The Official Thread for the Church of Oscar-winning Director and (soon to be) Sir Christopher Nolan

[Mr. Who 919]

I saw the film tonight and have to say that I was basically left speechless. Amazing piece of cinema that I’m definitively going to watch a few times more in the theatre.
 

Brilliant writing, directing, cinematography and acting. The acting was inspired and you could really feel the dangers and the horror of the nuclear weapons and the prospect of the Nazis having a nuclear weapon. The trinity test and all the science is incredible but the final act is what really ties everything together with Oppenheimer’s inner fears and the score political fallout of the Manhattan project.

 

Those hearing scenes at the end (both Oppenheimer’s and Strauss’) were as intense as the end of the Dark Knight. The writing and acting on full display.

 

The score was quite effective in the film and reminded me in parts of Theory of Everything, Dunkirk, Inception, Frost Nixon and Tenet. I really liked the Groves theme and the arrival in Los Alamos music but need to listen the OST before forming an opinion of the score overall.
 

I’m a huge fan of Nolan’s work and having seen a screening of Following last week at the theatre, it was amazing to see Oppenheimer a week later to see the evolution of his work!

 

 

[crocodile 8,017]

How is Tenet visionary? Please, explain. I genuinely tried to like it --- watched it at the cinema, in IMAX, on Blu-ray --- and it just doesn't connect. I know what the plot is about and its mechanics work and yet I am still unable to follow or participate in anything this film attempts to portray. And I say that as someone who has been a ardent Nolan follower for the past 23 years.

 

Karol

[KK 3,307]

As of now, this is what I'm feeling:

 

1. Oppenheimer

2. The Prestige

3. Memento

4. The Dark Knight

5. Inception

6. Batman Begins

7. Dunkirk

8. Interstellar

9. Insomnia

10. The Dark Knight Rises
11. Tenet

 

 

1 hour ago, crocodile said:

Personally, I would like him to make something smaller next.

 

I have a feeling that Oppenheimer will be as "small" a Nolan film as we'll get.

[Raiders of the SoundtrArk 2,433]

My ranking

1. Interstellar (great storytelling, visual and character developpement + one of the best Zimmer)
2. Inception (same as above with less interresting characters)
3. The Dark Knight (one of the best super-hero movie)
4. The Dark Knight Rises (a close second)
5. Memento (beautifully written)
6. Oppenheimer (simply great, but nothing more like the previous)
7. Dunkirk (a bit too flawed but still really good)
8. The Prestige (great twist but a bit too long)
9. Batman Begins (the action scenes aren't really good but the rest is very nice)
10. Insomnia (simple and efficient)
11. Following (quite interresting for its construction but the visual narrative ain't that great)
12. Tenet (the only one I don't like, overcomplicated for nothing, poor mixing and the sequence are too forgettable espacially the plane sequence which is a boring waste of money)

[MaxMovieMan 273]

1. Interstellar (One of my favorite movies in general)

2. The Dark Knight (One of the greatest crime/thriller movies ever made)

3. Inception (Super interesting original story with a great emotional core and awesome set-pieces)

4. Oppenheimer (Intense non-stop character study that is IMO the modern-day "JFK" minus the historical inaccuracy)

5. Batman Begins (Probably my favorite "origin story movie" and is a super rewatch-able action movie)

6. The Prestige (Great lead performances carry the movie and the magic stuff is interesting but not as crazy as it’s hyped up to be IMO)

7. The Dark Knight Rises (Disappointing ending to the trilogy that still is a fun popcorn film with a Nolan flair)

8. Tenet (Too complicated for its own good with sweet action but little plot coherency that you can only appreciate after seeing the movie several times)

9. Dunkirk (I just didn’t like this one besides the action scenes)

 

I haven’t seen Following, Memento, or Insomnia yet but I will soon.

[Holko 9,527]

I'm no big fan in general from the ones I've seen, but I just watched Oppenheimer with some colleagues. And it's pretty dang good!

[MaxMovieMan 273]

I’m so glad a movie like Oppenheimer is making good money. I’ve seen it twice now and both times the theater was packed. And both times the showings were at farther theaters or at an early afternoon time because the normal evening imax showings were booked out for days.

