Nolanism

(picture courtesy : Google images)

Today is just another day I am watching a movie. The same movie. Again.

The thing about a Christopher Nolan movie is that everytime you watch it, it has something new to offer. It makes you ask questions you usually don’t, and enables you to find joy you usually didn’t notice was around.

Nolan’s movies are more than what meets the eye, or the intellect.

Interstellar was not just about time travel. A Father-Daughter relation which transcends both time and space (“I love you forever, and I am coming back”), dust and blight which does not cow down the human spirit, survival instinct...you name it.

The world has been telling us about the power of dreams. Inception puts dreams on the dissecting table and awes us with the nitty-gritty’s. Therein again lies a man’s longing desire to unite with his children, a loving wife who was long gone from his life but not from his dreams, the value of team work and improvisation, a dying father’s love for his over-ambitious son (“I am disappointed that you even tried”).

About the Batman trilogy – well, it saved a superhero from going into oblivion, thanks to the disaster of the previous franchises.

Memento was worth an experiment of all sorts - a story that goes from the end to the beginning (enough with flashbacks!), a thriller with a stoic protagonist like Guy Pearce.

About Dunkirk,...well, I haven’t watched it yet. Why? Because it’s backup!

A Nolan fills you with a sense of calm and satisfaction once it ends, even though it leaves with a sense of suspense (remember the spinning totem at the end of Inception, did Cooper finally meet Amelia and so on). Added to that is Hans Zimmer’s magical music – makes us realize how story telling is incomplete without the perfect background score. Remember how in Interstellar, when the team lands at Miller’s planet and every hour counted 7 years back on earth, the background music is just “tick-tock, tick-tock”...how simple, yet so befitting!

There was once an interesting question in an interview with Aamir Khan doing rounds in the Indian media – “Can we ever make a movie like Inception?” I don’t precisely remember what Mr. Khan answered, but, I do have a counter-question – Can anyone? Or, for that matter, do we really need to? When was the last time someone had asked – “Can we ever paint a piece like the Mona Lisa or a create something like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ?"

In an age, when movies are about cheap thrills, the unconventional in a conventional world, blood, gory and cuss words, Nolan is a breed apart. If movies are about expressions of creativity, Nolan has a craft which connects directly with the viewer and makes her think and feel like no other movie maker does.

Great artists, philosophers and scientists did that, and Nolan is doing that too- making us think out of the box.