This is Nolan Theme Week, where we’ll be breaking down Christopher Nolan’s five most popular writing-directing efforts in hopes of learning something about how he crafts a story.  Monday Roger reviewed The Dark Knight.  Tuesday I took on Batman Begins.  Wednesday was The Prestige, which surprisingly has garnered some of the more heated talkback, Thursday was the film that put Nolan on the map, Memento. And today, to finish it all off, I’m of course reviewing the script for his most recent film, Inception!

Genre: Crime/Sci-Fi/Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) – In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job till date, Inception.
About: Inception came out in the summer and is currently the 5th highest grossing film of the year behind Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, and Eclipse. It cost 160 million dollars to make, opened with 62 million at the U.S. Box Office, finished with 290 million, and has made over 800 million worldwide, unheard of in this day and age for an original property (unless your name is James Cameron of course). Nolan is said to have worked on the script for ten years. When asked if he had done any dream research for the script, Nolan had a surprising response: “I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I took the approach in writing Inception that I did when I was writing Memento about memory and memory loss, which is I tend to just examine my own process of, in this case, dreaming, in Memento’s case, memory, and try and analyze how that works and how that might be changed and manipulated. How a rule set might emerge from my own process. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway. So at a certain point I realized that if you’re trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it’s mostly from my own process, my own experience.”  For some further Nolan reading, there’s a nice profile on him at the New York Times.
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Details: 146 pages – shooting draft

Okay, if you’re a big fan of this film, you might want to steer clear of this review. I’m about to get into it with Inception because after watching Nolan’s five most popular movies this week, I’ve concluded that Inception is by far the weakest of the bunch. The attention to detail – the care he put into those other films – isn’t there in Inception. Things feel rushed, smooshed together, as if Warners gave him gobs of money with a note attached that said, “as long as you give it to us quickly.”

As I pointed out yesterday in my Memento review, Nolan was so careful and clever in how he slipped his exposition into the film. Here, it’s like he doesn’t even care, spraying it around like gang graffiti. This is the heart of my problem with the film, but there are plenty of other things to talk about so let’s quickly recap the plot.

Inception follows Dom Cobb, a “dream thief” who travels into people’s minds to steal information. Early on he’s approached by Saito, a man who owns one of the largest energy companies in the world, to break into his biggest competitor’s mind (a man named Robert Fischer) and plant a piece of information (an “inception”) in him that will eliminate him as a competitor. Cobb initially resists until Saito promises he can reunite him with his children, who he lost after being accused of his wife’s murder.

Cobb recruits the perfect team to complete the task and constructs a multi-layered dream within a dream within a dream approach to get to the center of the mark’s subconscious. Complicating the mission is Cobb’s wife, who has died in the real world but who still lives inside Cobb’s dreams. If he’s going to succeed with the inception, he’ll need to reconcile his relations with her first.

Okay, so I’ve seen Inception twice now and read the script once. While the most important viewing of any movie is the first, Nolan’s films are constructed to be viewed multiple times, in my opinion not only to make for a richer viewing experience, but to make him and the studio richer. On that front, compared to the rest of his films, Inception is a failure.

Why?

One word. Exposition.

One of the reasons we’re repeatedly told as writers to hide our exposition is because bad exposition is one of the quickest ways to alert an audience that what they’re watching isn’t real. If you hear someone say, “We gotta go here to do this and then we gotta go there to do that and we only have 3 hours to do it or we all die unless Joey can somehow deliver the money to Frankie in time,” you say, “Oh yeah, this is a movie.” Why? Because people don’t talk that way.  Because it’s not real life. It’s the mechanics of the plot translated into words in order to condense key plot points for the audience’s benefit.

So what you do is two things. You hide it as much as you can. And you only tell the absolute minimum of what you have to. Now there are a lot of ways to hide exposition. Back to The Future is pure exposition, but it’s hidden in comedy. We’re more focused on these two bickering back and forth than we are on that everything they say is so the audience knows what’s going on.

But that first rule, keeping exposition to a minimum, that doesn’t require nearly as much skill – just discipline. You’re simply looking to keep things short. That’s it. Nolan completely ignores this rule here, spending not one scene, not two, not three, but a full one hour of scenes on exposition. And he doesn’t stop there either!  We are getting exposition all the way into the 120s!  For that reason, when you try and watch this movie a second time, you are bored to death during the opening hour of the film.

