Kick Me: Why Inception's Complexity Is So Unnecessary

I don't like my first review of Inception. I had nagging gripes with the movie the first time I saw it, but I couldn't nail them down. So, I saw it again, and I now wish to clarify what I find so frustrating about the film. Again, it must be said that Inception is not bad. It contains some fascinating ideas and thrilling moments. (If you don't want any of those moments spoiled, stick with my first review. This one will assume you've seen the movie and more or less grasp its plot.) Nevertheless, aspects of the film drive me nuts, and I have not been able to satisfyingly explain why until now.

Someone should sit through this movie with a stopwatch and determine exactly how much of the running time is devoted to explaining stuff. Textbook screenwriting says that your characters should verbally explain things as rarely as possible (meaning, as much should be shown as possible – this isn't radio!), and when your characters absolutely must be explaining things, you should camouflage it. Inception's main tool for camouflage is the old "we have a new recruit" trick. Cobb dumping info on Ariadne is tolerable for the early moments of the film because she's wet behind the ears, but stuff is still getting explained to her two thirds of the way into the film and, in the last third, Ariadne jumps in and starts explaining stuff herself. ("Wait! We can jump down into limbo and then Kick X will knock us into Level C, bringing Character P back to life... homefry!") The relentless barrage of information is not particularly involving. It's more headache-inducing than anything else.

Technically speaking, this isn't great writing, but whatever best serves the story, right? Thing is, I cannot figure out what this babbling adds to our experience. The consensus seems to be that Inception is about Cobb's journey toward realizing that existence is what you make of it – that whether you're dreaming or awake isn't terribly important. If this is the core of the film, all of this exposition only serves the film by showing that, in searching for reality, Cobb is making his life more complicated than it needs to be. So, yes, Cobb's plans should be complicated. Yet 90% of the explaining in this film is not devoted to Cobb's plans; most of it is devoted to the fundamentals of dream navigation. In other words, all of these complicated rules are only there because Christopher Nolan purposelessly made them up.

At the moment, the ability to follow Inception's plot seems to be our popular culture's litmus test for basic intelligence, but, since little of the film's complexity contributes to its ultimate meaning, this movie is not as intellectually engaging as it may seem. Cobb and Mal could have gone into one layer of one dream, gotten lost in the recesses of their own minds, and she could have been driven mad right then and there. There is no need for dozens of arbitrary rules to tell this story; they are needless mental busywork.

Not only would paring things down rid the film of tons of exposition, but it would create room for the characters to experience things together. This would allow the film to explore how these characters lost their grip on reality and why it happened. As the film is, what do we actually see Mal and Cobb do together? They briefly gawk at all of the buildings they made and then they take a train to the face. It conveys the events that took place, yes, but does it demand that we grapple with them?

I think this detached, clinical approach seriously harms the scenes following Mal and Cobb's return to (supposed) reality. We see her ignoring the kids and screaming at Cobb. These moments are obviously charged with emotion, and seem to be the most human way to convey the damage dream-hopping does. Yet we are not allowed to feel any of the emotion from these scenes because they are being conveyed through Cobb's narration.

Relegating such scenes to short flashbacks is presumably used as a way to speed things along so we can get back to the heist plot line. Even this side of the story, however, is not told in the most effective manner. Inception really wants to be a heist movie, but it does not properly execute the most fundamental heist movie device: Show us the plan so we know what can (and will) go wrong. Inception never really shows us the plan. It spends tons of time explaining the metaphysical context for the plan and the tools for manipulating this context (levels, kicks, architecture, etc.), but it never provides sufficient detail about who's going to do what and why. So, when the plan rolls into action and immediately falls apart, Nolan is wasting his time. We don't care because we didn't know what was supposed to happen. Then, the rest of the movie is a mix of improvisation and the original plan, meaning that the audience continues to be stuck trying to understand what the plan is, never getting a moment to react to what's happening. There is no room for investment on the audience's part. This is only storytelling in the most literal sense.

All of the misfiring heist movie mechanics also trample over the only remotely important characters: Mal and Cobb. Strangling the depth out of all of the characters is an impressive achievement for a film that mostly takes place within their minds.

