Shivaay’s note on Oppenheimer and Nolan’s return to character oriented cinema

Oppenheimer and Nolan’s return to character oriented cinema

As I watched (and rewatched) the teaser of Nolan’s next Oppenheimer, one cannot but help noticing the master film maker’s return to character oriented cinema, a brand of story telling that has made him one of the finest film makers of contemporary times. Not that films like Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet were mediocre by any yardstick (such is the genius of Nolan that even his underwhelming films are perhaps few of the decade’s best!) but the entire idea of building a plot around the central protagonist(s) is something Nolan seemed to have forsaken in exchange for larger than life concepts where characters fitted in as nothing more than pawns.

Considering films like Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception, these are stories weaved around a set of characters and their obsessions and eccentricities that make the central characters so intriguing and fascinating that as a viewer one cannot help but stay invested in their (mis)adventures. Back home when we refer to stuff like the commercial masala cinema, they tend to follow the same template of a larger than life protagonist facing off against an equally larger than life & menacing adversary (from the times of Sholay and Deewaar right until stuff like War, RRR and KGF).

With films like The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet, Nolan the film maker seemed to have shortchanged his characters for a conceptual brand of story telling where the entire hypothesis appears to be the main protagonist with the characters fitting in like puppets as per the maker’s vision & convenience (think films like 83, Pink and Zindagi na milegi dobara back home). With Oppenheimer being a passive biopic of Robert J Oppenheimer the physicist, we can hope to witness the character building exercise from Nolan yet again (perhaps for the first time since Cobb’s Inception) which perhaps makes this film as one of the most anticipated of 2023. The fact that the leading man is being portrayed by the versatile Cillian Murphy only makes it better.