I mean I’m just shocked at how sloppy it all is.

Now the script definitely picks up, and all of that explanation enables us to enjoy the complicated second half of the story, but I don’t think you ever really feel immersed in this movie the way you do in Memento or Batman Begins because the opening hour is essentially Christopher Nolan onscreen reading you the rules of his universe from a notepad. There’s no subtlety, no attempt to suspend your disbelief, and that’s probably why Inception feels less satisfying than his other films.

Having said that, it’s interesting to note that all the classic Nolan-isms are at play here, particularly his patented triple-crossing narrative opening to the film. This time we’re cutting between Cobb visiting an older Asian man, Cobb asleep in a hotel room with an approaching group of rioters, and Cobb asleep on a train. What I find fascinating here is that Nolan’s taken this device to its extreme. The opening of Inception is so confusing and so weird that we absolutely have to pay attention to keep up. It’s proof positive, as he’s done this now 5 times, how effective the device is.

Another thing I find interesting about Inception is that there’s no villain and there’s no love interest. In fact, what Nolan tries to do is insert both of these into a single character, Cobb’s wife. She’s this kind of fucked up love interest as well as a villain – the biggest obstacle to him achieving his goal. All the other “bad guys” in the film are essentially faceless. Unfortunately it doesn’t work, as Mal’s character in general is more of a confusing idea than a well-formed character.

The fact that our main character does not encounter these two dynamics (love or hate) in the story, is the reason I believe the film lacks any emotional resonance with the audience. And it seems like it shouldn’t be that way because Cobb himself is feeling SO MUCH emotion during this story.  But since we never see him have someone to love, since we never see him have someone to hate, we never feel any of that emotion ourselves. The emotional core of the movie is limited to Cobb trying to find closure with this woman who, for all intents and purposes (at least from how we see her), is kind of a bitch. Am I supposed to be emotionally connected to that?

In fact, this gets into a much deeper issue, which is that Cobb is the only character Nolan has put any effort into. We know barely anyting about Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s character. We know barely anything about Ellen Page’s character. Tom Hardy and the Indian Guy? I still don’t even know why they were in the movie! We’re talking about a 150 minute movie here, and only a single character is being explored on a deeper level. There’s no other reason to HAVE a 150 minute movie than to use that time to explore a bunch of characters!

So how did this happen? I’ll give you a guess. That’s right, because Nolan wasted the first hour of his film having his characters spout exposition! We can’t learn about characters if their only function is to explain things or ask questions!

Look, I enjoyed this movie. Nolan does enough right here to make the film work. The score alone is worth the price of admission (easily the best of the year – maybe the last five years). And as long as I’m bashing some of his writing mistakes, I have to give him props for how he wrote the dream within a dream within a dream climax.  I can imagine how complicated that must have been and yet it definitely holds our interest.  But when you read this script on the page, you really start to see its weaknesses. When it’s all said and done, I’d say this is his second worst film (behind Insomnia).

Although I can’t share the script, it is available, with concept art storyboards and handwritten notes by Nolan. 

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The biggest lesson I learned after watching Nolan’s films this week is to challenge the audience. There’s a misconception out there that the audience is dumb, that you need to serve them everything on a platter. Audiences are smarter than you think and they want to be challenged. Just know that there is a skill behind this and that skill is built through a ton of writing and a bunch of trial and error. You have to find out what works for you. You can’t just say, “Well Nolan cuts between 3 different storylines so I’m going to cut between 5!” and assume you’ve created a masterpiece. Being different, pushing boundaries, has great rewards, but it also means failing a lot bigger and more frequently. If you’re okay with that, then it may be something you want to try.

This is Nolan Theme Week, where we’ll be breaking down Christopher Nolan’s five most popular writing-directing efforts in hopes of learning something about how he crafts a story.  Monday Roger reviewed The Dark Knight.  Tuesday I took on Batman Begins.  Yesterday was The Prestige, which surprisingly has garnered some of the more heated talkback, and today I’m reviewing the film that put Nolan on the map, Memento.