Nolan's misuse of dreams, after all, is Inception's greatest problem. The lynchpin of every plan Cobb makes is avoiding "unconstructed dreamspace." He does this by using architects like Ariadne to make sandboxes within which Cobb and his team can safely play. The failure of one of those sandboxes is the worst thing that can possibly happen and, yet, it never does; the device with the greatest potential for drama is never utilized. No character ever wanders out of a building and into a void, and no collapsing dream ever reveals some untold anarchy beyond its bounds. Even when Nolan takes us into the limbo level – which, by his own description, is largely composed of "unconstructed dreamspace" – he goes against all likelihood and throws the characters into two pieces of constructed real estate.

This gutless move deprives the audience of the story's greatest potential spectacle and its best opportunity to explore the characters' minds. The bland mountain base shootout was painful to watch because I knew every moment we spent watching it was a moment we could have spent watching a cross between the film's hallway fight and the final act of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film does broach the potential for dreams' character development when Ariadne sneaks her way into Cobb's dream, but even that fairly intense sequence had only a fraction of the raw emotion we could have experienced if we had entered Cobb's unconstructed subconscious.

Such scenes would necessitate a bit of abstraction, but that is exactly what Inception lacks. Dreams are abstract, but Nolan insists on trying to reduce them to tangible, practical chunks. It's an impossible task and Nolan's failure to complete it renders this a cluttered, breathless film. The irony is that something much simpler could have yielded far more depth.

If You're Going to Dream, Dream Big

In spite of its travels to the depths of the human mind, Inception may be most interesting as an expression of the limits of Christopher Nolan's ambition. His film is by no means a failure, but it balks at taking big risks; Inception rarely feels like the unfettered roller coaster that it should be. Instead, it is a neat film – one that mostly challenges on the superficial level of plot and hesitates to unsettle the audience on a more meaningful level.

The premise, however, is irresistible. Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor. He, along with his team, enters people's dreams and steals their ideas. Saito (Ken Watanabe), a businessman, approaches him with a unique challenge: He wants Cobb to plant an idea in a competitor's head. The process, known as "inception," is largely untested and very risky. Nolan's script spends roughly the first hour of the movie establishing these risks and the complexities that go into mitigating them. It makes these early minutes slower than one would expect, but it's necessary; when the shit heads for the fan, it's much more fun if we know what's at stake.

Whether it be extraction or inception, Cobb's plans are meticulous. For example, the dream world that the thieves enter is never that of the victim. Instead, one of the thieves constructs a dream world in his or her own mind, then the victim is slipped into it. It ensures that the situation is as tightly controlled as possible. The variable? The imagined people inhabiting the dream are created by the person entering it. This means that your average heist must be pulled off in a setting filled with projections of the victim's subconscious – crowds of people keeping a suspicious eye on foreigners at all times.

Cobb brings a problem of his own into the equation: He's a little hung up on his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). As a result, she occasionally pries her way into a dream and wreaks havoc. Cobb's baggage is ostensibly the core of the movie. Nolan works hard to give the film a strong emotional thread, but it never quite resonates; Mal's scenes are often intense, but never moving. This is likely due to Cobb's impenetrable, sullen attitude. (Yet even the great supporting actors struggle to achieve some sort of presence amid all of the plot machinery.)

Mal serves the film a bit better on a plot level. With Cobb's plans keeping the dreams as tame as possible, she is the wildcard that is guaranteed to make things interesting. The moment Saito's heist begins, she delivers. I don't wish to spoil anything, but the action sequence that ensues makes surprising and harrowing use of a freight train, and it fully benefits from Nolan's disdain for computer-generated fakery. For the most part, however, Mal is content to simply tease Cobb.

Likewise, the main heist (which takes up the back hour and a half) tends to play out more through tense dialogue than surreal visuals. By the time Cobb & Co. have ventured into a dream within a dream within a dream, this has begun to ring false. How can a journey into the sub-sub-subconscious play out so smoothly? Maybe this is just me, but I always envisioned my subconscious as a circus of id-fueled madness. Sure, it makes sense that Cobb would try to control it, but I figured complete failure was inevitable. Things certainly go wrong, and Cobb's story reveals greater complexities during the course of the movie, but the dreamscapes never fully unhinge – they never quite feel dreamlike.

That's where this movie pisses me off.

