Christopher Nolan’s Adventures in Time and Space

Since his eye-catching calling card Memento in 2000, Christopher Nolan has become one of the most influential and profitable filmmakers of the 21st Century. Over almost 25 years, it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that he repeatedly comes back to one obsessive theme: Time and its all-encompassing effect on our lives. Let’s take a look at the Nolan movies where chronology plays a major part in how the narrative unfolds.

Memento (2000)

"How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?"

The set up:

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is on a mission to track down the man who murdered his wife. For an amateur sleuth, he has one major drawback: a blow from the attacker left him unable to form new memories. To combat this disability, he makes use of polaroid images of key details and tattoos major clues onto his body. He is also helped (or hindered) by a shady cop named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and a bartender named Natalie (Carrie-Ann Moss). 

How it plays out:

From the get-go, Memento is closer to Nolan’s Tenet than any of his other time-bending movies, opening with a polaroid photo of a slaughtered man un-developing before Leonard un-shoots his target.

This is a neat touch that reflects Leonard’s condition. While his revenge is fresh and visceral in the moment, it, like everything else that has happened to him after his wife’s murder, rapidly fades.

Nolan’s breakthrough film is so tight and ingeniously constructed that it took me several watches to realise: Hang on a minute, that’s not how anterograde amnesia works. Leonard’s condition would not cause events to unfold backwards, yet this is the major hook. 

More accurately, one of the film’s timelines plays out in reverse order while black-and-white sequences, showing Leonard describing his situation and the strange case of another patient with the same condition, move forward chronologically. Eventually, both timelines dovetail in the finale as we learn Leonard’s true motives and his cycle of perpetual self-delusion.

Memento is a gimmick, but that gimmick has practical and resonant story-telling purposes. If the narrative was told in chronological order, we would know the mystery straight away and always be several steps ahead of Leonard as he keeps forgetting what happened in each scene. Telling the tale this way keeps us wrong-footed and in Leonard’s shoes, not to mention feeling sympathy for him. We can all root for a guy trying to avenge a loved one’s murder, but his actions become less defensible when we realise that this is a scenario that he has constructed for himself many times before. Revenge is all that keeps him going, each time setting himself a new mystery and a new victim to track down and kill. 

Does it work?

Memento is one of Nolan’s most involving and emotionally engaging films, and one that rewards multiple viewings. Each time I see it, there are always a few details I forgot about and marvel at how Nolan juggles the complex narrative. Many lesser filmmakers have trouble making a straightforward linear story make sense, so his assured control of the material is still remarkable even in relation to his larger body of work. Some might say especially in relation to some of his larger and more ambitious pieces.

The fact that this is not how amnesia behaves is beside the point. There are chronological versions available, but why would you want that? Ultimately, we all exist inside our heads with a narrative we tell ourselves. Objective reality is largely an illusion from our own biased perspective. For someone like Leonard forced to live without context, the world is purely subjective and prone to manipulation, even from himself.

The Prestige (2006)

"Now, you're looking for the secret. But you won't find it because, of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled."

The set up:

In Victorian London, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are two warring stage magicians locked in a battle on increasingly deadly one-upmanship. Angier is also hellbent on replicating his rival’s Transported Man illusion, which may or may not involve a miraculous machine invented by Nikola Tesla (David Bowie).

How it plays out:

Christopher Nolan lays his cards on the table from the outset in The Prestige. A movie with a twist ending is basically a cinematic magic trick, and Michael Caine’s opening narration challenges the audience: We’re going to fool you. Can you figure out the secret before the final reveal? Correspondingly, the film is carefully divided into three interwoven acts that mirror the stages of an illusion: The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige. 

The present-day section (within the film’s period setting) follows Borden’s plight as he is accused of moving a water tank under the stage to drown his rival during a performance, threatening him with the gallows and leaving his daughter an orphan. There is talk of a grand illusion called the Transported Man which Cutter (Michael Caine), an engineer who designs stage magic, refuses to reveal.

Borden is visited in prison by a solicitor who offers to buy the condemned magician’s tricks and leaves with him Angier’s diary to help grease the wheels. The diary takes us into the middle-past timeline, which follows Angier to Colorado to visit Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), who supposedly built a miraculous machine that made Borden’s version of the Transported Man possible.

Angier’s reading material for the journey is Borden’s encrypted diary, which takes us into the third and most distant timeline detailing the beginning of their relationship. Here we find them as two budding illusionists working as a plant for an older stage magician (Ricky Jay), along with Angier’s wife Julia (Piper Perabo), who performs as the frequently imperilled assistant. Borden’s job is to secure Julia’s hands with a slipknot for an escapology trick. When it goes disastrously wrong and she drowns, Angier blames his colleague for her death and sets the narrative on course towards its deadly and surprising conclusion.

