The comic book movie Christopher Nolan called “spectacular”
Within the realm of the cinematic medium, there are several claimants to the throne of the contemporary master, but Christopher Nolan is certainly deserving of throwing his hat in the ring. Nolan’s mind-bending narratives, delivered with some of the most breath-taking and technologically inventive visuals the screen has ever seen, have left the director being rightfully considered one of 21st-century cinema’s all-time greats.
From his early days on Following, Memento and Insomnia right up to the likes of the science fiction work Interstellar and Tenet and his historical movies Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, Nolan has made films that challenge the audience’s intellect while simultaneously entertaining them to the core, proof of his seemingly endless talent.
Yet, compared to the rest of Nolan’s filmography, it could be said that his The Dark Knight trilogy sticks out like a sore but mysteriously beautiful thumb. After all, the rest of Nolan’s films do not exactly scream out “superhero director”, although it should be stressed that Nolan’s Batman effort certainly subverted the genre and gave it a new and darker direction.
During an interview with Black Film, Nolan once explained that he’s not exactly a superfan when it comes to comic book movies as they seem to remove themselves from their source material too much, focusing instead on spectacle rather than telling the stories as they appear flat on the paper.
“I’m not a real big fan of comic book movies generally because I felt like I really wanted to see a film that conveys the experience of reading a comic book,” he said. “That is to say, the mental pressure you go through when you get into the stories. You are not looking at the page as a flat surface. You are actually in the action, and that’s what I was trying to do with this film.”
Evidently, for Nolan, the superhero really ought to live in the original world from whence they came, the comic book. In the director’s eyes, more often than not, the superhero movie gets it wrong in not allowing audiences to be in the action, but it should be stressed that Nolan himself certainly rectified the mistakes of the past in The Dark Knight trilogy.
Still, there is at least one superhero movie that Nolan admires, as he explained: “The only time I have seen a film do the right thing was the 1978 Superman film that Richard Donner directed. They treated that film like an epic-scaled film and an amazing cast like Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty and Glen Ford. I thought that was a spectacular film, and I felt that Batman deserved that type of storytelling.”