[Romão 2,274]

1 hour ago, KK said:

As of now, this is what I'm feeling:

 

1. Oppenheimer

2. The Prestige

3. Memento

4. The Dark Knight

5. Inception

6. Batman Begins

7. Dunkirk

8. Interstellar

9. Insomnia

10. The Dark Knight Rises
11. Tenet

 

 

 

Except for Oppenheimer, which I haven't seen yet, my personal ranking would be exactly the same

[Jay 37,369]

5 hours ago, PrayodiBA said:

(Anyway, what happened to the text overlay “1. Fission” at the beginning of the movie then it’s not continued for the rest of the movie, or I missed it?)

You missed it.  The first black and white scene says "2. Fusion".

[Mr. Who 919]

Super interesting interview with Nolan and some physicists.

[Holko 9,527]

One thing I didn't like was how stuffed and fast-paced, tightly edited most dialogue scenes (so most of the movie) were, with little room to breathe or let characters think and react, let the camera do things like hold on them between lines. But I think that's just a Nolan thing in general. Overall I think it came together very well, I liked the unraveling and payoff of the "mystery",  key standout scenes like the Trinity test (very faithful) and his speech afterwards were just fantastic.

[crocodile 8,017]

42 minutes ago, Holko said:

One thing I didn't like was how stuffed and fast-paced, tightly edited most dialogue scenes (so most of the movie) were, with little room to breathe or let characters think and react, let the camera do things like hold on them between lines. But I think that's just a Nolan thing in general. 

Yes, precisely. It feels like a constant montage or, better yet, a trailer with those quick transition and music laid thick. It can be exhausting if you sell every scene, no matter how small, with the same sense of propulsion as the big setpiece. This is my only real problem.

 

Karol

[A24 4,338]

49 minutes ago, Holko said:

One thing I didn't like was how stuffed and fast-paced, tightly edited most dialogue scenes (so most of the movie) were, with little room to breathe or let characters think and react, let the camera do things like hold on them between lines. 

 

Classic Nolan ... but many people like that.

[Holko 9,527]

Thankfully it got the most important thing right... the hungarian accents are believable! Even if not thick enough

[KK 3,307]

1 hour ago, crocodile said:

Yes, precisely. It feels like a constant montage or, better yet, a trailer with those quick transition and music laid thick. It can be exhausting if you sell every scene, no matter how small, with the same sense of propulsion as the big setpiece. This is my only real problem.

 

Karol

 

Agreed. But this is classic Nolan after all.

 

I honestly think if you cut out half the music, especially in the first half, it would immensely help with this problem.

[MaxMovieMan 273]

The music is what kept the pace for me. Without it the movie would’ve slogged. I appreciate a director using a score as such an important tool in the film. Most take music for granted but Nolan is anything but.

[Trope 527]

On 25/7/2023 at 5:20 AM, crocodile said:

How is Tenet visionary? Please, explain. I genuinely tried to like it --- watched it at the cinema, in IMAX, on Blu-ray --- and it just doesn't connect. I know what the plot is about and its mechanics work and yet I am still unable to follow or participate in anything this film attempts to portray. And I say that as someone who has been a ardent Nolan follower for the past 23 years.

 

Karol

I don't know how to justify Tenet as being "visionary", but I know that while I didn't fully understand every element of the mechanics and the plot on my first viewing (and, let's be honest, I still feel like I'm missing things today many viewings later), I like that the movie is packed full of very interesting conceptual ideas and I had no idea where the story was going to go at any point in time - In other words, I found it to be completely original (i.e. something only Nolan and no other director could have conceived). I thought the friendship between The Protagonist and Neil felt genuine and developed over the course of the film, and how ideas established early in the film come to be paid off in satisfying ways by the end.

 

I also happen to love what Göransson did with the score - I enjoy how he attempted to apply the idea of inversion to particular motifs and rhythms which dominate the score, and I was able to pick up on character themes right from my first viewing, so even when I wasn't following the plot intricacies 100%, I still got the overall vibe and direction of the story and felt I was able to keep up and not become completely lost (i.e. in the final battle, I was able to identify who's perspective we were following based on the music). Just some of my own thoughts.