That amazing shot of Paris folding over itself (heavily featured in trailers) is shortly followed by Cobb's admonishment. Manipulating the scenery in such a way is too flashy, he tells Ariadane (Ellen Page), the latest recruit to his team. Cobb would say this; he's running from his subconscious. But Nolan? Why does he seem to feel the same way? One of the deepest dream levels comes in the form of a bland mountain base shootout – for no good reason – and the film's climax takes place in Cobb's old house, in the midst of a decrepit city. It's slightly surreal but, at this point, we're four dreams deep, in an unplanned face-off with his darkest fears. It's downright lame that the setting is anything short of a mindfuck. What happened? It's not like the budget was running short.

Nolan's execution of his ideas is not a complete letdown thanks to a few strong sequences. The aforementioned training sequence with Cobb and Ariadane is quite fun. She serves as the audience's proxy for most of the movie and the role pays off in this scene. She runs through a city, manipulating every structure conceivable – a brief moment where whimsy overcomes the film's portentousness.

The other highlight is an excellent action scene. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who is otherwise criminally underused) has to fight off a few guards in a hallway. Thing is, outside of the dream he is in, he is strapped into a tumbling van. The turning feeling has a direct impact on his experience in the dream. So, he must scamper up walls and and across ceilings as the hallway spins around him. The sequence is almost lyrical as it cuts between Gordon-Levitt scrambling to stay upright and slow-motion images of his unconscious body swaying inside the vehicle.

That scene, as well as the zero-gravity scenes that follow, is a marvel of special effects. I have absolutely no idea how Nolan and his team achieved these effects and, frankly, I do not want to know. Especially when one studies film, moments of genuine movie magic become very rare. This film provides a few such moments.

But, god damnit, those moments are just too few and far between to elevate Inception to greatness. Other than a devilish cutaway at the very end that leaves one major question unanswered, Inception leaves little of consequence to ponder. Nolan seems unable or unwilling to fully explore his biggest ideas; they are, instead, confined to the conceptual stage. Consequently, what could have been a landmark sci-fi epic is little more than a solid thriller.

The Inception That Proves the Rule

Inception is not Christopher Nolan's best film, but it may be the most representative film he has yet directed, a summation of his career thus far. With its twisty plot, its awe-inspiring visions, and its ambiguity, it seems the quintessential Christopher Nolan film. It's a shame that it also suffers from Nolan's few, but vexing, bad habits.

(I'll try and avoid explicit spoilers, but some plot twists will be implicit in my review.)

Inception is Nolan's most "high concept" film yet, a mixture of crime drama, thriller, science fiction, and psychological study. The film's title refers to the feat of entering a person's mind, manipulating their dreams, and planting a new, potentially all-consuming, idea. Unfortunately for our protagonists – I'm loathe to call them heroes – inception is nigh-impossible to pull off, and its practitioners run the risk of losing themselves in their own minds.

Nolan manages to make the plot of Inception plausible, and there may rest his greatest triumph in the film. The infiltration and manufacture of dreams are, of course, utterly fantastic ideas. Yet by showing how it's done in his world – and by having his characters raise objection to the concept – he successfully coaxes the audience past their disbelief. Based off my first viewing, the rules of the dream world are internally consistent; we understand (more or less) the dream technology and its limitations. Nolan's dreams have more rules and regulations than do our dreams; there's no gap for deus ex machinae to come through.

Inception's surprisingly wide-ranging plots allows Nolan to introduce a number of themes and motifs from his earlier work. As with Memento and The Prestige, the new movie begins near the story's chronological end. The relationship between the "hero" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) seems a direct lift from Memento. One can take the central dream caper as an expanded and deepened take on the Joker's bank robbery in The Dark Knight, while the extended planning scenes bring to mind The Prestige's interest in process and preparation. Ellen Page's Ariadne has an obviously symbolic name, just Al Pacino's Dormer did in Insomnia. The ending too reminds me of earlier Nolan films; more than that I shall not say.

Ever since Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan has had the reputation of being a bad director of action scenes, though I think several of The Dark Knight's sequences are brilliant. The action and chase pieces of Inception, however, suffers from poor choreography and planning. One dream sequence involves a gun fight in a crowded city, yet it's very difficult to determine who's who and who we ought be rooting for. A later sequence in a snow field has similar problems: heroes and "villains" dress so similarly as to make identification impossible. At least you could tell Batman and the Joker apart. The dream sequences don't lack for visual interest, but the most compelling dreams – folding and mirrored cities, M.C. Escher staircases, the dark heart of Cobb's subconscious – all seem to occur within the first hour of the film. With all the gunplay and explosions, there's precious little room for beauty.

