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Comment by dd8601fn | Hacker News Reader

Saying “Nolan was wrong” is begging for a fight.

But his weird sound mixing philosophy (experience over clear dialog / dialog as sound effects) makes me nuts. So fix those too, please.

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My working theory to this point is that he made the movies he had to make then, as he got increasingly successful, he gradually transitioned (back?) to making movies he wanted to make. Which, as it turns out, I'm less enamored with then his post-big break efforts. Oh well.

Yeah I'm pretty sure he has the juice to kinda do whatever he thinks is best.

Nobody can fight me on that because I don't know who Nolan is. Guessing he's a director, but in that case, didn't know he directed Oppenheimer. I'm part of the popcorn reviews, not the tomato ones.

The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.

Yeah. One of the more celebrated filmmakers out there. If you google him you’ll see familiar stuff.

I personally liked Oppenheimer fine as it was (except the crappy explosion), but I can see why others might not.

I also enjoyed that old Paul Newman, John Cusack, etc one that focused less on Oppenheimer. Fat Man and Little Boy.

Hm, Dark Knight is a top one. Interstellar was amazing until the end with the black hole unraveling the plot, but I blocked that out and only remembered the rest until I rewatched recently. Dunkirk was good but kinda slow plot-wise. What I'm getting is his films are exceptional in a lot of ways like audio/visual but don't necessarily have good plots, which idk if that's even his fault. Those didn't have jumpy timelines, though.

Messing with time is certainly a thing he does. Momento, Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Tenet... probably others I wouldn't remember.

Hm yeah, sounds like the majority of his movies do jump around. I don't remember Inception, saw that on release.

Interstellar's plot is about messing with universe time, but the movie isn't jumping around points in story time. There's just the astronaut and Earth storylines with a little crossover, and each mostly moves forwards only. I liked that part a lot actually.

Interestingly, Memento did have a linear time cut included as a bonus on some commercial home video releases.

Memento was his peak and he hit new highs with inception ... its been all downhill after that ...

Memento yes, Inception definitely no. The worst experience I've had in a cinema.

It's been too long since I watched Inception, just for some reason only remember the first half of the movie being good. I was in middle school at the time, so... I'll rewatch it.

There's a lot of problems, but the main one is that it just is a pile of arbitrary rules that all the characters just constantly explain to one another.

Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.

It's kind of a reimagining of Paprika (2006), just dumbed down and with lots of action.

I don't see much similarity with Paprika aside from the idea of sharing dreams

Almost exactly first half of Inception is the setup and worldbuilding before the actual main heist begins. So that could explain why.

There are a lot of movies where the world-building is better than the actual plot. Harry Potter 1 for example. Or TV shows where the pilot and first few episodes have actual plot before it becomes filler.

My argument is that the world being built is uninspiring, and the endless, arbitrary rules of the world are communicated in clumsy ways.

> The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.

This honestly reads like you don't watch a lot of movies, which is fine! The audio was really bad, which makes it nearly impossible to follow without subtitles. But with subtitles, this film is very middle of the road in terms of timeline ambiguity. I also don't think an ambiguous timeline is bad, if it recontextualizes a scene.

I mean in that Einstein scene, they are cutting footage of RDJ telling Oppenheimer he's a patriot who ran the Manhattan project with footage of him as a bumbling student people made fun of. That was definitely not a "big plot twist," they are explicitly saying it was after the war, even if it was momentarily confusing because so much is going on. I thought it was a pretty rewarding film to pay attention to.

There weren't subtitles in the theater, and that's supposedly the way the movie was meant to be watched, so :/ I could actually tell what was going on, it was just annoying and didn't add anything. I've watched plenty of movies, but almost all mainstream (just no Marvel).

The twist I'm referring to is Lewis Strauss overhearing the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein at the beginning, which at the end they clarify actually happened later in the timeline.

IMO the jumbled time gimmick only gets worse when you watch more movies. It was an interesting novelty in Memento (and fit thematically) but gets old pretty quick. Most uses are just a cheap tactic to hide an uninteresting plot.

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