How Does The Odyssey Compare to Chris Nolan’s Other 12 Films? (No. 1 Can Never Be Beat)
The Odyssey sits among Christopher Nolan’s best films, but here is how it ranks among his past releases. Nolan remains one of the best filmmakers working today, and one of the few filmmakers who can still sell a movie on his name as the director alone. He also works on very different kinds of movies and doesn’t seem to mind hopping genres. He has made award-worthy wartime dramas (Oppenheimer, Dunkirk), sci-fi mind-twisters (Inception, Interstellar), and even superhero movies (The Dark Knight trilogy). With every film, he puts everything he has into making it, and the genre is just the playground that he operates in.
With The Odyssey, he makes his first fantasy movie, and here is how it ranks among all the other films in his illustrious history.
13) Following
Following is an interesting movie, and it is the one that shows what kind of filmmaker Christopher Nolan would become. This was his feature debut, a low-budget black-and-white film that told its story out of order, with the scenes all mixed up to create a puzzle that the viewers would eventually solve as the action plays out. The main character is a man who is alienated from society but has a single-minded obsession as he follows strangers around London and gets into a lot of trouble.
There is a lot in this movie that hints at what would come later for Nolan. The idea of playing with time is important here. While he told his story in reverse in Memento, here it was all jumbled up, yet he somehow managed to hold tight control over the narrative to make it a satisfying puzzle for the audience to work through. It also presented Nolan’s tale of a man with a code who realizes that he might not be able to hold up to his own morals when the world starts to crumble around him. It is interesting, but slight, while still showing Nolan’s brilliance.
12) The Dark Knight Rises
There are a few things that hold down The Dark Knight Rises, the third part in an otherwise exemplary superhero trilogy. In this final movie, Nolan really tries to do too much. He has the Bane-breaking Batman storyline mixed in with the “No Man’s Land” story, and a little Talia al Ghul thrown in, as she looks for revenge for her father’s death. There is a tease of Robin, and in the end, it is way too much for one movie to contain, and the film as a whole suffers for it.
That said, Tom Hardy is great as Bane, Christian Bale is as great as always as Batman, and there are some very strong sequences and action set pieces in the movie. What the movie shows is all solid, but it feels bloated, and it just doesn’t hit the same as the first two movies, which had better self-contained stories, while this one was just a little too much for audiences to take in during one movie.
11) Insomnia
Insomnia deserves a lot more respect than a lot of critics gave it. The movie stars Al Pacino as a Los Angeles detective who has a dark secret he is hiding. He is assigned to go to a remote town in Alaska to solve a murder, where he teams up with a small-town investigator, played by Hilary Swank. Nolan then creates a brilliant visual dynamic as the detective suffers from insomnia thanks to the fact that he is in Alaska during the time of the year when the sun doesn’t go down.
Nolan ramps up the brightness of scenes when looking at things from the detective’s point of view, and that disorients the viewer as much as it does the detective himself. Pacino and Swank are both great, but this is a showcase for Robin Williams, who abandons his normal comic roles and plays the killer here, tormenting the detectives and eluding capture, while forcing the detective into facing his dark secrets. This has a lot going on under the hood, and while it is a remake of a foreign language film, Nolan still brings his own touch to it.
10) Tenet
Tenet had a lot going against it when it hit theaters. This was released after the pandemic shutdown was lifted, and Nolan insisted it could get people back into theaters. However, what he delivered was another confusing sci-fi movie that played with time, and it left most people confused. In fact, Nolan himself refuses to talk about what the movie means and what happened in the end, preferring to leave it up to the audience to decide. That is great for sci-fi fans, but it made Tenet one of Nolan’s worst-received films.
John David Washington is a secret agent without a name (called The Protagonist), and his job here is to stop World War III from happening, which would end up as a war between the present and the future. The sound was a problem here, with the background noise almost so loud that dialogue was impossible to hear at times. It also had a twisty plot that made little sense at times, and the time travel made this Nolan’s most inaccessible film.
9) Dunkirk
Dunkirk is an intricately plotted war movie that does something that seems almost impossible, but it pulls it off masterfully. This movie tells the story of a rescue effort at Dunkirk, where British World War II soldiers were trapped in the area, and rescue forces were attempting to pull them out. This wasn’t so much a war battle movie as it was a movie about brave soldiers just trying to save their own.
What Nolan did so well was that he told the story from three different points of view. He had three ongoing timelines showing the forces by air, sea, and land, and didn’t take the focus off any of them, as they all played an important role in this massive rescue mission based on real-life events. It is true that this took focus off most of the characters, who were mainly interchangeable, but this wasn’t a movie about specific characters. It was a movie about a united effort to save lives, and Nolan delivered that story to perfection.
8) Batman Begins
Batman Begins rescued the Caped Crusader after Joel Schumacher’s movies in the 1990s almost destroyed the character on the big screen. Nolan chose to ignore both the vibrant cinematography of Schumacher and the gothic tendencies of Tim Burton, and he instead put Batman into a more realistic, dark world of Gotham City, something that played out more like a crime movie mixed with a hero’s journey story. It revived Batman, and Warner Bros. has run with the character ever since.
Christian Bale was a perfectly cast Bruce Wayne, and his surrounding cast was just brilliant. Gary Oldman as a weathered Commissioner Gordon, Michael Caine as a stoic Alfred Pennyworth, and Liam Neeson as the villain in disguise were all spot-on. The first half of the movie was just Bruce Wayne discovering himself, and it wasn’t until the second half that Batman showed up. What is most impressive is that the lack of Batman early on didn’t matter. The movie was just that good.
