making it hard even to hear his characters talking.

It's a choice that prevents him from being considered among the greats.

With Oppenheimer, as with many of his other movies, Nolan has a real grasp of what the audience is looking for in his movies, but to quote a line from my favorite Nolan movie, “The Prestige”, his reach always seems to exceed his grasp.

With Oppenheimer, my opinion only, there’s a 150-minute cut available which delivers his main point without trying to be completist regarding his message on Oppenheimer, America’s relationship with Oppenheimer, and the world’s relationship with nuclear weapons.

But, Nolan being Nolan, to put this in football terms, he couldn’t just kick the extra point; he had to go for the 2-point conversion and then the onside kick afterward, even though he almost always fails.

Some people think his going for it is enough, and there’s some truth to that. Too many directors play it safe.

But, to use a poker analogy, directors also need to know when to hold them and when to fold them, and Nolan not only always holds them but also goes all in at the very end.

I will always love Chris Nolan, and I hope he makes movies for another 30 years. He single-handedly made movies important again, reminding Hollywood that original concepts can be based on original IP.

But, to paraphrase one more movie (Magnum Force), he needs to know his limitations.