The Odyssey was certainly a hell of a movie wasn't it? I wrote a thing about it here. Digesting my thoughts on the movie, along with this interesting video (by Willow Heath) about the film, as well as Nolan's broader filmography, has gotten me thinking about Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker. He's certainly talented and intelligent, often favorably compared to Kubrick, and wildly popular, but Willow is right about somthing being missing. She identifies it as "heart" or "blood". I would prefer to call it dynamism. All of Christopher Nolan's movies conform to the same tone and aesthetic and narrowly so. A filmmaker like Sam Raimi, for example, (Evil Dead has been on my mind having seen Evil Dead Burn mere hours before The Odyssey) has a handle on a very dynamic treatment on tone and aesthetic. His movies deftly dance between high melodrama, slapstick comedy, and intense thrills. Nolan's work, on the other hand strictly maintains a grounded, professional, and dramatic tone. His work is very classical and polished. This is by no means a worse approach than a more freewheeling dynamic style, but it is inflexible and limits the kinds of stories Nolan can effectively tell. What works really well for his spy and crime thrillers, heist films, and political dramas does not work for mythic fantasy. This unsuitability, for lack of a better term, is not enough to ruin a film but it can make it feel like it's working against itself. It's unsatisfying, as Willow put it, to be told a story about fantastic creatures and places, and larger than life personalities, but be shown only approximations limited by a grounded tone.
However, The Odyssey is still a great film and is immensely popular with critics and audiences. It's obvious his technical abilites are probably the biggest contributor to his success, but I don't think that's everything. Other filmmakers are superbly technically competant from Spielberg, to Cameron, to Scott, to Coppola, and while they're also greatly respected, their movies are no where near as universally praised. I think what makes the difference is Nolan is a "storyteller's filmmaker." The prime focus of his screenplays and production is squarely on structure and themes. Characters, sets, costumes, dialogue, even narrative are subordinate in focus to structure and theme. Memento isn't really a film about a man with antrograde amnesia. That's in the film but the focus is on constructing a coherent narrative arc with a structure that ping pongs back and forth in time, and how that structure demonstrates how limiting information can be a tool of manipulation. TENET isn't really about a man working to prevent an apocalypse. It's about telling a non-linear story from a linear perspective. These aren't the best at being emotionally enagaging human stories. Where Nolan excels is in creating highly intricate and technical narrative machines that move characters and narrative in interesting and novel ways while producing theme. They are storytelling showpieces. This connects with people because everyone tells stories. Narrative is how we make sense of the world: we connect stimuli both past and present in causal chains that suggest meaning. We all have some experiance with narrative construction so we have the foundation to recognize when someone does it really well; most especially when they break as many conventions as Nolan does.
Unfortunately, I think this has led me to be increasingly unimpressed with his work. He has a very narrow specialty and it has made his oeuvre a bit samey when compared most of my favorite directors (especially Raimi and The Wachowskis). Not to suggest he needs to broaden his artistic pallet, he's his own man and can do what he wants, but it makes praise of his work feel a little overblown. We've seen him explore theme through structure, we know he does it well, but can he do anything else?
