Entertainment
All 6 Christopher Nolan Epic Movies, Ranked
Though he first got some attention with Following, and then quite a bit more with Memento, Christopher Nolan is best known nowadays for making films on a massive scale. Those two early films of his weren’t really epics, by any means, and neither were Insomnia nor The Prestige, even if they got a bit bigger in scale, and had larger budgets. It wasn’t until Nolan started making some superhero films that he began leaning more towards crafting epics, and it’s that zone he’s generally stayed in for almost two decades now.
The Odyssey is about a month away, at the time of writing, and looks set to continue this trend of making epic movies, what with its runtime that comes in at just eight minutes shy of three hours, and a budget of approximately $250 million used to bring the whole thing to the big screen (hopefully, the biggest screen you can possibly see it on). The only fairly recent movie of Nolan’s that’s not being considered here is Dunkirk, which is almost an epic, but isn’t long enough to count in the traditional sense. It’s under two hours, whereas all the movies here hover around the 2.5-hour mark, and one is even right on three hours. This is a ranking of all Christopher Nolan’s epic movies to date, starting with the flawed yet interesting and ending with a couple of films that are pretty darn close to perfect overall.
6
‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (2012)
Concluding what ended up being a pretty massive blockbuster trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises is certainly flawed, though it would be a stretch to call it an outright terrible comic book/superhero movie. Batman Begins wasn’t quite an epic, while the second movie in the trilogy does count (and will be talked about more later on), but for better or worse, The Dark Knight Rises feels the most in line with what you usually find in the epic genre. It’s the closest to three hours long out of all the Nolan Batman movies, it feels like it juggles the most moving pieces narratively, and it also seems to cover a decently long period of time.
Bane is the main villain here, though there’s also some stuff relating to a past foe of Batman’s that’s a little silly, yet does at least kind of tie the events of Batman Begins to the events of The Dark Knight Rises, with an almost full-circle sort of thing achieved. There are parts of this trilogy-capper that are thrilling and successful at capturing some kind of spectacle, and then there are other sequences that feel hammy and goofy in ways the other two movies in the trilogy mostly avoided. At the end of the day – and at the end of this trilogy – The Dark Knight Rises is a bit messy, and definitely inconsistent, but still has enough to offer, as an epic, to keep it from being outright bad. It’s probably more the case that it’s just disappointing by the rather high standards of Christopher Nolan’s filmography.
5
‘Tenet’ (2020)
There’s also a messiness to Tenet, yet it’s an admirable movie, too. Christopher Nolan clearly had a weird vision here, and a desire to top some of his previous psychological thrillers, action movies, and sci-fi films, doing all that while also making the most spy/espionage-heavy flick he’s done to date. To try to summarize what’s going on here, Tenet is about a man known only as “the protagonist,” and he gets tangled up in a complex plot that involves objects that are able to travel backward in time. In time (ha), it also turns out that people can go backwards, like the objects, and then things get progressively wilder.
It’s always there to be rewatched, if you think it’s the sort of puzzle that might well come a little closer to being solved on repeat viewings, but there’s never any real guarantee of clarity.
Tenet has a lot of fun with set pieces that feature things going backwards and forwards simultaneously, and it’s also not really a movie that cares about whether you’re keeping up and having fun alongside it. You get what you can get out of Tenet, and hopefully, that’s a pretty decent amount. It’s always there to be rewatched, if you think it’s the sort of puzzle that might well come a little closer to being solved on repeat viewings, but there’s never any real guarantee of clarity. It’s a mind-bender, to put it mildly, and comes close to feeling like a parody of a Christopher Nolan movie at times. For the stuff that works, though, and the parts that are thrillingly strange rather than outright confusing (probably not as many parts cause confusion as you might fear), Tenet is still very much worthy of your attention.
4
‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)
Oppenheimer is huge, standing as Christopher Nolan’s longest movie to date, and also being the only one to hit the three-hour mark (even The Odyssey is confirmed to fall a little short of that). That might make Oppenheimer the most traditional epic of Nolan’s, with the content of the film also supporting that idea. It’s got so many different characters, the narrative spans a great deal of time, and Oppenheimer is also attempting to do a lot as a character study and a historical film at the same time. It’s about J. Robert Oppenheimer, and there’s a particular focus on his involvement with developing the first atomic bomb.
This makes Oppenheimer a World War II movie of sorts, but not one with any scenes of combat, since it’s more about making a weapon that’s intended to bring about a close to the war. But… it’s also about the aftermath of making such a weapon, and the consequences that might not have been fully appreciated until it was too late. Oppenheimer jumps around in time a lot, and spends a good deal of its runtime on certain things that happened after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is almost too much movie, but also, so much of this too-much movie is great. It might seem low on this ranking, but it should be stressed that it’s quite a bit better than both The Dark Knight Rises and Tenet.
3
‘Inception’ (2010)
While Oppenheimer might’ve felt the most like a traditional epic, out of any Christopher Nolan movie, Inception probably feels the least like one. Some of that comes down to the runtime, as it’s the only movie in this ranking that’s technically just short of 2.5 hours (by only two minutes, but still). Also, Inception races by in what feels like under two hours, since it is a phenomenally paced movie. You don’t really feel as though it has a runtime that could be considered epic, since everything is very finely crafted, there’s a generous amount of action, and the film never really stops being intriguing and/or surprising.
It is technically a heist movie, albeit in an unusual way, a bit like how Tenet was an unconventional spy movie. Inception has its main characters taking part in a heist that involves infiltrating someone’s subconscious, and there are a few different levels of dreaming that have to be traveled to, to carry out this plan. It’s a film that begins confidently, lays out exposition in an entertaining way, and then delivers some serious action and spectacle in its back half. Inception sees Nolan operating quite perfectly in blockbuster mode, so it also being something of an epic is really just icing on the (very, very layered) cake.
2
‘Interstellar’ (2014)
While it doesn’t span as much time as 2001: A Space Odyssey (which has the room to, since it’s a bit more abstract and mostly has different characters in each of its different segments), Interstellar spans about as much time as you could expect a sci-fi movie to, while focusing mostly on the same characters throughout. Admittedly, that’s partly because Interstellar involves different people experiencing time at a different rate, so maybe it doesn’t span a ton of time, depending on the perspective… but on Earth, decades and decades do pass.
This is a reliable source of drama for the film, and something that gives it a greater emotional punch than most other Christopher Nolan movies. On top of being moving, Interstellar is also spectacular to look at and listen to, all the while having a largely exciting story about going into deep space to ensure humanity can find a planet that’s not Earth to live on into the future. It begins with confidence, ends extremely well, and then, in between, distinguishes itself as one of the finest sci-fi epics of the century so far.
1
‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
You can’t really go wrong with The Dark Knight, since it’s an amazingly well-written comic book movie that does a lot more than just feel like another comic book/superhero movie. It’s the perfect filling between the two pieces of (fairly good quality) bread that are Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises. Within the trilogy, The Dark Knight does the most by way of interesting things, and it also has the most compelling conflict out of any of the three movies, thanks to a perfectly cast Heath Ledger as a particularly engaging version of the Joker.
You can also compare The Dark Knight to Inception in the sense that it’s a long movie, yet it passes by in what feels like a flash, being a movie that never really slows down. You probably knew all that already, because most people seem to love The Dark Knight, and it doesn’t feel controversial to call it pretty much a masterpiece, but there it is anyway; there it is, being said again. It kind of is just that good.
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