Genre: Revenge/Noir
Premise: (from IMDB) A man, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife.
About: Memento was Nolan’s second feature film and first large scale production. The inventive story and stylistic directing backpedaled Nolan onto the scene, making him one of the hottest directors of the time. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Gosford Park. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance but lost out to…The Believer.  Boy, the judges sure got that one right (if you can’t see me, I’m rolling my eyes right now). Asked if he was ever worried whether the strange structure of his film would play to an audience, Nolan replied, “There’s this weird irony, because you actually find yourself as a filmmaker in the position of the protagonist that has to trust these notes he’s written himself. It sounds a bit trite, but it’s really true. I watch the screen and think, okay I read the script three years ago and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s like you really are, at a certain point, you’re so immersed in the material. You’re just having to trust yourself. You have so many points along the way where the film stops being real and you just have to say: this is what I’m making, this is what I’m doing and switch that half of your brain off and absolutely trust your initial instincts, your editor, your actor’s instincts and your own instincts about whether you’re getting what you want. The weird thing is you go through these torturous creative machinations and then you look back at the original script and it’s pretty, pretty close to what’s on the screen. It’s almost exactly the same. You say, “Thank God, how did that wind up like that?”
Writer: Christopher Nolan (based on his brother, Jonathan Nolan’s, short story, “Memento Man.”)
Details: 139 pages

It’s been nearly ten years since I watched Memento. It was a different time. I looked at movies a different way. And all I could remember was that I kinda liked it but wasn’t too fond of the ending, probably because I didn’t understand it. Figuring the law of diminishing returns would be at play here, I anticipated a ho-hum encore presentation.

Boy was I wrong.

This movie nearly blew me away. So inspired was I by this film that I actually spent 20 minutes devising a way to write my review backwards. I made it about three sentences but still, just the fact that I was willing to try says something! Yesterday I said that The Prestige was my favorite of Nolan’s films. I might have to change that after watching Memento.

Memento follows a man named Leonard Shelby who has a unique illness whereby he can’t form short-term memories. His last memory is walking in on a man raping and killing his wife. He was hit on the head, fell to the floor, and passed out. When he awoke, he was afflicted with this problem.

Leornard has dedicated his life to finding and killing this man, who goes by the mysterious moniker of “John G.”  Because he can’t remember the pieces of his investigation, however, the only way he can keep track of his progress is through body tattoos and notes to himself. 

The film is told backwards, from the moment Leonard murders John G. all the way to the “beginning” of his investigation, when it started. Along the way, we learn not only how difficult this process is for him, but how the people who are supposedly helping him may not have his best interests in mind. It leads to a mystery deeper than the murder we witnessed at the outset. Did Leonard kill the right guy?

Well what do you know? How do we start off Memento? I’ll give you three guesses. Memento starts exactly like the rest of Nolan’s films – with a divided narrative jumping between three incoherent timelines. Once again, Nolan proves that a key trick to capturing the audience’s attention is to confuse and challenge them, forcing them to focus in or be left behind.

The first thread shows Leonard killing John G., but in reverse. We then cut to a hotel room in black and white where Leonard is mumbling to himself in voice over, trying to figure out what he’s doing there. We then cut to what we’ll eventually learn is our central storyline, Leonard’s pursuit of the killer.

Judging by what I’ve read from Nolan this week, writing this script must have been an orgasmic experience for him. Unlike his other films, where the cross-cutting eventually dies down, leading to a traditional easy-to-follow narrative, in this film he gets to play with time and confuse the audience all the way up to the end. And it works. I can’t remember the last time I was still guessing what the hell was going to happen this late in a film. And I’d already seen the movie!

But I think the reason every aspiring screenwriter needs to see this movie, or at least be aware of it, has nothing to do with the actual script, but rather with the concept. Memento takes a tired premise and turns it on its head. Go back and read that sentence again because knowing it could be the difference between you making it as a screenwriter or not.

I’d say that 99.99% of the writers out there either give you the same old thing or a slightly different version of the same old thing. And if you’re a great writer, you may be able to get away with that. But to really get noticed, especially if you’re not connected, turning a tired “been there done that” premise or genre on its head is the fastest way to rise above everyone else.  I’ve read a million procedurals. I can usually tell you who the killer is by page 30 and I know every beat you’re going to hit ten pages before you hit it. But if you give me a script where the procedural is done backwards?? I’m lost. I have no frame of reference. Every scene I read is going to feel like I’m reading something for the first time. That’s what Memento did. That’s why Christopher Nolan was noticed. That’s why he was able to go on and make Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception. Had he merely told a straight forward procedural-revenge film with a few stylistic flourishes, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be talking about him right now.

