Six Essential Christopher Nolan Films To Rewatch Ahead Of The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan is synonymous with epic ambition. The Oscar-winning filmmaker commands brand visibility of power and influence which few of his ilk do. With every release, Nolan ignites the most passionate discourse, also attracting a fandom that can veer a tad too possessive and adulatory. Often, the reception of his films gets unfairly viewed through a competitive lens of rational understanding, spurring debates over who manages to grasp them at first viewing. This doesn’t take away from the breathtaking, galvanizing spectacle of his movies, the intelligence and vaulting reach. Few directors working in the 21st century manage to unfailingly rake in audiences and ratchet up massive intrigue with every subsequent release, scoring a blockbuster appeal even if it's for a three-hour talky movie like Oppenheimer.

As the fever-pitch hysteria for Nolan’s latest, The Odyssey, is all set to explode in the upcoming release, here are six of his past films that are mandated viewing.

Nolan executes structural coups with cunning ease, wrong-footing audiences in this deliberately warped revenge tale. Suffering from anterograde amnesia, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) hunts down the person responsible for his wife’s murder. Nolan leads us through a jigsaw that gradually reveals deceptive angles while paving the way for a knockout finale. Chronology is scrambled, time muddled as the journey towards the truth becomes the ultimate game in withholding and revelation. Nolan has later admitted he might not be able to orchestrate it today, “It’s the classic example of what you can do when you don’t know what you’re doing. If I tried to do that again now, it’d be a terrible failure. As you learn more and more, it becomes harder to forget the rules.”

Heath Ledger’s spin on The Joker defined an entire generation. Boundaries of good and evil deliciously blur as Ledger’s thrillingly unpredictable performance constantly accelerates the stakes and keeps up a nervous, volatile energy. Watching it is like witnessing a comic book pantheon almost shift its moorings to receive a darkly gripping, morally fraught and diabolically twisted fresh spin. While superhero franchises continue being drained in an unimaginative repetition, The Dark Knight is that rare bold interruption that realigns cultural imagination with sweep, conviction and invigorating daring.

It takes the smartest storyteller to mount such a precisely constructed narrative and pull it off with unapologetic ease. This film brought the persistent tag of challenging the audiences to Nolan. Leonardo DiCaprio fronts this multi-tiered play upon dreams buttressed by complex narrative machinery. He plays a spy who steals ideas from his targets by intruding on their subconscious minds while they sleep. It amped up DiCaprio’s commercial prospects way more than ever, cementing him as a bona fide star. The knotty structure and a teasing ending had audiences squabbling for years, even as zero-gravity duelling scenes embedded themselves into the popular imagination.

Nolan’s Second World War film about the evacuation of British troops from the French town of Dunkirk in the face of the German advance stitches three perspectives-on land, air and sea-spilling over different timelines. Lee Smith’s intricate, Oscar-winning edit glues it all together in a taut, pure technical display. The sheer sound design compounds the feat in what’s one of the most indelible theatrical experiences in recent memory. Surpassing narrative building blocks, Dunkirk is an experience like no other, as pulsating and thunderously mighty as familiar to Nolan-obsessives while summoning a moment in history with specific, granular intensity.

As expansive and exhilarating as intimate and moving, Nolan’s riff on a familiar search for life outside earth is wrapped in a father-daughter story. It boasts incredible ambition and scale while never losing sight of its emotional tenterhooks. With humanity teetering on the brink of extinction, a group of astronauts travels through a wormhole in search of another inhabitable planet. Hans Zimmer’s all-timer score gears awe while cueing the heart-tugging narrative turns. It’s incredibly absorbing and poignant as space, humanity and time converge in a meditation on love that goes beyond everything.

Biopics are a tricky sell. Couple that with a film on the father of the atomic bomb and the project instantly suggests formidable vision and a conflicted moral reckoning. Oppenheimer handsomely broke Nolan’s infamous Oscar luck with several wins, fetching Cillian Murphy the Best Actor trophy. Ludwig Göransson’s rousing score peaks in an unforgettable montage as Oppenheimer ideates on the atomic configurations. This is a searing, damning probing of what it takes to pursue a pioneering vision and the psychological readiness to be equipped enough for the consequences. Increasingly sombre, Oppenheimer gathers an indicting weight, lodging deep and uncomfortably.