While Inception has a large cast of big names, I was rather surprised at how little screen time certain actors get. Michael Caine in particular felt underused, having at most five minutes of screen time in a two hour movie; his role seems little more than a charming cameo. Though the story belongs to Cobb, Mal, and Ariadne, I was generally impressed by Nolan's efforts in fleshing out the minor characters. Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy, who held small roles in previous Nolan films, both acquit themselves well of their increased screen time.

I was hoping that I would love Inception as much as I do The Dark Knight, that the film would be a science fiction masterpiece. The new movie isn't as good as The Dark Knight, but I think it's one of Nolan's better films, and hardly a misstep for the director. It's beautiful and surprising, but the pacing and some of the extended action scenes really damage the film's impact. Inception may not the best film in Nolan's fine career, but I'm already looking forward to rewatching it.

Inception Incoming

Readers,

Mere hours from now, Christopher Nolan's Inception will open nationwide. If you have been following Mr. Keeley and me long enough, you'll know that we've been ceaselessly anticipating the film for a year now. I could joke, as I have in past editor's notes, but I have not a single drop of insincerity to share on this topic; I'm shitting myself with excitement.

Mr. Keeley had enough foresight to prepare a Christopher Nolan retrospective over the past months, and it serves as a great warm-up for tomorrow's debut. Nolan's career thus far has been fascinating and varied, yet Inception looks like it brings things full circle. It is the most conspicuous melding yet of his undying fascination with fractured, psychological storylines and his recent assent to mega-budget summer blockbusters. So, take part in Mr. Keeley's look back. It will only deepen your appreciation of Nolan's latest.

Following (1998): "London Lurking"

Memento (2000): "Getting Past the Past"

Insomnia (2002): "The Sleeplessness of the Unjust"

The Prestige (2006): "Are You Watching Closely?"

As a bonus, here's my review of The Dark Knight (2008), "Fear and Trembling at the Multiplex". Also check out Mr. Keeley's comparison of the trailers for Avatar and Inception from last summer, "Two Trailers" – I think that time has proven it to be dead on.

These six posts should be more than enough to get you as excited as we are but, in case you need further insight into whether or not Inception is worth the ticket price, both Mr. Keeley and I will be posting our reviews of the film in the next week.

See you then, and remember: BRRRM.

- Matt

P.S. I have not forgotten about Twilight. My Eclipse review is forthcoming. If you have read my New Moon review, you know that I absolutely loathe the fact that I'm excited for the third installment.

The Sleeplessness of the Unjust

A few weeks back I promised I would write a post on Christopher Nolan's Insomnia. Here it is, slightly delayed.

I've now watched all of Christopher Nolan's currently-released films with the exception of his student work. So I can say with some certainty that Insomnia represents a break from the rest of his oeuvre and – perhaps – hints towards his future artistic development.

Like its two predecessors, Following and Memento, Insomnia is a noirish psychological thriller. Following took place in a seedy London, while Memento occurs in an unnamed and rundown western American town. Both films are gritty and often filmed from street level. Insomnia retains a somewhat squalid setting – the town of Nightmute, Alaska is hardly a pleasant place – but juxtaposes the story's human crimes and cruelties with the grandeur and bleak beauty of Alaska (or, rather, northwestern Canada where the movie was filmed). In the movie's northern panoramas, we can see the first hints of Nolan's love of spectacle, so apparent in The Prestige and The Dark Knight. Insomnia isn't Nolan's best movie by any means, yet it nonetheless feels like an expansion of his abilities.

Al Pacino stars as the not-at-all-symbolically-named Will Dormer, an LA detective and "hero cop." He and his partner, Hap (Martin Donovan), wouldn't normally lend themselves to an Alaska murder, but both want to be out of the way of an Internal Affairs investigation in LA. Neither cop, as we find out, has an entirely perfect record, however many psychopaths they may have put away in the past. The local detectives aren't exactly bumpkins, yet they have little experience of murder and are glad to have the celebrity experts help them investigate the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl. Especially glad to work with the legendary Dormer is Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), who has studied the great detective's past cases.