[Tallguy 3,398]

Sometimes the score seemed amazing and integral. Other times is felt very overdone.  (Well, good or bad it was always integral.) There was an occasion I wanted the score to shut up for just a few minutes. (Is any of this film unscored?)

 

I also think in the current film landscape this film stands very much by itself. So it becomes far more remarkable than it would have been 20 years ago just by that.

 

WHAT. A. CAST. And everyone is pitch perfect. Obviously Murphy carries the most weight and this is a tour de force. It's great to see Downey step out from Tony Stark's shadow. Hey, Emily Blunt is terrific! What a shock! (That's sarcasm. Of course she was terrific.) But to me the stand out that will probably be overshadowed by such a sea of performances was Matt Damon.

[Glóin the Dark 1,222]

I thought the score was used pretty well (not overdone, and contributed effectively to the film's momentum) while, at the same time, being rather dull in its own right. In particular, the quantum ideas deserve a more harmonically and rhythmically complex accompaniment. There was an interesting passage involving a discretely and rapidly changing metre, but I only noticed it a few times.

 

I don't recall a well-attended cinema ever being as chillingly silent as this one was during the quiet moment.

 

There was an early scene in which I thought Oppenheimer said something along the lines of "Einstein published his theory of relativity forty years ago, but couldn't accept the quantum world which it revealed". Did I mishear?

[Holko 9,527]

No, you didn't mishear it, he didn't accept probabilistic quantum theories like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, commenting, as also quoted in the film, "God does not play dice".

[Glóin the Dark 1,222]

Yeah, but it's the "quantum world which it [relativity] revealed" phrase which baffled me (if that is indeed what he said).

 

Isn't it the case that, far from revealing the quantum world, relativity has yet to be reconciled with it?

 

Perhaps the reference is to a role played by special relativity (which would line up with the "forty years" claim) in the discovery or explanation of early quantum phenomena.

[Edmilson 7,466]

Oppenheimer: Quantumania

[Glóin the Dark 1,222]

Atom-Man and the WoMD

[Holko 9,527]

59 minutes ago, Glóin the Dark said:

Isn't it the case that, far from revealing the quantum world, relativity has yet to be reconciled with it?

 

Perhaps the reference is to a role played by special relativity (which would line up with the "forty years" claim) in the discovery or explanation of early quantum phenomena.

Yeah special relativity from 1905 led to quantum mechanics among other things, but general relativity from 1915 can't be unified with it yet.

[KK 3,307]

1 hour ago, Glóin the Dark said:

In particular, the quantum ideas deserve a more harmonically and rhythmically complex accompaniment. There was an interesting passage involving a discretely and rapidly changing metre, but I only noticed it a few times.

 

Amen.

 

Even that ascending/descending (Oppenheimer in the quantum world?) theme is pretty boring once you hear it again on its own. It's just doubling in time on the way down and keeps repeating while speeding up. I thought it was at least playing with different kinds of tuplets on each descent...shame.

 

The score is striking enough in the film, and that has its own merit. But musically, it's pretty flat.

[JNHFan2000 2,966]

 

[Trope 527]

22 hours ago, KK said:

Even that ascending/descending (Oppenheimer in the quantum world?) theme is pretty boring once you hear it again on its own. It's just doubling in time on the way down and keeps repeating while speeding up.

From my understanding, the theme isn't doubling in time with each tempo increase. If it was, you would be able to tap a regular pulse all the way through and each note would be exactly half its original length (and hence double its original speed), so that crotchets would become quavers (or half-notes would become quarter-notes, for my American friends). What Ludwig has done is he seems to increase the speed by an irregular percentage each time (and, to my ears, exponentially), which disrupts the regular pulse/metre and makes the music feel like it is flying further and further out of control (mimicking the chain reaction concept in the film). 

 

Check out 2:29 in "Theorists" if you wish to hear Ludwig alter the notes/harmonies of the ascending violin theme, albeit without the tempo increases.