Does it work?

As we are primed to expect from the opening moments of The Prestige, nothing is quite what it seems as the three-pronged narrative unfolds. Nolan does a great job handling the complex plot, keeping the tale clearly comprehensible while stringing us along with a series of intriguing clues and red herrings. If you figured out the twist before the end, you’re a lot sharper than me!

The ending is pretty far-fetched but by the time we get there, we’re already too invested in the storytelling to call BS. Tesla’s machine, which at first seems to be a red herring set up by Borden to get rid of Angier for a while, turns out to be real and provides the basis for Angier to pull off the Transported Man. Each night, he creates and drowns a clone of himself, stashing the water-logged bodies in a disused theatre. As for Borden, we find out that his version of the trick involved his secretive twin brother, who disguises himself as stage engineer Fallon.

Ultimately, Nolan’s manipulation of three timelines serves no greater purpose than pleasurably misleading the audience until the final reveal, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Instead, by focusing on the recurring motif of doubles - hinted at earlier in the movie when Angier hires a drunken lookalike for an earlier version of the Transported Man - Nolan returns to notions of self-deception and self-deprivation that are also recurring themes in his films. 

Angier sells his soul and ends up murdering a version of himself every night to revel in the audience’s applause, while we find out that Borden has been sharing his entire life with his twin in his dedication to his craft, resulting in the suicide of his wife. This makes for an alluringly dark narrative, but it is that darkness that makes the film linger well after we know the trick.

Inception (2010)

"Dreams feel real when you’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realise something was actually strange."

The set up:

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an exiled corporate thief with a difference: His speciality is using dream-sharing tech to perform heists, seizing valuable information from a target’s subconscious while they sleep. Cobb and his gang are approached with one last job that could enable him to return home to his children. Instead of stealing an idea, they must plant one instead. Despite the objections of his crew, Cobb insists it is possible because he’s done it before - but there is also the small matter of Mal (Marion Cotillard), his dead wife, who keeps cropping up in the shared dreams with malicious intent. The stakes are high, and failure could result in Cobb losing himself forever in a dream state.

How it plays out:

Most of our dreams occur during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep. Although it is hard to determine exactly how long we dream for, researchers estimate that we spend around a quarter of an 8-hour session dreaming. As for the dreams themselves, they may last on average between 5 and 20 minutes. Within the dream, however, time may seem to stretch out far longer.

This is the crux of the action in Inception, where time becomes increasingly dilated as Cobb and his team descend through levels of sleep on their dream-heist. Dreams within dreams, the virtual scenarios created by Architect Ariadne (Elliot Page) become more unstable the deeper they go.

Nolan has admitted that he did little or no research into sleep and dreams while writing the screenplay, and he has concocted his own scaling effect for each level of dreaming. We are told that five minutes of sleep equals one hour on the first level, but dream-time becomes dramatically dilated in levels two and three. The bottom level is the dreaded limbo, where a few hours’ sleep can result in decades trapped in a seemingly never-ending dream.

Working within dream worlds present a hazard for Cobb and his team, as they risk losing track of what is real and what is a figment or their (or someone else’s) imagination. That’s why they each carry a totem; a small item that only they know the feel and weight of, which they can use to test whether they are asleep or awake. The gang daringly pulls off the inception gig and Cobb can return home – but is it real or is he still dreaming?

Does it work?

Beyond The Dark Knight, Inception is Christopher Nolan’s most popular film (according to the IMDb Top 250, at least) and it has many devoted fans around the world. For me, however, the entire concept of the film never quite added up to a coherent narrative. Despite all the exposition and technical work-arounds that Nolan’s screenplay employs, I could never quite square the idea of a lucid dream that Cobb and his team can walk around in and interact with, fully conscious within that world. 

That is partly because Nolan’s vision of dreams is so logical and exact - in other words, precisely what dreams aren’t. My nine-year-old daughter picked up on it too; she called it out within the opening few minutes: “That’s not what dreams are like.”

And she is totally right. Reviewing Inception several years ago, I suggested that Nolan is a director who dreams by Powerpoint, and there is a frustrating orderliness to each level of the dream world he presents in the movie. Especially compared to Paprika, a wildly imaginative anime movie that Inception bares a striking resemblance to – premise-wise, if not execution.

