‘The Prisoner’: Christopher Nolan and the cyclical nature of successful spycraft
It’s been the case for a while that Christopher Nolan has the freedom to make whatever movie he wants, but the scrutiny will be more intense than ever before now that he’s fresh off the back of his career’s crowning achievement.
He is already one of the industry’s most popular auteurs. However, his next feature will be the first since Oppenheimer won him Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, not to mention the fact it’ll be his first as ‘Sir Christopher Nolan’ following the announcement of his recent knighthood.
Looking at his filmography, though, there’s reason to believe his next move will be a little more action-packed than Oppenheimer. He followed the blockbuster stylings of Batman Begins with The Prestige, tackled the existential musings of Interstellar after The Dark Knight Rises, and turned time on its head with Tenet immediately after Dunkirk, so it’s not unreasonable to assume he’ll be heading back into that arena.
Naturally, speculation is one again running rampant that he’s in line to take the reins on the next James Bond adventure, but that happens every time the franchise is in need of a director. Everyone knows he’s the most powerful 007 fanboy in Hollywood, which he’s already confessed to putting to good use in everything from his Dark Knight trilogy to the aforementioned Inception.
It was noted in Variety‘s Oppenheimer post-mortem that the filmmaker’s next port of call could be a big-screen remake of the classic TV series The Prisoner. Created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, the one-season mystery follows an unnamed intelligence operative abducted and imprisoned in an ominous coastal village after resigning from duty, which plunges him headlong into another conspiracy.
Beyond the obvious belief that Nolan’s time is better spent not adapting pre-existing properties, The Prisoner feels far too cyclical for his next port of call. His name was first floated in conjunction with a feature-length remake in the mid-2000s, again in 2009 after The Dark Knight, and for a third time earlier this year.
Not only that, but The Prisoner was already remade as a six-episode miniseries in 2009 with Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen in the lead roles. Nolan has flirted with it on several occasions, and the entire thing has been repurposed fairly recently, which is only part of why it would be the most uninspiring and unimaginative thing he’s taken on for a long time.
The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Tenet all deal with espionage and spycraft in one way or another, which is all derived from their director’s endless fascination with the Bond saga. He’s happy to pick and choose certain elements from 007 history to inject into his own features, and it would be an understatement to say he’s done a great job at making the tropes and trappings of subterfuge his own.
On paper, The Prisoner would be Nolan indulging in wish-fulfilment and little else, the completion of a cycle that first began almost two decades ago when he was first linked to the property. However, coming off the biggest night in his entire career at the Oscars, there’s more expectation than ever before heaped on what potentially comes next.
Is the remake of a 55-year-old TV series that lasted 17 episodes and has already been remade the best way to take that next step? It would at least keep those Bond rumours at bay until the next one rolls around, in fairness, but spycraft seems to be the one thing that Nolan can’t seem to stay away from for too long, whether he’s actively avoiding it or running into its waiting arms.