[KK 3,307]

3 hours ago, Trope said:

From my understanding, the theme isn't doubling in time with each tempo increase. If it was, you would be able to tap a regular pulse all the way through and each note would be exactly half its original length (and hence double its original speed), so that crotchets would become quavers (or half-notes would become quarter-notes, for my American friends). What Ludwig has done is he seems to increase the speed by an irregular percentage each time (and, to my ears, exponentially), which disrupts the regular pulse/metre and makes the music feel like it is flying further and further out of control (mimicking the chain reaction concept in the film). 

 

Check out 2:29 in "Theorists" if you wish to hear Ludwig alter the notes/harmonies of the ascending violin theme, albeit without the tempo increases.

 

Well sure. I just don't find that that intelligent or clever.

 

Subatomic particle behaviour offers so many wildly interesting and imaginative ways to think about movement and motion and Ludwig's theme, while "pretty" to listen to at first, feels like a pretty tepid response.

 

Theorists is nice, but doesn't strike me as anything exceptional.

[Edmilson 7,466]

Oppenheimer is great! It made me a believer in the Church of Nolan again! 

 

About the score, I have some mixed feelings, but not due to Göransson's fault. He did what Nolan asked of him. It's the Nolan approach to film scores that I believe is a little problematic. Oppenheimer is a better score (and has a least annoying use of music) than Tenet or Dunkirk, but I still think the wall-to-wall music kinda makes it loses its impact. 

 

I too love a good montage where a long piece of music is developed over the course of a few minutes while the scene builds and builds. But Nolan uses this approach so often that it makes the setpieces that would actually benefit from it (like, for example, the Trinity test scene) feel less special. 

 

The Trinity scene is an expertly directed, shot, edited and scored sequence, but for me it would've had more emotional impact if what came before had more moments of silence, or at least less long cues going through different scenes in different time periods. Sometimes it even feels like Göransson's music was just like someone randomly chose a cue and left it playing in the background but forgot to dial it off, instead of something more specific.

 

Also, I'm not exactly a fan of the Blade Runner-like synth BAAAAAUUUUMSSS, but Nolan seems to love it since his Zimmer days. Speaking of him, during some cues I was kinda expecting for them to turn into Time from Inception or Stay from Interstellar, which makes me think Nolan misses Zimmer even if he doesn't admit it.

[LSH 969]

Saw Oppenheimer today. Thought it mostly excellent. A few condensed notes from my initial thoughts:

 

I think I enjoyed the pre-Trinity test half more. I felt it lost its momentum slightly after that, though it does pick up a bit in the final 30 mins.

 

As most have said, the actual Trinity test was not as spectacular as expected and, given the excellent build-up, I feel - as an audience - we deserved better.

 

For a film made up almost entirely of scenes of people talking in rooms, it’s as good as any. Spielberg’s more recent serious endeavours are a benchmark I think most should aspire to in this respect.

 

Score works really well for the most part though it definitely is overscored. Lots of scenes did not need it at all.

 

I’d also forgotten just how many names there are in it. Almost every scene introduced another big star in a very small role. Made it very fun to watch I thought.

 

Cillian Murphy is superb. I hope this proves to be his breakout role as a lead actor outside of the UK and Ireland.

 

Overall I truly believe Nolan has set a benchmark for the ‘big-budget biopic’ genre.

 

 

[crocodile 8,017]

 

 

Karol

 

[Not Mr. Big 4,639]

1. Dark Knight  

2. Oppenheimer 

3. Inception 

4. Tenet - a great and criminally underrated B-side Nolan film

5. Dark Knight Rises -messy but monumental and dramatically satisfying 

6. Batman Begins - slow and kind of muddy looking compared to the later entries 

7. The Prestige -good movie but I don't care for the twist 

8. Insomnia - just a normal thriller.  Not much Nolan

9. Interstellar - it's good but I still mainly see the Spielberg film that wasn't (veteran JWFanners will remember this was THE upcoming JW score).  

