Christopher Nolan has slowly become mainstream Hollywood’s main director, trusted with massive budgets and wholly original concepts. It might be hard to recall some of his earliest work, like Insomnia with Al Pacino and Robin Williams, but the middle of his filmography is where he began to take on the style and scale we associate with him today. Inception and Interstellar represent a turning point in Nolan’s career, where his grandiosity or concept officially outweighed his penchant for smaller stories like Memento or The Prestige. They also represent Nolan’s directing abilities and what can happen when he exceeds them.
Inception is arguably the high point of Nolan’s concept movies. It balances high-thinking sci-fi with relatable character motivations and a sense of intrigue. Interstellar, however, is the first time Nolan took one step too far. Interstellar loses grasp of its galaxy-stretching themes of love and family, wrapped up in layers of retention Nolan hadn’t stretched to before. Christopher Nolan has never been a character-led director, but both films show a distinct course correction that has stayed with him for Tenet and his most recent Oppenheimer.
Inception and Interstellar sit on either side on a precarious pendulum, so finely balanced that one small step for man is all it takes to throw it off irrevocably. Nolan must be applauded for working comfortably in a space nobody else is today, but he isn’t untouchable. Then again, both Inception and Interstellar offer Nolan’s most intriguing puzzles, which ultimately work for different reasons.
‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar’ are Both ‘Humanist’ Sci-Fi

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Release Date

July 16, 2010

Runtime

148 minutes

Cast

Leonardo DiCaprio
, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
, Elliot Page
, Tom Hardy
, Ken Watanabe
, Dileep Rao
, Cillian Murphy
, Tom Berenger
, Marion Cotillard
, Pete Postlethwaite
, Michael Caine
, Lukas Haas
, Tai-Li Lee
, Claire Geare
, Magnus Nolan
, Taylor Geare
, Johnathan Geare
, Tohoru Masamune
, Yuji Okumoto
, Earl Cameron
, Ryan Hayward
, Miranda Nolan
, Russ Fega
, Tim Kelleher

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The difference between Inception and Interstellar is how they balance emotion and sci-fi concepts, with the former taking a more delicate approach. Inception’s family stakes are nothing revolutionary but allow the concept of dream heists to take on a human angle, as Interstellar spreads it out across space in a story spanning decades.
Nolan’s earlier movies may work better than his later ones because his concepts can be seen as an external metaphor for what the character is going through. The concept is intrinsic to the motivation, whereas Interstellar’s plot quickly loses itself in broad strokes compared to Inception’s softer sways.
There is an emotional core to Interstellar, but Nolan fails to wrap his massive canvas around the even larger themes he is grappling with. For all of its beauty, Interstellar feels strangely masochistic in its view that we should abandon Earth, preaching about an unending love built in that context. Interstellar is a more ambitious project but does not establish its sci-fi context further than the Michael Caine poetry narration. Inception is similarly expansive but only explores its topic so much, which aligns with how deeply the characters explore their shortcomings. The balance is respected, but in Interstellar, Nolan goes for awe instead of tangible feelings.
‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar’ Bleed into ‘Tenet’ and ‘Oppenheimer’

The shift between these two films has rippled into his subsequent Nolan projects, Tenet and Oppenheimer. Interstellar’s larger stakes are what damaged Tenet’s ambition. There’s a certain joy in the ambiguity, but when dealing with ideas not so far removed from pre-existing sci-fi, there needs to be a stronger logic.
Tenet is largely a mess if you think about it for longer than a few moments, and Interstellar is the movie that took Nolan from human motivation to world motivation. Even when he’s gone larger, like in The Dark Knight Rises, there’s often been that central humanizing pull, but neither Interstellar nor Tenet have that. Sci-fi can be barren and unfamiliar, but Nolan doesn’t have the nuance to pull this off.

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In Oppenheimer, Nolan somewhat falls into the trap of over-complicating things, this time with his editing technique. Inception worked so well because it infused genres like adventure into the predominant sci-fi subtext but didn’t have to over-compensate. As Nolan’s scales have increased, so has his seeming desire to make everything ‘epic’ when he doesn’t have to.
Christopher Nolan Is a Unique Director

Nolan is a special filmmaker who truly offers blockbuster cinema. Inception and Interstellar are arguably the two most interesting films in his library and ultimately achieve different things. Inception is less worried about the concept than it is with how emotion complicates it. Interstellar is less personal, and with this, it is more epic. Just because Nolan is the only one trusted to do these big movies doesn’t mean he’s a master at doing them. Where his strengths lie is misdirection, both emotional and conceptual.

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Inception and Interstellar are crucial to understanding modern blockbuster filmmaking. They offer massive ideas encased in differing levels of emotional consequence and can be used as a benchmark for the closest we have come since Kubrick showed us how to achieve and, in some instances, intentionally avoid emotion in concept movies. Inception and Interstellar are the two projects that sent Nolan into the atmosphere, but his ascent hasn’t been without its faults.
Few directors can reach the modern benchmark Nolan has set. As Inception and Interstellar suggest, emotion is a fine tightrope between sincerity and spectacle, and maybe thrills need to be the only thing getting your attention. Inception and Interstellar are both streaming on Netflix.

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Release Date

November 7, 2014

Runtime

169 Minutes