In the past few days you might have heard a collective shriek from the online comic book fans as Warner Bros. recently released the teaser poster to Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. There have been many comic book films released this summer and some have been pretty decent, but none have compared to The Dark Knight and none will compare to the Nolan's third Batman film that arrives next summer.



Chris Nolan burst on to the scene in 2000 with an indie called Memento. The film was smart, and after seeing it I was convinced it was too smart for its own good, so I went back to see it again and I was sure I would find a hole in Nolan's logic. With so many facts to keep straight and the way he plays with time and memory I was positive there would be a mistake. There wasn't. Memento was one of those films where the filmmaker asks the audience two things, 1) trust me because I know what I'm doing and 2) you might have to use some brain power to keep up with me. The film also became an excellent calling card to Hollywood studios who would launch Nolan on his way to becoming the smartest throwback director working today.

I call Nolan a throwback because that is what he is. He is the only director working in big blockbusters today who has managed to maintain a 70's sensibility about his work. The 70's were the greatest decade of American film. The directors (or auteurs) then were making real movies about troubled and flawed protagonists who were involved in delicate situations. They asked the audience to come along on the ride but forced them to think while they were there. The 70's gave us the greats like Roman Polanski, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Milos Forman, Alan J. Pakula and Sidney Lumet (although he had been making movies for a while he hit his peak in the 70's).

After Memento, Nolan moved on to Insomnia where we began to see his inclination towards the 70's decade. The film revolves around a troubled character in a high pressure situation (the sun never sets). Insomnia also proved Nolan could work with A-list talent like Al Pacino and Robin Williams and coax good performances out of them where they really acted and were not just playing a movie version of their real personalities. The best part of Insomnia and the reason it feels like a 70's film is because the viewer has more fun in the process of discovering the resolution in the detective story than in the actual resolution itself at the end of the movie. In many 70's films the ending is never as important as the fun in getting there.

 When Warner Bros. gave Nolan Batman Begins it wasn't the first time a studio had paired an indie director with a tentpole summer movie (that was probably Bryan Singer and X-Men in 2000) but it would signal the arrival of the Chris Nolan we know today, the man who is able to make a 70's film for hundreds of millions of dollars and still capture a new millennium audience. Bruce Wayne is a flawed 70's film character and Christian Bale plays him as such. He's a billionaire with women throwing themselves at him, yet something is forcing him to dress as a bat and fight crime at night. And Bale's performance could not be more important, there is no wink to the audience that this is all in fun, it's deadly serious and the foes he's fighting are extremely dangerous. Bale's Bruce Wayne is not unlike Jack Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They both have needs pulling at them to buck the trend and do their own thing. Batman Begins proved you could make a smart and serious summer blockbuster with real flawed characters.

The blockbusters from the 70's are no different than Nolan's characters. Jason Miller's troubled priest who can't escape the death of his mother in The Exorcist or the war hero who wants nothing more than to distance himself from the corruption that is his family's business only to find himself sucked into it in The Godfather.

In 2008 with the arrival of The Dark Knight Nolan perfected the melding of new millennium blockbusters and budgets with a 70's sensibility. The $185 million movie was an essay on the blurred lines of good and evil and audiences worldwide ate it up as it grossed over a billion dollars. The movie also looked like a 70's movie in that it looked real and authentic. I loved Watchmen but that film looks like a comic book and has a stylized comic book feel. The Dark Knight looks like it could take place in our real world. The film is dark and not a brightly lit comic. In 1970 Robert Altman made war look bloody and messy because that's what it is, even though MASH was a comedy. Scorsese made us feel the streets and grit of New York in Taxi Driver as though the city was a supporting character in the tale of Travis Bickle. Nolan does the same, he allows you to understand and feel Gotham City even though you won't find it on any map in the real world. 70's were all about authenticity and Nolan does the same even in a world where a man dressed as a bat chases another man with green hair and a white face.

Inception is where Chris Nolan truly pushed the limits of his 70's filmmaking. He made a $200 million movie that begged the audience to hang on every word, think about what is being said, and then doesn't even really have a definite ending. Cobb is a true 70's character. He's plagued by the death of his wife and yearns to be reunited with his children (this is the 70's sensibility). Of course he is going through all this while entering people's dreams and planting ideas there (this is the addition of new millennium filmmaking). The real 70's telling point is the end. Nolan cuts away before we can see if the top stops spinning or not because like other 70's movies the point isn't to show whether Cobb is in a dream or not, the point is that he has made it home to his kids and that's what is important to him.

Chris Nolan is far and away one of the smartest movie directors working today. He has managed to prove that audiences can be smart if you treat them with respect. He has shown that by investing in character and setting regardless of what your film is about, you will be rewarded with a greater product. In essence he has learned from the masters of the 70's and applied it to big budget modern tentpole filmmaking. Movie studios should learn from his example and don't just settle for effects but give your story a true foundation, or they could simply hire Nolan to get involved in their summer blockbusters they way did by hiring him to produce the Superman reboot.

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