7) Interstellar
Nolan went for his biggest swing in the sci-fi genre with his 2014 movie Interstellar. If anything, this was his attempt to do something as high-concept as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but with much more action and adventure. It worked on most levels, and it was a great chance to give sci-fi fans something they could examine and dig into, arguably Nolan’s most cerebral movie in the genre. This is also one of Nolan’s most heartwarming movies, proving he isn’t always a cold filmmaker who remains detached from his characters.
Matthew McConaughey delivers a powerful performance as an astronaut who leaves behind his daughter in an attempt to save humanity by finding a new world humans could go to as Earth is rapidly dying. This involves black holes, wormholes, a scientifically realistic form of time dilation, and a story about a father and daughter’s relationship. While it seemed overly complicated at times when released, it has grown in reputation since its release, and it is one of Nolan’s fan-favorite films.
6) Memento
It seems interesting to hear from Guy Pearce about Memento, which was Nolan’s breakout movie. Pearce said that he doesn’t like watching the film, not because it’s not a good movie, but because he hates his performance. However, for fans of this movie, there is almost nothing to dislike about the story of a man incapable of forming new memories who is trying to find the man he believes killed his wife.
The movie is told in reverse order, with the final scene from the story shown first, and then each scene is played out in reverse order, with the opening scene of the movie as the climax. This forces viewers to remain in a state of confusion, as much as the hero is, and when the truth is revealed, it is done in a way where even the audience is not sure who to believe and what really happened to the man’s wife, the event that set him on this path. That puzzle makes this an unforgettable experience.
5) The Prestige
The Prestige is a movie that Christopher Nolan shot between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, giving him a break from the superhero genre to do something completely different. Based on the novel by Christopher Priest, the movie is a historical mystery about two rival magicians (Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) at the turn of the century who develop a hatred for each other when one of their wives (Piper Perabo) dies in an accident on stage during one performance.
The entire story here is played out as the two magicians use their power of illusion to one-up the other, and then things go in a very twisty sci-fi direction when one of the magicians takes his revenge to the extreme. Nolan even pulled in David Bowie to play the real-life Nikola Tesla, while names like Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, and Andy Serkis fill out this incredible cast. This movie was a perfect film for people who wanted to see Nolan do something other than superhero movies, and he delivered a masterful tale.
4) Inception
Inception is a sci-fi movie that has a twisting and turning story, but Nolan uses so many cinematic tricks in this movie that he just seems to be showing off at times. The movie looked that good, and everything, no matter how weird and disorienting, seemed like it was really happening. This was the movie that proved that Nolan could do pretty much anything he wanted to as a director, and it would work on the big screen. It was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, while winning Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects.
The story follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an “extractor” who is able to commit corporate espionage by using experimental dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their targets’ subconscious and extract information. However, in this movie, they are tasked with inserting false memories, called “inception” in this case. Much of the movie takes place in the mind of the victims, where anything is possible, and not even the extractors are in complete control of the situation. This remains Nolan’s most exciting movie outside his Batman trilogy.
3) Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer might be Nolan’s most successful film of his career for many reasons. The biggest of which is the combination of the box office and critical praise the film received. The movie, based on the true story of the man who helped create the atomic bomb that ended World War II while killing countless people, made $975.8 million at the box office and finished with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score. What was most impressive is that Oppenheimer achieved all this as a biographical film that had more dialogue scenes than action, yet it still managed to bring people into the theaters en masse to watch it.
It was also a huge awards success for Nolan. Oppenheimer received 13 Oscar nominations, winning for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. Nolan has had Oscar success before, but this was on another level.
2) The Dark Knight
For many years, The Dark Knight stood as Christopher Nolan’s greatest movie. While there are several elitist critics who would dismiss it because it is a superhero movie, and that means it is lesser entertainment, Nolan took his movie and proved that it was just as worthy of masterpiece status as any crime epic or action-adventure film. The Dark Knight, in many ways, is as much a crime movie as it is a superhero movie, and it matches up with even Martin Scorsese’s films.
Nolan took what he did so well in Batman Begins, and then he set up Batman as a dark force for good in a Gotham City with a lot of evil characters lurking on the streets. Not only that, but Nolan created one of the best villains ever to appear in a DC movie with Heath Ledger’s Joker. To this day, DC movies are still trying to find someone who can match what Joker brought to this specific superhero movie, and a performance that won Ledger a posthumous Oscar. The Dark Knight is a masterpiece, and only Nolan’s brand-new movie has eclipsed it.
1) The Odyssey
The Odyssey is not only Christopher Nolan’s new masterpiece, but it is the best movie he has ever made, one of the best fantasy movies ever made, and the definitive retelling of Homer’s epic poem that no one will likely ever beat. Matt Damon is Odysseus, a man who was the hero of the Trojan War, but ended up lost on his way home and was gone for 20 years. The movie shows his journey home, while also focusing on his wife as she waits for his return and his son, who never knew him, as he fights to stay alive.
The movie is a dense tale, and it is a strong story with an even more powerful message. Nolan, as always, has a masterful touch on the pacing as he switches between Odysseus, his son, and the present and the past, as the story falls into place. There are also changes that Nolan made to Homer’s tale that strengthen the themes of failure and disappointment, which makes Odysseus’s tale even more poignant. The Odyssey beats out The Dark Knight as Nolan’s best movie, and if the director ever reaches this level of storytelling again, it will be a miracle. The Odyssey will likely go down as Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.
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