Nevertheless, Inception still packs an emotional punch. The story is steeped in Cobb’s sadness and the ambiguous payoff is one that people will still be talking about for decades to come. As it appears he has returned to the United States and is about to reunite with his children, Cobb gives his totem one last spin to check if it is real or not. However, he decides not to wait for the result, walking away to see his kids while the top still spins.

Nolan cuts to the credits as the top perceptibly wobbles but is still spinning for what feels like an unnaturally long time. He leaves it up to us to decide. Does that wobble mean that it is slowing and will fall, proving that Cobb is awake? Or will it keep on going, revealing that he is only dreaming the heartwarming moment? For Cobb, it doesn’t matter anymore. He has reached a point where he no longer cares what is imagined and what is reality. He would rather be with his kids forever in a dream than be without them any longer in the real world.

Interstellar (2014)

"I love you forever and I’m coming back…"

The set up:

In the year 2067, planet Earth is becoming inhospitable as a blight decimates crops and makes our atmosphere increasingly unbreathable. Former NASA test pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is approached by the space agency with the chance to save humanity. He must lead a team of astronauts through a wormhole that has appeared near Saturn to scope out three potentially habitable planets orbiting a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. 

Finding a new home for our species comes at an immense personal cost for Cooper, however, as he must leave behind his two children, Tom (Timothee Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy). His daughter is especially distraught about her father jetting off to outer space, and Cooper makes a heartfelt promise to return. But how old will she be by the time he gets back?

How it plays out:

After completing The Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan returned to the emotional effects of time in Interstellar, touching upon similar themes to Inception. Here we have another father determined to return to his children, and costly time slippage that may prevent him from keeping his promise - in this case, caused by the vast gravitational pull of a black hole.

Nolan’s brother Jonathan studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology while writing the screenplay, which took around four years to complete. Nolan also enlisted Kip Thorn, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, to ensure that everything that happens in the movie remains within the realms of scientific possibility.

An incredible amount of research and technology also went into realistically portraying the film’s black hole, Gargantua, released five years before the Event Horizon Telescope gave us our first glimpse of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy.

As for gravity’s effect on time, we can observe that a clock on a GPS satellite orbiting the Earth 12,500 miles away runs a barely-perceptible difference in relation to how clocks run on the ground. That effect can be extrapolated to how time would behave for someone visiting a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole with an infinitesimally larger gravitational pull than our own world.

As things are looking bleak for Cooper’s mission and the folks back home, Nolan takes a leap of faith by dropping his hero into the black hole. That is where he encounters the mind-bending Tesseract, a four-dimensional construct handily provided by the movie’s mysterious five-dimensional beings to help Cooper interact with his daughter back on planet Earth and save the day.

Does it work?

Interstellar is a big unwieldy movie that half-successfully mashes together cold hard science and good old-fashioned sentimentality, but it is the theoretical physics that provides the earnest emotional clout of the film. It is a race against time, and the novelty here is that time runs differently in different parts of the universe, upping the stakes even further for our reluctant hero. 

We were pregnant with our first child when the movie came out and Cooper’s departure had me choking back tears in the cinema then. Watching it again with my daughter and son recently made me even more upset. The idea of leaving them behind, even to save the world, is one that hits so hard as a parent.

At nearly three hours long, almost an entire hour passes before Cooper actually leaves Earth. This pays dividends with the emotional heart of the story, but it does leave some of the space stuff feeling a bit under-cooked. Once we’re out exploring planets, it becomes a movie of moments. The most effective is an ill-fated excursion on an inhospitable water planet locked deep in Gargantua’s gravity well, where a few lost hours results in 23 years passing back on Earth. 

Less effective is the disastrous decision to visit the uninhabitable ice planet of Dr. Mann (Matt Damon). Damon’s uncredited role has a destabilising effect on the movie - suddenly, up pops another superstar, apparently channelling cowardly Dr. Zachary Smith in the old Lost in Space TV show.

Nolan goes big with the theoretical physics stuff and people are still arguing about it to this day. One of the chief sticking points for many is the business of the Tesseract and how Cooper is able to convey the information to save the world, with the help of future fifth-dimensional humans, or evolved post-human beings.

This may at first glance seem like a case of the Grandfather Paradox, but the key factor is time as the fourth dimension. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains that in our current reality, we can move at will through three physical dimensions but we are bound by time travelling in one direction. However, if we could interact with time the way we do with the other three dimensions, then we would no longer be prisoner to the linear passage of time and could dip in and out of any point in our lives. If this is the case and we accept that fifth-dimensional humans exist in the reality of the film, then Cooper has always left Earth and always returned via the Tesseract to save the human race. I think…

Nolan gives us a lot to chew on and, whether it works for you or not, this is why he is such an important director. In a world of endless superhero movies, remakes, prequels, and reboots, we should be thankful for a filmmaker with the influence and the determination to make huge movies that everyone wants to see but also provide so much food for thought.