Of course everything goes wrong. Dormer finds he can't sleep in Nightmute, where the sun stays up for days; he ends up making a horrible mistake, then covering up his crime. Then the killer he's been hunting starts playing games with Dormer's addled head and confused heart. Like Memento, Insomnia is, at heart, a study of a single character. The straightforward and relatively simple plot helps us keep the important thing – Dormer's soul – at the front of our mind. Of course it doesn't hurt that Al Pacino plays the insomniac cop. Throughout the week over which Insomnia takes place, we watch Dormer break down. At first he's the quintessential big city cop, gruff, cynical, and scarred. By the end, he's a slurring wreck; several times he almost totals his car.

Dormer's insomniac hallucinations are interesting, but they're not as disruptive as they perhaps should be. In Memento, we're constantly reminded of Leonard's unique mental state; it's the prism through which we must view his actions. In Insomnia, however, it's far too easy to forget how tired Dormer must be. His physical and mental states are vital to the plot, but they can easily slip away from the audience. Nolan and Pacino often remind us of the insomnia – near car crashes, scenes of Pacino failing to sleep, etc. – and yet the effect doesn't quite stick.

Insomnia is a strange film. The opening scenes make us think we are watching a crime thriller, and there are indeed a few shootouts, plus several scenes of sleuthing. Yet, as the film wears on, the "central" murder mystery loses importance. We realize that we're watching a moral-psychological thriller, not a criminal-psychological one – we find out the identity of the perpetrator halfway through the film. I kept expecting a further plot twist, but none ever came. I suppose watching all of Nolan's other films trained me to expect deviousness where there is none.

Of all Nolan's films, Insomnia is probably the one I like least. For all its many virtues – the setting, the cinematography, the Pacino – it seems to lack something. It's nowhere near as tense or disconcerting as most of Nolan's films, and the plot is somewhat too predictable. In theory, I admire its elevation of character over plot, but nothing quite gels together here. Like all of Nolan's films, it's worth watching. It is also, however, the one I am least likely to rewatch.

Are You Watching Closely?: The Prestige

Originally, my Christopher Nolan retrospective was going to cover Nolan's films in order. Alas, Netflix sent me The Prestige (2006) before Insomnia (2002), so I've decided to cover the later film before the earlier. Somehow it seems appropriate, given the director's penchant for telling stories out of order.

I don't know that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan's best movie, but – unless Insomnia is far better than I've heard – it's his best trick. At first, The Prestige would seem to have very little in common with the gritty neo-noirs Memento and Following. The Prestige, after all, is a period film, the story of two British stage magicians and their attempts to variously upstage, harass, embarrass, and kill each other. The gaslights, horse-drawn carriages, and other turn-of-the-century trappings, however, don't do too much to disguise the story's essential darkness. The Prestige is another story about murder, duplicity, cruelty, and obsession.

The film starts very near its story's end, with Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) on trial for the murder of rival magician Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). We witness the apparent crime, but we don't gather its full significance until very close to the end of the film and we don't get full and horrifying confirmation of our suspicions until the very last shot. While the movie's final revelations are shocking, Nolan has provided subtle clues to them throughout the film. From the cryptic opening shot onwards, the script has readied the audience to accept some truly bizarre twists. Very few viewers will predict the plot's course, but all must admit that the clues are present and – in retrospect – almost shockingly obvious. Twist endings and shocking revelations have ruined many an otherwise decent film, but they serve The Prestige very well indeed.

Like Following, The Prestige often feels like a film without a hero. Neither of the film's two magicians is anything like a moral exemplar; we end up rooting for the one who happens to be less evil than his counterpart. Both protagonists hurt friends and family and commit innumerable acts of cruelty. Near the beginning of the film, Borden performs an illusion where he makes a bird and a cage disappear. The bird reappears and flies away and the audience applauds. We're impressed, until we see the secret to the trick: There are in fact two birds. One flies away at the end of the illusion. The other stays in the cage, which collapses and kills the bird. Before Borden and Angier's story ends, "magic" will have destroyed not just birds but people too.