I think another thing that separates Nolan from his competitors though, is that he wasn’t satisfied with the concept alone. He really sat down and thought about it. He tried to figure out what living a life like this would really be like. The result of that research can be seen in numerous little moments. In bed, when Leonard’s sitting there, thinking about how his situation makes it impossible for him to ever get past the grieving process, because his last memory is and will always be of his wife dying. I mean that’s some hardcore deep shit there.

Or the fact that it doesn’t matter if he ever gets revenge or not, since it will be impossible for him to remember it.

Another great flourish are the scenes in between the scenes. Whenever you do something different, you’re forced to make up some new rules because there’s no blueprint to draw upon. Nolan adds these black and white hotel scenes between the main narrative because he knows jumping backwards directly after a scene would be too jarring. This creates a rhythm by which the backwards storyline actually feels smooth and digestible. A unique challenge.  A unique solution.

But what I love about Nolan is that he doesn’t just rest on this device. He knows that if we’re jumping back into this room a dozen times during the film and nothing’s really happening, we’re going to get bored. So he uses the black and white scenes to tell the story of Sammy Jenkins, a man who had the same brain condition Leonard did. This way, when we get to these scenes, we’re not just waiting for them to end, we’re eager to find out what’s happening in Sammy Jenkins’ storyline. On top of that, he’s also using these scenes to give the audience exposition on Leonard’s complicated condition. In retrospect, it’s surprising how cleverly he slips this exposition in, considering how sloppily he adds it five films later, in Inception.

Not to be lost in all this are some of the simpler touches Nolan made that dramatically affected the script, such as making sure Leonard was a sympathetic character. Having this disability makes him an underdog, and the audience always ALWAYS loves an underdog! When you tack onto this that he’s avenging the rape-murder of his wife, I mean who’s not going to root for this guy?

My only real problem with Memento is that the ending is still confusing to me (spoilers). I love what Nolan is going for here with Teddy using Leonard to kill in multiple towns to make money, but I’m not sure it makes sense when you really start to think about it. It seems like Teddy’s only use for Leonard is to kill the drug dealers so he never actually murders anyone. That way if they get caught, it’s Leonard who’s the murderer, not him. But I think it would be pretty clear in court that he was tricking Leonard into performing the murders, making him a murderer as well. So if he’s a murderer anyway, why not just perform the murders himself?

Also, the way that the black and white storyline turns into the main storyline at the end so that we’re now right back at the beginning of the movie (or the end) definitely hurts my brain whenever I think about it. Even now, as I try to lock down the time frame, I can’t quite do it, and that makes me feel like I missed something.

But hey, that’s what’s makes this writer-director so popular. He likes to make you think. And this is his most thoughtful film. Memento is different and challenging and fun. A great film that every screenwriter should watch.

Script link: Memento

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Having someone take advantage of your character creates sympathy for your character. Nobody likes to see anyone get taken advantage of. It’s sort of the adult version of bullying. And whenever we see our hero get bullied, we develop a bond with them.  We get a feeling of, “We’re in this together now.”  Now lots of people take advantage of Leonard in this movie, but the most obvious is Carrie-Anne Moss. Her scene where she pretends to have just been beaten up by her drug dealer to take advantage of Leonard’s condition is easily one of the most memorable scenes from any movie that year. Not coincidentally, it’s the moment where we connect with Leonard the most.

This is Nolan Theme Week, where we’ll be breaking down Christopher Nolan’s five most popular writing-directing efforts in hopes of learning something about how he crafts a story.  Monday Roger reviewed The Dark Knight.  Yesterday I took on Batman Begins.  Today, I review The Prestige.