Dunkirk (2017)

"You can practically see it from here."

"What?"

"Home."

The set up:

It is 1940 and over 300,000 Allied troops are stranded on the beaches of France and Belgium by German forces. At Dunkirk, beleaguered soldiers are encircled and strafed by Luftwaffe fighters as they desperately wait for an escape route. Things are looking bleak, but the British military mount a last-gasp evacuation supported by a brave flotilla of merchant and civilian “little ships.” The stakes are high, because the elimination of forces retreating to the shores of the Channel will almost certainly hand victory to the Third Reich. 

How it plays out:

An epic retelling of the Dunkirk evacuation during World War II might not seem like the right place for Nolan’s temporal experiments, but he’s at it again with the usual mixed results. He’s not interested in portraying a blow-by-blow account of the ordeal, but rather in creating an abstract experience of how time behaves subjectively under extreme duress. In that sense, he could have picked almost any battle in any conflict, but the heroic failure of Dunkirk lends itself neatly to his central thesis, broken down into three overlapping timelines each set over a fixed period.

The Mole, focusing on the land-based action with the troops stuck on the beach awaiting salvation, is set over one week. The Sea, charting the adventures of a small English vessel called the Moonstone, is set over one day. The Air, joining three Spitfires sent to provide air cover for the evacuation, covers only one hour.

This tactic emulates how time must feel for the characters in each situation. For the men on the beach, time passes agonisingly slowly as they are rendered helpless and don’t know if they will make it back home. For the pilots in the air, travelling at high speed and engaging in dogfights, they are living in the moment. The sea is the middle-ground: The troops want nothing more than to board a ship and get out on the water to relative safety. If the pilots are shot down, they too can bail out of their planes and join the relatively sedate middle timeline.

Does it work?

Dunkirk is one of Nolan’s most innovative narrative gambits and Hans Zimmer's score is integral. The original music in Nolan movies is often so important in setting the mood and themes, but here it is key to the very structure of the film. 

Zimmer employs the Shepard tone, which loops several layered tones separated by an octave, creating the sense of a constantly rising pitch that never resolves itself. Nolan has used scores with this effect before, but here Nolan’s screenplay closely mirrors the auditory trick. As we dip in and out of each timeline, the action appears to rise towards a crescendo, but cuts to the next scene before the tension is released. 

The combined effect is a film that plays with our senses to create an urgent feeling of never-ceasing anxiety. I was both incredibly tense and somewhat frustrated with Dunkirk when I sat alone in an empty theatre watching it. As a Brit whose grandparents had fought in the war, I grew up with these stories and expected to be a blubbering mess, but Nolan’s intellectual approach to mapping out the three passages of time left me cold for much of the film. While we get visceral moments of crisis and panic, individual characters are almost an afterthought in the grand design.

We all know how the story ends, of course, and Dunkirk only resembles a traditional war movie in the final moments. This is when Nolan and Zimmer release the pressure at last. As one of our bedraggled survivors reads out Winston Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” speech and Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot just about lands his plane safely, a muted but stirring rendition of Elgar’s Nimrod gloriously unfurls. That was when the patriotic tears came for me.

Tenet (2020)

"You have to start looking at the world in a new way."

The set up:

The Protagonist (John David Washington) is a CIA operative who is enlisted by a top-secret organisation called Tenet to help unspool a very novel threat. After a hostage situation in Kyiv reveals that time is reversible and inverted items may travel backwards from the future, he must track down a Russian oligarch called Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who has a grasp of the tech and intends to cause a cataclysmic event in the present. 

How does it play out?

As with Inception and Interstellar, Nolan worked with theoretical scientist Kip Thorne to hash out the more speculative elements of a story that would otherwise be a fairly routine espionage action thriller. The dense screenplay incorporates concepts including reversible entropy in the universe, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s Demon, the Grandfather Paradox, and the Sator’s Square, a heady mix for even a ringmaster of cerebrally-inclined summer blockbusters like Nolan. 

Fatally, however, his approach to these concepts was similar to his take on sleep in Inception: taking real concepts and bolting them all together in a story that, by his own admission, “we’re not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate.”

The first hour, as the Protagonist teams up with his raffish handler Neil (Robert Pattinson) and courts danger by trying to enlist the help of Sator’s abused wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), is convoluted (perhaps unnecessarily so) but fairly involving. Eventually, however, Nolan surrenders all narrative coherence in favour of spectacle as he gives up on making any sense from the palindromic puzzle he has set for himself. As he later told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show: “You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It’s not all comprehensible.”

