I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago about Chris Nolan’s output when I realized something: Nolan still has a reputation for being able to channel both brains and brawn, to make movies that are both exciting and intellectually stimulating. Certainly that once was the case. But it wasn’t until I discussed his entire filmography in some depth that I realized just how much of a pass the guy gets from Memento. Consider this trend:

1. Following: Unlike most of Nolan’s superfans, I have seen the film, which is very lo-fi and constrained, a huge departure for someone who was introduced to Nolan from the Batman movies (though much less of one for someone who first was introduced to his work with Memento). It’s a self-reflexive, meta movie (not quite a “movie”, though) commenting on film by telling a tale about the perils of voyeurism, all in black-and-white, very noirish. I liked the movie, though Nolan wasn’t quite the smooth filmmaker he would become and the character development can be fragmentary. And the most action here is maybe a footrace. They really should do a double-bill between this and The Dark Knight.
2. Memento: His peak, really. A very exciting movie, innovative structure, but also very much an argument about the meaning of life that has something to say about it. Well-directed, obviously low-budget but uses that fact to its advantage. I’m not going to expound on this one because I’m assuming that most people are going to agree on it.
3. Insomnia: Haven’t seen it. I saw the original Norwegian film, FWIW, but not Nolan’s remake so I can’t pass judgment here.
4. Batman Begins: Or, Nolan gets a huge budget and goes big on the spectacle. Still, I feel like the movie is the most intellectually coherent of the three, if the least compelling in terms of brawn. More or less questioning corruption and its cousin, apathy, and whether or not we’re worthy of survival, with Batman on one side and Ras Al-Ghul on the other. Interesting as far as it goes. No Memento, though.
5. The Prestige: I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, though I saw it more as what Graham Greene would call an “entertainment” rather than a full-bore artistic endeavor. Which is hardly a bad thing. Themes of obsession and vengeance, and another meta sort of thing on the nature of art, wanting to believe it as the key in captivating anyone. That’s a rich enough idea to hang a movie on. The character dynamics are the best part of it, though I feel that the movie stacks the deck (Hey now!) in favor of Jackman’s character, though the ending has some of the most intriguing ideas of the film. For “entertainment” there’s plenty to think about here, and also notably, it had about 1/5 the budget of the next film on the list.
6. The Dark Knight: Here’s where it starts to fall apart. The Dark Knight is very exciting, is full of incredible spectacle, and has some thought to it, sure. But only in a few scenes does it really grapple with ideas of any sort, which mostly tend to be inconclusive. The boats-with-bombs on them scene seems to comment on humans’ inherent decency, but this is followed by Harvey Dent threatening to murder Gordon’s son, which makes that takeaway murky at best. Typically, when one idea is explored in the film and seems to go somewhere, it’s contradicted somewhere else, and aside from some Charles Bronson-esque “we just have to let this guy do anything he wants” philosophizing, for lack of a better term, there’s nothing really to think about here. As a way of exploring the madness and chaos of The Joker’s anarchist mindset, it’s a triumph. And it’s a hell of a ride. But not much else. (Also, why didn’t they blame the Joker at the end?)
7. Inception: Again with the meta commentary about movies, this time with the metaphor of sharing dreams through technology. This is probably the nadir of Nolan’s intellectual filmmaking IMO, the ideas here don’t really mesh. Putting aside the very sketchy “science” behind all this dream manipulation (going into a dream within a dream slows time exponentially??? And why would Cillian Murphy know the rules about the reflexive dreams, which are basically made up when applied inside a dream, yes?), it’s hard to find any real takeaway from the movie. “What is real?” is in science fiction what love is in a pop song–a classic subject but one that’s hard to do with any freshness. Again, lots of spectacle, which is dazzling. And some clever details to be sure. But the problem here is the elevation of puzzles over concrete ideas. You leave the theater thinking about whether DiCaprio is in real life or not, not about some of the broader implications of “your mind making it real,” you know, form over substance. The puzzles are elegant as hell, but on an idea level, this does less with the nature of reality than the original Total Recall, and the vast majority of this overstuffed movie is dedicated to plot and story mechanics rather than ideas. The whole thing is essentially one big puzzle, which is fine, but this is intellectual masturbation. Ultimately.
8. The Dark Knight Rises: A complete success as a dazzling narrative but, again, not a winner in terms of ideas, which are neglected to a shocking degree in what’s allegedly a brainier-than-most franchise. Nolan might have been aiming to establish a vision of the appeal of authoritarianism, how people get to the place where they’re willing to overlook considerable flaws in supporting a radical opposition because they’ve lost hope (honestly, I see more a fall of the Weimar Republic sort of thing here, rather than a French Revolution or OWS parallel, but that might just be me). However, the movie simply doesn’t have enough scope to really get into any of this, because that would mean actually depicting more than a handful of poor orphans and one single volunteer in order to place the popular support or toleration for Bane in context, or to establish a sense of the public being cowed by his power. It’s too damn vague. The Batman movies don’t count as epics because their scope is limited to the hero and his circle, the bad guy and his minions, and a few other high-profile figures in the universe (Commissioner Gordon, The Mayor, Matthew Modine). Unless you consider The West Wing as an epic, you have to have a broader perspective than this. This movie particularly needed a panoramic view (The Wire-style) of the whole situation in order to actually have the debate it seems to want to have. But it doesn’t. And the more reflective parts of the movie suffer from it because it’s unclear what we’re even talking about. Is the society breaking down because of abuses by the rich? A failure of civil society in keeping people together? Poorly run city services? I have no clue, and without anything specific to say about society it suffers from excessive vagueness.

The funny thing is, I’ve liked all of Nolan’s movies purely on a narrative level. He knows how to draw you in and keep you interested, and few are better at weaving a yarn. But this trajectory is all too familiar. Once upon a time James Cameron was a brain-and-brawn guy too. Aliens gets a lot of credit but it’s actually astonishingly well-written for a movie of its type, each time I watch it I notice more and more details that are just so right!. That was until he got a megabudget for T2 and hasn’t made a movie of any intelligence since. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a much better writer saying much the same thing. Megabudgets are the leading cause of death for thoughtful filmmakers, since the invitation to get wrapped up in the technical capabilities of films to create spectacle seem to be damn near irresistible to filmmakers, though I’ll take later-Nolan to later-Cameron easily.