Genre: Period/Drama/Supernatural
Premise: Two obsessed magicians engage in a dangerous rivalry.
About: The Prestige was Christopher Nolan’s fifth film and fourth writing-directing effort. It was the follow-up to his first bonafied hit, Batman Begins. On the structure of The Prestige, Nolan said, “It was quite challenging to find the right structure and it took a lot of time. We really spent years working on the script. It required interlocking framing devices and interlocking voiceovers, combined with the notion of structuring using the three act structure of the trick. It took a long time, the key being the need to express multiple points of view purposefully and clearly. It was a difficult script to write.”
Writers: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan (based on the book by Christopher Priest).
Details: 128 pages

I’m going to make a pretty outrageous statement here but hey, what’s a Theme Week without a controversial statement or two? I think that if you reversed the releases of The Prestige and Inception, that you would also exchange the box office takes of each film. In other words, if The Prestige had been released this summer, it would’ve made 300 million dollars, with Inception making 53 million back in 2006.

Now part of that has to do with Nolan reaching the apex of his popularity and talent in 2010, with his fans fervent anticipation for his follow-up to The Dark Knight, and a studio willing to back anything he came up with every resource they had. But it also has to do with the fact that The Prestige is the best movie Nolan’s ever made, and I think it’s the best he’s ever made by far.

The story follows two magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) who start out as partners, but after Borden accidentally kills Angier’s wife during a trick, they separate and become rivals.

Angier, a great showman with a lack of ingenuity, becomes increasingly obsessed with whether Borden, an ingenious magician with a lack of showmanship, killed his wife or not. He begins stalking Borden’s shows, looking for ways to trip him up. Borden follows suit, doing the same to Angier.

The story hits its stride when Borden creates one of the greatest tricks in the world, “The Transporting Man,” in which he’s able to transport himself from one side of the stage to the other. The trick stumps Angier, resulting in him going to the ends of the earth to match the trick, and ultimately top it.

The greatest thing about The Prestige, for me, is that the premise – two dangerously obsessed magicians trying to outdo one another– gives you exactly what you’re hoping for. One of the biggest problems I run into when I read amateur screenplays is an inability to deliver on the concept. Most writers can mine a high concept premise through one act, but almost invariably run out of ideas and simply draw upon previous movies and TV shows to finish the final two.

Nolan does not have that problem here.

As every good writer knows, the concept opens the story. It’s what hooks the readers. But if you want them to stay around, you have to create fascinating characters. That middle act is your character’s main stage.  It’s when the concept exits left and they take over the play.  If you don’t have your characters worked out, if they’re not deep and complex and interesting, your script will end up like the amateur ones I mentioned above.

Borden and Angier are the epitome of this complexity.  Each one has reversals and surprises and secrets and grow and regress and change and have so many sides to them that we don’t even remember what the concept to the film was.  We’re just engaged in these two battling each other.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a movie where a writer pushes his characters as far to the extreme as Nolan does these two. It’s really great character work.

Just like he did with Batman (and in a theme I’ll be pointing out all week), Nolan once again starts his film with a tapestry of cross-cutting storylines that confuse the audience, which, as we discussed yesterday, is a unique way to get them to pay attention.

The first is a court case in which the only thing we know is that Borden is on trial for killing someone. The second is a limping Angier travelling to a mysterious mansion in the woods. And the third is both Borden and Angier working together as young magicians.

It’s almost uncanny how similar the set ups are between this and Batman Begins. Indeed it speaks to a larger theme in Nolan’s work. I think one of the reasons he likes to confuse the audience and pack so much plot into his movies is so that you’ll come back again. He knows that if you don’t catch it all the first time out, you’re going to want to see it again. This is by no means a radical concept, but I don’t think I know a filmmaker who covets it as aggressively as Nolan. And hey, it’s working.  You don’t get to 1.8 billion on your last two films if people are only going to see them once.

What I think sets The Prestige above the rest of his work, however, is the attention he gives to his main character’s fatal flaws. Borden’s flaw is that he puts magic above everything else in his life, even his own wife and kid. Whenever you give a character a “fatal” flaw like this, you want to create a scenario in which they either overcome the flaw and reap the benefits, or refuse to change and suffer the consequences. Borden has that opportunity. (spoilers) He can give up his best trick, finally putting life above his magic, or he can continue to keep it a secret. He chooses to keep the secret and suffers the consequences. Death.

Angier’s flaw, on the other hand, is that he won’t get dirty. The reason Borden is a better magician than him is because he’s willing to do anything for the trick, a talent Angier does not have. Later, Angier is given a choice, continue with what he has and be a marginal but ultimately empty success, or “get dirty” with the most dangerous trick ever performed. He “overcomes” his flaw by choosing to perform the trick.