Does it work?

If Christopher Nolan can’t be bothered to make a movie that is comprehensible, then why are we supposed to care? Depending on your point of view, Tenet is either Nolan’s most audacious or self-indulgent tinkering with time in his entire filmography. For me, this was the moment Nolan jumped the shark and disappeared up his own wormhole.

The Colbert quote sums up the problem with Tenet and hints at larger issues with Nolan’s time-bending movies as a whole. All of his movies in the time-and-space category are narratively, conceptually, and thematically dense, requiring the utmost attention from the viewer. Tenet is a film that still makes no sense even after a second or third viewing. I’m of the opinion that if you need to watch a movie again or draw a diagram to figure out what the hell is going on, the director has failed on a fundamental storytelling level. And the fatal flaw of Tenet is that its central conceit is virtually impossible to realise on screen.

As theoretical physicist Claudia De Rham, explained to the Los Angeles Times, you can create a device that can slow the process of entropy, ie: the gradual deterioration of all matter from order into chaos. A refrigerator is one such device. In the case of water, it reverses entropy by stabilising molecules in a solid form.

A fridge can also reduce entropy by cooling food to stop it decaying so quickly. But that isn’t the same as reversing entropy – it doesn’t make it fresher, it just slows the process. As humans, we have conceptualised entropy by inventing time, which ticks off the passing seconds towards our demise and the eventual heat death of the universe.

So it is possible to imagine a device that fully reverses entropy, and therefore the passage of time as we understand it. That is fine in a narrative focusing solely on that idea, like Oldrich Lipsky’s Happy End, which starts with the protagonist’s death and works towards his birth.

A time machine, on the other hand, doesn’t reverse entropy. It just returns the user to an earlier step in the process. The problem with Tenet is that the turnstile device is basically both an entropy-reversal machine and a time machine, which causes a major problem when non-inverted and inverted objects come into contact and start interacting. 

How could two versions of the Protagonist come to blows if they are travelling in opposite directions through time? Nolan solves the problem here with his speculative tech as the reverse-Protagonist arrives in a specific moment in time and stops for a punch-up with his non-inverted self. In both cases, they would be trying to avoid punches that haven’t been thrown yet.

Nolan attempts to resolve this issue by staging a fight that largely plays out like a regular fight, just with some weird physical effects thrown in. A more egregious example of how Nolan has created an unfilmable problem for himself is the backwards car chase. 

As De Rham explains, an inverted traveller would not only need to take their own oxygen with them (as shown in the film), but their own light too. Inverted light would leave our eyes, bounce off the object we saw, and speed back across the solar system to the sun. On a smaller practical level, they would need to take an inverted vehicle to participate in a car chase - it wouldn’t just sit there on the highway waiting for the reversed driver to un-crash it and pursue the Protagonist.

The concept of time inversion is a cool one, but Nolan has no real choice but to hand-wave the specifics as much as possible in the service of spectacle. This brings us to a series of Nolan Paradoxes. He’s a serious man who courts scientists and physicists in the name of research, then ditches their advice and just makes shit up for himself. He’s a meticulous director who is great at the technical aspect of filmmaking, but frequently gets hazy about the details when figuring out the solution to his puzzle becomes too hard. He deals in speculative concepts like dream heists, black hole diving, and time inversion, but has the eye and imagination of a cautious accountant. 

Whimsy and fantasy are notions as alien to Nolan as a well-edited action sequence where the audience can actually follow what is happening. He is only able to visualise his towering ideas in the most literal and prosaic way. Layers of dream become something like a multi-storey car park or high-rise corporate hotel, and just as bland and homogenous. A four-dimensional construct enabling an astronaut to send messages via a bookcase back home becomes a four-dimensional bookcase. A man travelling backwards through time chases a non-inverted character by driving a car backwards… that’s just dumb.

In other words, by making these concepts look realistic, he loses the safety net of fantasy that might otherwise allow him a little poetic leeway. All this wouldn’t be a problem if the spectacle of Tenet was balanced out with a strong emotional core. It is easier for us to suspend disbelief in Memento or Inception or Interstellar because we have engagingly human characters we can relate to. Tenet sacrifices it all to mere meaningless spectacle, making it a sterile experience that amounts to Nolan’s worst film to date.

So there you have it, a breakdown of Christopher Nolan’s time-tinkering movies. Some of these concepts are very hard to wrap your mind around, let alone trying to explain in words. If I have made any blunders trying to unpick them, please let us know!