INCEPTION 2010

Christopher Nolan’s bleak, billion-dollar sequel changed the face and future of superhero films

SOME DIRECTORS TOGGLE big blockbusters with quirkier fare. Not Christopher Nolan. Every one of his movies is both an epic event and an experiment, as he plays with structure and challenges audiences to keep up. And the ultimate example of this is Inception, a film that asks: what would Luis Buñuel, the creator of gonzo 1929 dream-logic drama Un Chien Andalou, have made if you’d given him an IMAX camera and a vault full of cash? Coming after the billion-dollar haul of

The Dark Knight, which granted Nolan seemingly total creative freedom from his patrons at Warner Bros., it saw the director push his stylistic flourishes and thematic obsessions further than ever before, melding a hardboiled crime caper, with requisite slick suits, with a trip deep inside the human subconscious, complete with folding streets. For a film about dreams it’s pretty restrained, not going Doctor Strange psychedelic but setting sequences inside warehouses, hotels and Alpine slopes (Tom Hardy’s Eames is clearly a fan of On His Majesty’s Secret Service). That’s in its favour, though, keeping the narrative crisp, cool and credible, powered by Leonardo Dicaprio as tortured gang leader Dom Cobb. The thunderingly emotional Hans Zimmer score has been imitated a thousand times since. And Inception’s complex chrono-noodlings (Dicaprio himself last month admitted he has no idea what the ending means) paved the way for

Dunkirk, and this summer’s

Tenet, as Nolan continued to dream a little bigger.

2008 WAS A BIG year for superhero movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe began in earnest with Iron Man. Guillermo del Toro continued to carve out his own unique space for fantasy heroics with Hellboy II.

And director Christopher Nolan redefined what a superhero movie could be with The Dark Knight.

Since its release, the film has been lavished with a stonking box office (the first comic-book movie to reach the billion-dollar milestone), a couple of Oscars (including a posthumous one for Heath Ledger, who died shortly after finishing work on the film), and endless plaudits, column inches, fan accolades and memes. But it’s easy to forget, in the intervening time, just how revolutionary it was at the time. The prevailing wisdom among many in Hollywood in 2008 was still that comic books were for kids and films should reflect that. Nolan, building on the tone he had established three years prior in Batman Begins,

chose not to condescend to his audience, making a crime thriller that happened to have a superhero, rather than a superhero movie with some crimes in it.

This is no small thing. It showed that comic book movies could be taken seriously; that they could probe into the psychology of criminals and those that fight them; that they could present moral ambiguities rather than moral binaries; that they could offer intense, suspenseful action that felt grounded and real, without relying on maximalist CGI; and that they could be shot, somehow, with giant 70mm IMAX cameras.

The legacy has been immense and far-reaching. It became the house style for practically every DC movie that followed — you can still see the residue of influence in films like Joker — and distinguished the studio from its sunnier Marvel rivals. But beyond that, The Dark Knight

effectively legitimised comic books in Hollywood, finally making it an acceptable form of entertainment for grown-ups, and cementing the genre as the dominant blockbuster form for years to come. And it holds up to repeated viewings, rewarding returning devotees with hidden details and nuances every time. Like the psychologically layered crime thrillers Nolan looked to emulate, there’s more to it when you scratch the surface.