What makes Angier’s character exploration so interesting, however, is that normally when someone “overcomes” their flaw, they find happiness. When Luke finally believes in himself, he’s able to destroy the Death Star. When Shrek finally opens himself up to others, he finds friendship and love. But what’s unique here is that Angier’s gain after overcoming his flaw is a false one. He finds happiness, but the consequences of that happiness outweigh the happiness itself.

Like I always say, how compelling your character is rises in direct proportion with how difficult you make their choices. (spoilers) Angier is faced with the ultimate choice – a choice that will determine how much he cares about his job – Is he willing to die for it? Not once but every single day? A character that’s faced with that choice, who ultimately chooses to die, is infinitely more interesting than a character who’s never been presented with that choice at all. That’s why fatal flaws are so important for characters. If you don’t know what their flaw is, you don’t know what kind of choice to present them with later in the story.

There’s a small segment in The Prestige, after Scarlett Johansen’s character has joined Borden, where the script gets repetitive. Again, at 130 minutes, Nolan is going with a screenplay that’s 10-15 minutes too long – and this portion is exactly why it feels that way. But outside of that small hiccup, this is a really great movie, one that if you haven’t checked out, you definitely should.

Script link: The Prestige

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I think the opening of The Prestige is better than the opening of Batman Begins and here’s why. When Nolan was cross-cutting between the three storylines in Batman begins, he doesn’t set up a mystery, doesn’t insert a clear question in the audience’s mind that they want answered. Without that question, the cutting feels random (which is why I referred to it as random yesterday). But if a mystery is presented, the audience is then looking for an answer, and that allows them to participate in the surrounding scenes. So in The Prestige, we get a court scene where Borden is being accused of murder. The mystery is, who did he kill? When we’re watching the early scenes where Borden and Angier are working together now, they take on a heightened level of suspense. We know someone gets murdered. But who? When? We get to participate in that mystery.  As a result the opening is still scattershot, but executed in a much more skillful way than in Batman.
*

This is Nolan Theme Week, where we’ll be breaking down Christopher Nolan’s five most popular writing-directing efforts in hopes of learning something about how he crafts a story.  Yesterday Roger reviewed The Dark Knight.  Today, I review its prequel, Batman Begins. 

Genre: Crime/Superhero
Premise: Tiring of the way his city has catered to crime, billionaire Bruce Wayne creates a super-hero-like persona to fight crime himself.
About: This is the first film in the rebooted Batman Franchise for Warner Brothers. Christopher Nolan was a trendy but unproven choice as writer-director. His dark and realistic approach to the material made the film a solid success, and changed the way the entire industry approached their superhero franchises.
Writers: David Goyer & Christopher Nolan

I’m not a huge Comic Book Guy. Blah blah blah and everything that goes with that. But I do enjoy the spectacle of Hollywood popping off on all cylinders, watching millions of dollars go into a single shot, seeing how directors handle the challenge of creating a film that the entire company’s fiscal year is depending on. Batman movies are Warner Brothers’ Super Bowl, just like Spider-Man is Sony’s Super Bowl and James Bond is MGM’s Super Bowl. Seeing how those pressures play into the finished product, particularly the writing, is fascinating to me, as usually you have so many people with so much on the line that everyone’s desperate to get “their thing” into the final film, regardless of whether it’s right for the screenplay or not.

Batman Begins was Nolan’s first foray into the comic book universe, and believe it or not, there were plenty of people who wondered if he could handle the load. His big achievement at the time was a film called Memento, a surprise hit on the indie circuit, but far from mainstream stuff. This was followed up by Insomnia, a misdirected mess of a film that had Al Pacino struggling through endless days searching for what I now realize was a story. He never found it.

Nolan learned his lesson after that, figuring that if he was going to fully realize his vision, he would need to direct AND write his films. Insomnia remains the only film Nolan’s directed that he didn’t write.

Enter Warner Brothers, who recognized that despite Insomnia’s ironic ability to have the exact opposite effect of its title on the audience, Nolan was doing something different, enough so to entrust him with their cherished franchise reboot. He wanted to be edgier, darker, and approach the superhero film in a way it had never been done before on this level – realistically. Nolan was given an invitation to the biggest ball in town. The question was, what would he do with it?

