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.  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.
*

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). 

MODERN FAMILY
Modern Family somehow took a premise that was getting tired fast – the mockumentary sitcom – and made it fresh again, by having the cameras document a family. To be honest, I thought this season’s premiere episode kinda sucked.  It felt like the cast was trying too hard to live up to last season’s buzz. The second episode (The Kiss) was much better, as the actors seemed to find their characters again. This week’s episode, The Earthquake, had Phil locking his wife in the bathroom after an earthquake dislodged a book cabinet that came inches from killing their son. This particular cabinet is a cabinet Phil promised his wife he had fastened to the wall months ago in the off chance that an earthquake should dislodge it and it nearly kill one of their children.  So Phil goes to work securing the cabinet, hopefully before Claire finds her way out of the bathroom.  I would argue that Ty Burrell is the funniest character on TV right now.  I love this show.

THE EVENT
Okay, yes, The Event IS a Lost ripoff.  Impossible to argue that.  But let me say something if I may. This is the best Lost ripoff to hit television since Lost debuted six years ago. There are many reasons why I should hate this show, the biggest being the unoriginal random time bouncing that keeps happening. But here’s the thing that always saves it.  Once we get into the actual scene we’ve time-jumped to, it’s always good.  Every scene in The Event is packed with suspense, mystery, and action, and it’s all non-stop.  Jason Ritter, who should have been an indication to avoid the show, is pretty freaking amazing as the lead character. There hasn’t been a second in the first three episodes where I didn’t believe him.  And that just doesn’t happen to me anymore.  I have to admit also that I’m genuinely interested in who these mysterious visitors are and what their purpose is. I don’t know if this is going to crash and burn a la Heroes or has some Lost-level mythological depth, but I am officially a fan of the show.

OPEN WATER 2
Okay, you’re not allowed to ask me under what circumstances I found myself watching this sequel to the 2003 surprise hit, Open Water. Just know that as soon as I realized the watching was on, I was committed to trashing it for the entirety of its running time.  Indeed, the way this thing starts, with a bunch of douchebag friends going out for a nostalgic booze cruise, I wanted to claw my eyeballs out.  But to my complete surprise, the unique and shockingly simple premise made me reevaluate everything.  Basically these guys head out to the middle of the ocean, jump out to go swimming, and then realize they forgot to place a ladder on the side of the boat!  So they can’t – get – back – up. And the best part? There’s a baby on the boat! I mean come on. You gotta love it. This is cheesy as hell. Silly as hell. Stupid as hell.  The ending is so melodramatic even the titles are rolling their eyes.  But hell if it’s not a fun ride. A great backup plan flick.   

PRESSURE COOKER
If you know me, you know one of my pet peeves is critics’ infatuation with documenteries. You could make a documentary about upholstery and it would get at least an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. Documentaries are fine.  I have no problem with them.  But putting the word “documentary” on your poster shouldn’t ensure a four-star rating.  Unless that documentary is Pressure Cooker.  This totally surprising doc is about a group of inner city kids who take a culinary arts class in hopes of getting a college cooking scholarship. Although the focus is on the tough-as-nails guidance of teacher Wilma Stephensen (who, behind the scenes, terminated the documentary several times for being too intrusive on her class), the breakout star for me was the socially awkward Fatoumata, a recent immigrant from Africa who used to walk 30 miles to and from school every day, and who takes advantage of every oppotuntiy America gives her, foregoing activites such as hanging out with friends and her senior prom so she can perfect her culinary skills, all in hopes of landing that 100 thousand dollar scholarship.  If you’re feeling down and just want to smile, watch this documentary now.  It’s really good.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE
I’m about 150 pages into this right now and let’s just say I’m f’ing disappointed. (spoilers) The second Lisbeth Salander is introduced as having a boob job, a little piece of my dragon tattoo died. There are no circumstnaces under which this character would ever or should ever get a boob job, yet these kind of strange choices are commonplace in this Dragon Tattoo sequel.  Mix in a hurricane (?) a few pointless Salander relationships that go nowhere, and a story that pretends like Salander and Blomqvist never even met each other, and I’m borderline pissed. The only reason I’m still reading is because Dragon Tattoo took 200 pages to start getting good. So I ask you dragon tattoo experts. Is it worth it to keep reading? Or should I move on to another book? The first book is so amazing, I don’t want to spoil it with all this random stupidness.