 

Haven't seen Dunkirk, Following, or Memento. It'd be cool if Dunkirk returned to 70mm Imax

[Bespin 8,483]

I have now seen enough of Christopher Nolan's movies to understand that he's always redoing the same movie: "I'm intelligent, you're an idiot" (and so you'll have to watch my movies at least 2 times to understand them... if you understand them, ah, ah, you morron). 

[crocodile 8,017]

Brilliant marketing strategy really.

 

Karol

[MaxMovieMan 273]

28 minutes ago, Bespin said:

I have now seen enough of Christopher Nolan's movies to understand that he's always redoing the same movie: "I'm intelligent, you're an idiot" (and so you'll have to watch my movies at least 2 times to understand them... if you understand them, ah, ah, you morron). 

Move on from this stupid opinion. I’m tired of reading this when it’s based in absolutely nothing. Just like the movie or don’t.

[Bespin 8,483]

If you are tired of reading this, it's because you read this often, so it may be true. Hehe 

 

On 24/07/2023 at 3:20 PM, crocodile said:

How is Tenet visionary? Please, explain. I genuinely tried to like it --- watched it at the cinema, in IMAX, on Blu-ray --- and it just doesn't connect. I know what the plot is about and its mechanics work and yet I am still unable to follow or participate in anything this film attempts to portray. And I say that as someone who has been a ardent Nolan follower for the past 23 years.

 

Karol

 

I was so disappointed by this movie. It's not about the famous French singer Charles Tenet at all.

[MaxMovieMan 273]

If people’s intelligences are insulted that’s their own fault.

[Not Mr. Big 4,639]

Christopher Nolan is a lot less pretentious than people assume he is.  He's just a big showman like Cecil DeMille 

[A24 4,338]

 

I don't know who he is but I'm sure he's no longer welcome in the Church of Nolan.

[Tallguy 3,398]

Don't ever let this man see Rope.

[Naïve Old Fart 9,537]

I've just watched this.

It's difficult to offer explanations on why the film didn't connect with this man without sounding offensive, but I'll have a go.

He is an actor (apparently), a boxer, and a wrestler. He's also under thirty years old.

OPPENHEIMER (rather like JAWS 2) might have been too "intense" for him. It's also three hours long, which might have added to the "boredom factor" (although I don't understand why. I sat through THE TOWERING INFERNO five times, when I was twelve years old).

Also, and without trying to sound demeaning, those who work in the man's particular chosen branch of sports entertainment, are not usually known for their... let's just say "perception".

Of course, the man is perfectly entitled to his opinion. I just wish that it was articulated with a little more finesse.

 

[Tallguy 3,398]

It's entirely possible to dislike Oppenheimer. But this man appears to be an idiot.

[Naïve Old Fart 9,537]

Indeed... but I was trying to be diplomatic 

[Tallguy 3,398]

12 minutes ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

Indeed... but I was trying to be diplomatic 

 

I was helpfully translating.

[MaxMovieMan 273]

Logan Paul poisons everything he touches.

[MedigoScan 324]

Logan Paul is also a scammer so there's that.

[Brónach 1,302]

On 28/07/2023 at 3:01 PM, KK said:

 

Subatomic particle behaviour offers so many wildly interesting and imaginative ways to think about movement and motion and Ludwig's theme, while "pretty" to listen to at first, feels like a pretty tepid response.

 

the score is boring as shit.

[Naïve Old Fart 9,537]

1 hour ago, Brónach said:

the score is boring as shit.

 

Don't mince words. Tell us what you really think.

[Brónach 1,302]

I have heard cooler trailer music!
 

edit: ok, sorry, i'll elaborate. I like Fission, but through the album, i keep getting reminded of stuff i could be listening to instead (sometimes it's actually similar, sometimes it's not similar but my mind made the connection anyway). There's something not entertaining about it.

 

I admit, I'm not exactly a musical connoisseur. I really enjoyed Black Panther, for context.

[Edmilson 7,466]

Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson and others really enjoyed Oppenheimer.

 

Denis Villeneuve Says ‘Oppenheimer’ Reminds Us Film Is an ‘Art Form’ and Not ‘Content,’ Paul Thomas Anderson Calls $900 Million Gross ‘Nature’s Way of Healing’