Because everyone’s seen Batman Begins already, I’ll keep the synopsis short. The film is an origin story that follows billionaire Bruce Wayne being exiled from America (hmm, sound familiar?) where he travels the world, learning the ways of criminals everywhere. Eventually he’s invited into and taught how to be a warrior by a man who works for a shadowy organization.

When he comes back to his crime-ridden town, Gotham, he decides to use his skills to create an alternate persona, known as Batman, to take down the criminals Gotham’s corrupt police force refuses to. Eventually a crazy psychiatrist known as The Scarecrow emerges onto the scene, threatening to poison the city’s water supply, turn everyone crazy, in hopes that they’ll all kill each other.

The first thing I was looking for when I started this week was a connection. All five of the films we’re reviewing were successful. Was there a story element or a device that could be found in all of them? Might that device be a key to why his movies were so successful? Or, on a slightly less ambitious note, help the rest of us become better writers?

It didn’t take long to find one.

Nolan likes to deliberately confuse his audiences at the beginning of his movies. Here, we’re actually following three separate storylines in completely random order. The first is the most confusing, with Bruce Wayne in some sort of foreign prison. What is he doing here? Why is Batman in a foreign prison? And who is this mysterious man who wants to recruit him?

This is juxtaposed against the most familiar element of Bruce Wayne’s life, watching his parents get shot and killed in an alley.

We’re juxtaposing those against a third storyline, which is located between the first two, with Bruce just out of college, confused about his future, and dealing with the possibility of his parents’ killer about to be set free.

For someone like me, who’s never read a Batman comic book, this is a ton of information to process, and the fact that it’s coming at me so haphazardly forces me to pay attention out of fear I’ll be left behind.

In that sense, it’s a trick, a device. By forcing us, the viewer, to stay on our toes, to watch closely so we don’t miss anything, we’re actively engaged in the story. We’re participating in it instead of having it spoonfed to us. Because you eventually piece it all together yourself, you feel like you’ve earned the information. This form of accomplishment, feeling like you’ve solved a puzzle, feels good as a viewer, and because you feel good, you’re eager to keep participating.

Strangely, this flies in the face of conventional screenwriting practices. Usually, when you write a first act, you want to be clear. If you’re too confusing, readers with short attention spans (aka all of them) start to check out. That’s not to say you can’t be mysterious, but cutting between three separate storylines in random order is usually not an enjoyable reading experience.

Of course in this case, Nolan does benefit from the audience’s familiarity with the material. We’re not totally in the dark because everyone knows the basics of Batman. However, I found that Nolan does this regardless of the material he’s writing, which you can see in The Dark Knight, Memento, The Prestige, and Inception.

Despite this clever approach to opening a film, Batman Begins suffers from some story mechanics that I think we can all agree are lacking, particularly the “Origin Story Blues.”

The choice to spend the first half of the movie cutting between three different timelines, the cumination of which results in Bruce Wayne creating Batman, leaves little time to actually develop a plot when that sequence climaxes.

Indeed, The Scarecrow shows up almost incidentally and his inclusion in the story is as artificial as the original Batman’s set pieces. Remember, in most movies, we get about a page of backstory on our main character. Everything else we learn about him is shown through action (Indiana Jones runs into an ancient cave to steal a gold monkey – we know everything about that character from that 7 minute sequence).  So to take 60 full minutes of a movie to develop a backstory and motivation for a main character just isn’t done anywhere else in movies.

And because it isn’t, when The Scarecrow pops up and starts yammering on about making everyone crazy so they’ll all kill each other, we’re scratching our heads going, “Wait a minute, huh?”

When you think about it, Batman Begins is two completely independent movies. The first 1 hour movie is Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. The second 1 hour movie is Batman trying to take down Scarecrow and save the city. The script tries to tie these two movies together, with a late twist of Ra’s Al Ghul still being alive, but it’s a bit of a desperate move, as the script would’ve worked just fine if it was The Scarecrow driving the train into the Wayne Building and not Ra’s.

I’m not saying the second half of the script is bad. It’s just so rushed that it doesn’t have time to breathe, to be believable. Information’s being thrown at us machine-gun style and we’re having to buy it at face value. A secret weapon water ionizer floating off the coast? Uh, okay. It needs to be delivered into the Wayne Building cause then and only then can it spread to the whole city? Uh, okay. The Scarecrow wants the city to destroy itself because…why again?