Like the Batman films and Insomnia, The Prestige is an adaptation. Christopher Priest's original novel is an extremely good book, but not, I would think, great material for a film. Jonathan and Christopher Nolan have done a wonderful job turning the original material into something appropriate for a two-hour film. They've dropped the book's frame story, changed the relationship between the two protagonists, merged supporting characters, played up the romantic aspects of the story, and made crucial alterations to the ending. One plot change in particular – I can't divulge it without spoiling the film – makes the story far more horrific. The book and movie diverge in any number of places, yet their spirits remain the same. A more faithful film would have been a lesser one; the brothers Nolan understand that the story must be a creature of its medium. The cinematic Prestige is tighter and twistier than its literary counterpart; unlike so many adaptations, it can stand alone, without comparison to its precursor.

As much as I liked the adaptation of The Prestige, the script does have a few important flaws. I think that one character appears just a little too heroic at the conclusion of the story; we know he's a monster (sometimes), but the film lets us forget for just a few crucial (and sentimental) moments. Another character acts a little too villainously; I wish we had had just a few more scenes showing his moral decay. The plot fits together slightly better than the characters who act it out. There's nothing unbelievable in the context of the film, but one wishes there were more elaboration of motivation.

Of all Nolan's films, I think The Prestige may have the most interesting cast. Michael Caine, it's true, plays a role very similar to the one he plays in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. And yes, I suppose that Scarlett Johansson doesn't have that much to do besides look conflicted and fetching. Hugh Jackman plays Angier, the more refined of the two magicians; Bale's Alfred Borden is earthier and angrier. In some ways, it's casting against type: in most films, one thinks Bale would play the restrained protagonist and Jackman the looser cannon. Had Jackman and Bale switched their roles, I have no doubt that The Prestige would have been a fine and enjoyable movie. Yet the surprising casting works so well that I had to reevaluate the two actors – I was happily surprised. Despite its historical setting, only one real-life figure appears in The Prestige, the famous scientist Nikola Tesla, played by David Bowie, who gives a surprisingly low-key performance. Given all the crazy stories about Tesla – and his "wizard" role in the movie – Bowie could have been far more flamboyant and surreal. Bowie doesn't oversell his role, but he does bestow Tesla with the glamor and weirdness he doubtless possessed in real life. Bowie's Tesla isn't an unbelievable steampunk hero, but he's very clearly the possessor of arcane wisdom.

The Prestige is one of my favorite Nolan films. Here at last he's perfected his non-linear storytelling and his tricky plots. Nolan, a great believer in misdirecting the audience; doubtless, he feels kinship with his magicians. In their years-long fight, Borden and Angier, after all, employ just the sort of ploys that Nolan loves. Rarely have I seen a director so well-matched with his subject. Memento, Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight remain the best-known of Nolan's films; it's a shame this movie doesn't share their fame. It's better, I think, than two of those three movies.

Getting Past the Past: Memento

Last week I took a look at Christopher Nolan's first film; this week I'm looking at his second. Sometime in the next few weeks, expect looks at Insomnia and The Prestige.

Following may have played the independent theater circuit, but Christopher Nolan didn't enter the mainstream until the release of his second film, Memento. Nolan's second feature film uses many of the same tricks and teases that Following did, but here they're far better integrated into the film's plot. Furthermore, Memento is forty-five minutes longer than Following; Nolan has far more canvas on which to paint. Memento may not be as original as some critics think – it borrows a lot from its predecessor – but it remains one of the best thrillers I have ever seen.

The film's protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) lost his ability to create short-term memories on the night that his wife was raped and murdered by the mysterious "John G." Lest he forget his enemy's name and crimes, Leonard has tattooed his body with various details about the murder. He supplements his body-writing with an assortment of notes to himself, annotated Polaroids, and a map of the unnamed city he's staying in. But how can Leonard hope to catch his wife's killer when he doesn't even know how long it's been since the night of the crime? Besides, Leonard freely admits that he won't even remember taking his long-delayed (?) vengeance...

As does Following, Memento unfolds its story out of chronological order. In Nolan's first film, the protagonist always thinks he knows what's going on around him; the shuffling confuses the audience, but doesn't reflect his mental state. One of the few things that Memento's protagonists knows for sure is how much he does not know; the viewers share his bewilderment and confusion. Following's structural games are entertaining and intriguing, but the story would have functioned perfectly well with a more straightforward plot progression. Memento, on the other hand, would lose most of its poignancy and much of its suspense were it arranged in chronological order.

