How Inception supersized Chris Nolan's brand

Movies are in crisis, and in the last couple of months Christopher Nolan’s TENET has come into focus as the clear bellwether for an industry that has, understandably, lost any idea of what it’s doing. It makes a lot of sense, especially in the absence of a big Disney release, to use a Nolan film as a kind of grand opening event, given his almost unique positioning as a truly auteur filmmaker who balances explosive populist entertainment with high minded, ideas driven story-telling better than anybody currently working.   

The man has become a brand unto himself, with a rabid online legion of film-bro fans (and critics) and an immediately identifiable set of aesthetic and narrative signifiers that have earned him a blank check from Warner Bros for over a decade now. And while many would point to his second Batman film, The Dark Knight, as his major breakout, I think it was his follow-up that truly solidified him as the kind of filmmaker who can dictate the trends of a whole industry. 10 years on, it’s Inception that stands as his greatest blockbuster achievement and a turning point in his career. What better time to look back at this time bending psycho-spy romp.         

When I say turning point, that doesn’t necessarily mean Inception marked a radical shift in approach from Nolan. His ticks and tricks have been consistent from the get go, established in his first major feature, Memento. A detached masculine hero methodically pursuing some philosophical goal while often set back by emotional connections, a chronologically experimental structure, compositions of boxy grey concrete, cotton and glass; Nolan’s MO has always been front and centre as well as pretty divisive. His movies often observe emotional connections with a detached, almost academic eye, as opposed to getting stuck into all the messy human business, which can leave audiences cold. But in the absence of heart there’s a whole lot of head, and Inception is as heady as they come.         

Nolan’s seventh film doubles down on everything, becoming the ultimate expression of his film making philosophy. The time manipulation is cranked up to the point of straining the plot, as multiple narrative threads proceed simultaneously at different speeds, often harmonising in exhilarating fashion. The men are manlier and more sombre than ever, their suits sharper and greyer, the buildings they inhabit featureless blocky monoliths.   

This is all accomplished in a way which is still technically astonishing a full decade later, using a combination of digital embellishment and practical set pieces that top anything Nolan had done up to that point. There’s an old-school show-off quality to the whole thing that harkens back to classic Hollywood extravaganzas like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments; the goal is to give you a whole lot of bang for your buck, and the bangs sound better when they’re really happening. Around 2010 blockbusters were getting very digital, emboldened by the monstrous success of Avatar’s entirely fabricated fictional setting, and while CGI is not necessarily a problem, there was an obvious positive response to Nolan’s engineering wizardry from punters and pundits alike.        

It was old fashioned in other ways too, sold using the star names of its cast (DiCaprio, Hardy, Cotillard) and director as opposed to relying on pre-established brand recondition. This was a wholly original story (pay no attention to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, released four years earlier), a practice Hollywood was quickly moving away from but when done right can give general audiences a tantalising craving for the unknown. Despite the monopolising production line effect of Disney films over the last decade, people still react strongest to something they haven’t seen before, where the spectacle can come from anywhere instead of the same predictable narrative beats.

Despite these trend bucking factors, or more likely partly because of them, Inception was a runaway hit, earning $830 million worldwide on a $160 million budget. It got rave reviews, Oscar nominations, and the score by Hans Zimmer became one of the most beloved of the century so far. It works as a thrilling technical exercise, both as a screenplay and a series of daring camera moves, while keeping enough ideas coherently in play to warrant genuine analysis, a rare feat for something so expensive. And while the plot doesn’t hold up to strong real world questioning or logic, who’s to say we’re in the real world anyway? Certainly not the film, with its deliberately ambiguous final shot.              

Inception was a risk; expensive, original, and probably too “smart” for general audiences. It was given to Nolan as a thank you for raking in a billion with batman two years earlier and nobody expected a smash hit that would stay in popular discourse for years after release. And yet it struck gold, and its success earned Nolan a blank check, solidifying him as one of biggest brands around. Here was a man who could draw a crowd with his ideas and technical talents alone, without needing a superhero to hedge his bets on. From that point forward, Nolan could ask for just about anything and get away with it, such was the credit he had built up.   

Bringing us back to TENET, under normal circumstances a sure-fire hit, but in these trying times perhaps not even Nolan can tempt crowds back into multiplexes. Which creates an interesting stalemate; because there is no other filmmaker in the world who will more fiercely defend his movies right to a big screen roll out. Unlike films such as Trolls World Tour, King of Staten Island, or maybe even the latest Marvel release, TENET is never getting pushed to streaming, no matter how bad the pandemic gets. Perhaps no other director has that kind of power over both studios and audiences, and it was Inception, almost exactly ten years ago, that crowned Chris Nolan king.