These are the kind of subtle plot problems that need time to be massaged into the plot, and the origin story taking up a full half of the movie just doesn’t allow that. I think in its current form it barely works, but there’s no doubt it could’ve been smoother.

Another thing I noticed about Nolan’s films is Nolan’s love for putting two characters in a scene and just having them talk about the theme of the movie for 20 minutes (or what seems like 20 minutes). He’s even more guilty of this in The Dark Knight, which is a full half hour longer for possibly this reason, but even here Nolan seems to create scenes for no other story purpose than to have his characters discuss theme. Take the scene where, just out of college, Bruce heads to Falcone’s bar and talks to him about crime. Or any scene with him and Rachel. These Bruce-Rachel scenes are particularly bizarre as Nolan refuses to touch on any relationship-related or emotional issues whatsoever between them, preferring instead to have each ricochet thematic opinions off one another until your head gets dizzy.

I think using these scenes to attack the theme and not the interpersonal relationships is a big reason why Nolan is accused of creating such cold emotionless films. Either way, Nolan’s obsession with theme is one to note. If one of the Top 3 filmmakers in the world is obsessed with theme in his screenplays, chances are you should be too.

Overall, watching this was a bit of revelation. I hadn’t seen it in a long time and to be honest, I never really gave it much credit. Part of that was due to me checking out once things got too complicated. While it’s safe to say Nolan packs more story into his stories than he probably should, if you commit to the full ride, it’s a pretty rich experience.

Batman Begins is a flawed but fun film.

Script link: Batman Begins (Older Goyer draft)

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I’m still nervous about endorsing this confusing cross-cutting setup to open a script. It works for Nolan, so it can’t be discounted, but remember, Nolan’s boss when he’s writing is himself. There aren’t too many scenarios where you know your boss is going to understand exactly what you’re doing 100% of time. With Nolan being the director, this is one of those scenarios. So when you think about it, Nolan is able to get away with his confusing cross-cutting openings in part because there’s no one there to challenge him on them. I’d say it’s okay to use Nolan’s method of challenging the reader early on, but don’t go overboard with it. There’s a fine line between complex and complicated.
*

It’s Nolan Theme Week here at Scriptshadow and while I know some of you will bicker about the interruption of our stream of unproduced screenplay reviews, if you’re a Nolan fan, you should enjoy the change of pace.  You see, I’ve been wanting to break down Christopher Nolan’s films for awhile now.  The man is the only director working who can consistently offer Hollywood thrills in a cerebral package.  His unique brand of high-brow/high-concept entertainment has resulted in an unheard of 1.8 billion dollar haul for his last two films.  Clearly, this man is doing something right.  So I wanted to take a deeper look into his movies, specifically the story-structure, cast of characters, and narrative choices, and see if we can’t discover what Nolan is doing on the writing end that makes these films so popular, and in turn use that knowledge to improve our own writing.

Now these are script-as-film reviews.  That means we’ll be addressing only the story/screenplay elements that can be seen onscreen, not the words on the page.  If you have a fundamental problem with this, feel free to e-mail me and we can discuss it.  But there will be no debate about it in the comments section. 

I have to say I’m happy Roger chose to review The Dark Knight.  I have watched this movie three times now and I’m still not entirely sure what happens.  I’d probably need 5000 words to bring all my thoughts together, and even then they’d be an in-cohesive mess.  But watching five Nolan films back to back last week, I realized that that’s probably exactly what Nolan wants, and one of the keys to his success.  Shit, I’m getting ahead of myself.  It’s not my turn yet.  Here’s Roger with his review of The Dark Knight!  

About: Sequel to Warner Bros. and Nolan’s Batman Begins. Starred Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, and Heath Ledger and set numerous box office records and received 8 Academy Award Nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Ledger’s performance.

So, in that spirit, when Carson told me that we would be reviewing Christopher Nolan movies, I thought, on my end at least, the only thing that wouldn’t make you readers groan would be to deconstruct The Dark Knight to the best of my abilities (without getting too long-winded, because, trust me, I could go on forever about this script as Pure Plot Monstrosity).