This is an odd sort of admission, but some of the best parts of Memento are the parts that aren't there. Following has an almost airtight plot; once you've seen everything, you can put all the story's pieces together and form a coherent story. Memento's story isn't entirely inscrutable, but there are several important events that we never see. The audience has far more interpretative freedom. Great mystery films have left out crucial information before – consider the general's chauffeur in The Big Sleep – but rarely in a manner so well-considered and clever as this film.

Nolan's films tend to be far more philosophically engaged than today's typical film. To be terribly reductive, Following discusses the seductive nature of evil, Batman Begins is about fear, The Dark Knight is about ends and means. Memento is about subjectivity and the nature of reality. As Leonard puts it early in the film: "Just because there are things I don't remember doesn't make my actions meaningless. The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?" Leonard recognizes solipsism as a peril; he knows that time passes, even if he doesn't remember it.

I'm not sure if Memento is Christopher Nolan's best film – I haven't seen Insomnia or The Prestige, for one thing, and The Dark Knight is one of my all-time favorite films. To say that Memento may be Nolan's greatest film is to give it a great deal of praise.

London Lurking: Following

As some of you may know, The Dark Knight was by far my favorite film of 2008. Mr. Hollis-Lima liked it, too. Earlier this year, I blogged about the trailer for Nolan's next film, a science fiction thriller called Inception. Nolan's second Batman seems to have overshadowed all his previous work, even the much-praised Memento. I thought it would be entertaining to do a Me and Matt on Media retrospective of all Nolan's earlier films, starting with his debut movie, Following.

Memento was praised for its shuffling of scenes and timelines; Following does much the same thing, though it lacks the narrative justification (i.e. Guy Pearce's brain injury) for the confusion. There's a frame story – the protagonist in a police station, telling a detective his story – but I don't think the audience is supposed to assume that he's telling it in this disjointed fashion, especially since there are a few important scenes that our protagonist doesn't even witness. The plot would be extremely interesting even without the rearranged scenes, but the conceit generally works. Though a tad pretentious and slightly nonsensical, putting the plot's puzzle together is extremely satisfying.

Following's plot is highly and self-consciously noirish; it's a psychological thriller shot in black-and-white. With one exception, the thief Cobb (Alex Haw), the cast list doesn't even give character names. Instead, Jeremy Theobald is "The Young Man," Lucy Russell is "The Blonde," and John Nolan (the director's uncle) is "The Policeman." The archetypical character descriptions suggest a pastiche or homage, but Following hardly lacks for originality. The protagonist, though a fool, is far less an everyman than the typical noir sap. "The Young Man" is a struggling and unemployed would-be writer who has found a new way of gathering material: tailing random people through London's streets.

It's damn creepy, but he doesn't harm anyone until the day he tails a well-dressed gentleman carrying a mysterious duffel bag. As it turns out, this man is a burglar named Cobb; he's in the market for a partner-in-crime. Following is all well and good, he explains, but it's nothing to match the transgressive thrill of breaking and entering. The young man isn't terribly intelligent, so he follows Cobb into his life of crime. Soon he's dating one of his past break-in victims, a beautiful blonde with a mysterious connection to a very bad man... Given that the film opens in a police station, one can't expect things to end well for our poor following fool.

It's rather sad to look at Following's cast on IMDB. All the film's actors are very good, but very few of them have appeared in much else, though Nolan gave several of them cameos in Batman Begins. Lucy Russell's role is by far the most traditional – her character is a classic femme fatale. Alex Haw as Cobb is simultaneously charming, dapper, and threatening; he's by far the most energetic actor on the screen. Jeremy Theobald plays the lead, a sucker, a follower (in every sense of the word), and a pervert with an odd mix of meekness occasional confidence. He's likable, but his downfall is darkly comic, not tragic.

I can't finish my review of Following without mentioning its budget. Nolan had very little money to make this film, but he did a phenomenal job working around his lack of funding. Most of the film takes place inside the same few rooms, but this makes sense for the story. According to IMDB, the director and stars were only able to shoot on Saturdays, as they all worked the rest of the week. Films shot under such conditions should not be as good as this one.

