Christopher Nolan’s First Sci-Fi Movie Is Better Than ‘Interstellar’ or ‘Inception’
With his impeccable balance between cold precision and awe-inspiring sense of grandeur and spectacle, Christopher Nolan is perhaps the perfect amalgamation of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. As a director of science fiction in particular, Nolan’s auteur flair comes alive when dealing with matters beyond human capabilities. As a director of seemingly mythical powers, such as turning a historical biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer into a culturally seismic blockbuster, Nolan, as a brand name, is as strong as any piece of IP.
He makes the fantastical seem both gritty and imaginative, as seen in his films Inception and Interstellar, simultaneously operating as crowd-pleasing entertainment and deeply personal expressions. While not a traditional sci-fi picture, Nolan’s 2006 mystery-thriller, The Prestige, released before he was the face of IMAX and cinema at its most high-octane, crystallizes his unique vision with more clarity, pathos, and inventiveness than any of his blockbusters.
Christopher Nolan’s Style and Themes Were Perfect for ‘The Prestige’
With only one Batman movie under his belt, Christopher Nolan was a signature mystery-thriller director of the time, coming off creative and mind-bending genre exercises in Memento and Insomnia. Much like seeing a new M. Night Shyamalan experience, audiences braced to get the rug pulled out from under them in Nolan’s hands. At the very least, they know that Nolan will not be confined to a linear structure. The writer-director pushed the envelope with The Prestige, a film with a subject well-suited to his fascination with blurred realities and deception. Starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians in Victorian London, the film follows Alfred Borden (Bale) and Robert Angier (Jackman) trying to one-up each other in every cutthroat way to pull off the ultimate stage illusion: teleportation.
Nolan’s more prominent and higher-scale films, Inception and Interstellar, are explicitly sci-fi, but The Prestige features the genre’s necessary hallmarks, as well as signature traits carried over by Nolan in his later films. Where Inception and Interstellar get bogged down in having their characters explain the parameters of their trade, rapidly spewing jargon, Nolan gracefully underlines the basic construct of magic in The Prestige. As his spectacle and visual audaciousness grew, he became more clunky and less seamless as a writer. While it is charming to watch him passionately convey the idea of communicating love via black holes in Interstellar, it lacks the bold precision of The Prestige. The film treats the fantastical craft of magic with the same level of groundedness as The Dark Knight does with comic book lore.
‘The Prestige’ Has More Narrative Clarity and Moral Ambiguity Than ‘Inception’ or ‘Interstellar’
Between his nonlinear narratives and frequent cases of inaudible dialogue, Christopher Nolan is comfortable leaving things unclear, no matter how hard he tries to explain the minutia of dream exploration in Inception or quantum physics in Interstellar. Without resorting to verbose dialogue, Nolan outlines the art and technical process of magic — to a point, because after all, a good magician never reveals their tricks. He makes the viewer feel like a close observer of Borden and Angier’s elaborate construction and execution of their performances. This sense of being privy to the secrets of crafting an illusion makes the film’s gobsmacking climactic twist a triumph, effective as a piece of narrative construction and a dramatic device. Like Orson Welles in his documentary on fraud and deception, F for Fake, Nolan takes a bow for the audience, as we never realized he was performing as a magician the whole time.
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Inception and Interstellar both center around gifted architects and scientists who dedicate their entire livelihoods to a greater, more profound cause beyond our universe, and they speak to Nolan’s meditation on balancing work with family. While these films grapple with such morally complex dilemmas at an impressive level for a mainstream blockbuster, The Prestige, which follows characters you’re not always supposed to sympathize with, is the most confrontational of Nolan’s “great man” archetype, only to be rivaled by his portrait of the brilliant but delusional titular architect of the nuclear bomb in Oppenheimer. In comparison, his future blockbusters lean too far into feeling sorry for Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). As Nolan became more visually dynamic, he lost some critical edge in his characterization.
Upon reaching household name status following The Dark Knight and Inception, The Prestige became the hip, fashionable choice to be your favorite Christopher Nolan film. Although it lacks the audacious spectacle of his later epics, this mystery-thriller with sprinkles of sci-fi encapsulates Nolan’s own magic trick by taking a cryptic subject and turning it into a work of engaging, endlessly dissectable entertainment. At its core, this is what science fiction ought to strive for.
