Two decades earlier Christopher Nolans most polarizing movie hit theaters, a mind-bending scene from Memento laid the foundation for it. Nolan technically made his directorial debut with the no-budget neo-noir FollowingAbout a writer who follows strangers around London in search of inspiration and ends up in more trouble than he bargained for. Following Was well reviewed and made a huge profit compared to its shoestring budget, however Memento was the movie that put Nolan on the map. With its overlapping dual timelines, Memento Established the signature complexity of Nolan’s filming and storytelling.
Since MementoNolan’s filmmaking has changed a lot. He went from making small-scale, low-budget thrillers to making mega-scale, big-budget blockbusters. He revitalized the Batman franchise (and the action genre as a whole) with the gritty realism of his Dark Knight trilogy, and he has made beloved properties of original sci-fi stories like the Dreamscape Heist movie InceptionThe spacefaring epic Interstellarand the time-traveling spy actor Tenet. But he set the stage for the latter with one of the earliest directorial choices of his career.
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Memento’s back opening shot came full circle with Christopher Nolan’s tenet
Nolan first experimented with showing scenes back in Memento
The first time Nolan experimented with the idea of ​​showing a scene backwards was in the opening shot of his second film, Memento. Memento Opens on a close-up of a Polaroid photo In other people’s hands. Over the opening credits, the photo un-develops And goes back into the camera. Then, a bullet casing goes back inside his gun, Joe Pantoliano’s corpse slumps up from the ground, and Pierce U-shoots him in the head. It was the first time Nolan played a scene in reverse, and it was a truly unique use of the filmmaking craft.
20 years later, Nolan expands on this reverse filming experiment in his spy-fi epic Tenet. in TenetA ton of different scenes are played in reverse. The plot revolves around time-traveling spies taking on a shadowy criminal organization that has figured out a way to send weapons back in time. The movie has shootouts and car crashes that play out in reverse, with bullets flying back into the chamber and cars rolling back on their wheels. Tenet is a feature-length extension of the experimental editing style that Nolan used to open Memento.
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Memento teased how important time would be in Nolan’s other movies
Time is a key plot point in almost all of Nolan’s works
The twisty narrative structure of Memento Established how significant time would be in Nolan’s filmography. Memento Plays out in two separate timelines: The black-and-white scenes are shown in chronological order, while the color sequences are shown in reverse order. To replicate Leonard Shelby’s non-linear mental state. At the end of the film, the two timelines converge to bring the story together. Nolan continued to experiment with the passage of time in almost all of his subsequent movies. If Memento It’s complicated, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Time dilation creates the most heartbreaking scene in Interstellar: Matthew McConaughey returns to the ship after spending a couple of hours on an alien planet and finds that 23 years have passed on Earth, and his kids have grown up in the blink of an eye. in InceptionTime moves slower and slower in each successive dream level. While Cobb and his team spend weeks infiltrating a mountainside base, they very slowly fall off a bridge into the waking world.
Dunkirk Simultaneously chronicles a week on land, a day at sea, and an hour in the air. At the end of the movie, much like in MementoThe concurrent timelines converge when the civilian fleet arrives to pick up the last remaining soldiers on the beach and Tom Hardy’s fighter pilot swoops in to shoot down a dive bomber just as it runs out of fuel. and of course, in TenetThe titular organization uses time travel and time reversal to prevent the outbreak of World War III.
The differences between Memento and Tenet show how far Christopher Nolan’s career has come
One is a small-scale independent thriller, the other is a big-budget event film
The differences between Memento And Tenet Highlight just how much Nolan’s approach to filmmaking has evolved over 20 years. Memento is a small-scale independent thriller shot on a shoestring budget, while the other was made on a massive blockbuster budget and promoted as an event film. Nolan sets the bar high for himself with MementoWhich is why there is always so much discourse around his movies. Christopher Nolan Can only get upset so many times, which is why Tenet was so harshly judged and was arguably his most detailed film, or at least the least universally praised.