Much of Following seems to prefigure Nolan's later work – the magnetic villains reappear in The Dark Knight, while the plot convolutions show up in Memento and (if the film is at all like the book) The Prestige. There's also one wonderful inadvertent "premonition" of later Nolan in the film, but I'll leave that for viewers to discover on their own. For all its affinities with the director's later work, Following seems to stand apart from the rest of the Nolan canon. For one thing, it's extremely quiet and low-key, hardly words one would associate with today's Nolan. In addition, Following is a very short movie, only seventy minutes long. Nolan's last movie was almost twice as long as his first.

Following is available on DVD and on Netflix Watch Instantly. It's worth your time.

Two Trailers: Avatar and Inception

I gather that quite a few people - perhaps they're restrained to the Internet, but I doubt it - are actually excited about James Cameron's new film Avatar. I've always thought I'm just a bit out of the American mainstream, but I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone would give a damn about the movie after seeing the trailer.

Avatar has two major selling-points: James Cameron's return to directing and the innovation of 3D CGI motion-capture with "3D virtual cameras." While I have no doubt the technology is impressive, the trailer does little to distinguish itself from various Final Fantasy XIII trailers. They've both got impressively exaggerated geography, flying islands, too-shiny surfaces, and mysterious races with unnecessary apostrophes in their names (Na'Vi, fal'Cie). Alas, I suspect the videogame will have the better script. Or at least the less-painful and embarrassing script.

It's hard to believe that James Cameron hasn't made a movie - aside from a deep-sea documentary or two - since Titanic. And yet Cameron doesn't seem to have moved on that much: the subject matter of Avatar seems to resemble earlier Cameron films like Aliens and The Abyss, though Avatar also seems to have an eco-friendly message - I can't help but wonder how many beautiful Na'Vi trees the film's doubtless brutish humans will despoil. Big budget, new technology, ecological consciousness... Avatar won't be Cameron's Waterloo, but it may be his Waterworld.

The film, aside from its technical aspects, seems designed by committee. According to all-knowing Wikipedia, Cameron wanted to replicate "every single science fiction book I read as a kid." Alas, all those separate stories seem to have blended together into something utterly generic-looking. Wikipedia also explains that parts of the Avatar tie-in videogame worked their way into the movie itself; clearly this is a film with coherent artistic and aesthetic visions. Consider Cameron's persistent dedication to his craft, his drive to produce the best of all blockbusters: "he kept tweaking his Na'Vi aliens, asking his all-male crew over and over "Would you want to do her?" Oh well, Cameron's doing nothing new with awkward sexualization: Disney executives apparently try and ensure that any "Disney princesses" are "fuckable." (Link, alas, doesn't have full text of that article)

The Avatar trailer is almost entirely wordless, perhaps to accommodate MST3K-style mockery . The one line we hear in the trailer is Cameron patting himself on the back: "This is great." As you might have guessed, I don't agree. Another wordless trailer, however, has me very excited. Christopher Nolan is one of the few directors who has made films to rival Cameron's in their popular success, yet his filmmaking philosophy is radically different. Cameron, like Lucas, loves CGI and new filmmaking technology. Nolan is disappointed when he can't film a real stuntman really flying over real Hong Kong. While Cameron is taking vehicle designs from his game developers, Nolan is in his garage designing and building scale-model Batmobiles. And while both Cameron and Nolan can make damn good popcorn movies, Nolan's are far deeper and far smarter.

After The Dark Knight made over $500 million domestically, quite a few people expected Nolan's next film would be another Batman. Instead, Nolan decided to do a science fiction film called Inception. Though Warner Bros. hasn't said too much about the plot, there are some indications that the plot will bear resemblances to The Matrix, some Philip K. Dick films and other such movies about the nature of reality. The trailer shows a surreal fight taking place in a hallway that seems to be tilting around the combatants. Yet the few seconds of fighting seem to lack the "style" and "cool" that made the Matrix films seem inhuman. This is a real fight, surreal sci-fi setting or not. Indeed, the film seems to have a somewhat gritty look reminiscent of Nolan's Batman films, which seems appropriate for a film where (to quote a tagline) "Your mind is the scene of the crime." Nolan has done well with crime (The Dark Knight, Memento, Insomnia) and with the fantastic (The Prestige); I hope he can combine the two "styles."

Time will tell if it's good, but as of right now Inception is just about my most-anticipated film of 2010. I doubt it will be as popular as The Dark Knight, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were as good. And I have no doubts that it will be a finer film than Avatar.