“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” mutters Eames, played by Tom Hardy, as he defends his dream-infiltrating team from a barrage of gunfire occurring just outside the walls of a warehouse they are safely holed up in. Of course, he uses such a line to present a grenade launcher to stifle the attack, where his companions were using mere machine guns. This moment here foreshadows the next 15 years of Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking. It may seem silly to use such a fleeting moment in a 148-minute film, but allow me to explain.
Inception–a movie, simply put, about a troubled thief tasked with planting an idea in the mind of a CEO using dream-sharing technology–contains all of the building blocks that Nolan has stacked in his last decade and a half of filmmaking. More aptly put, it is the single strongest building block that Nolan constructed, has pulled from, and has experimented with that allowed him the confidence, creativity, and narrative know-how to make movies such as Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), and yes, even Oppenheimer (2023).
You’re probably asking yourself where The Dark Knight Rises is on the above list, the very movie that directly succeeded Inception in 2012. While Inception’s influence is not to be missed, I find it part of a more fascinating conversation regarding Nolan and his work within the comic-book guided studio system–perhaps for another time. Per the motif of Inception, we press on.
While revisiting this understated, unflinching project within Nolan’s filmography, three key identifiers threw themselves at me with nearly the same velocity as the grenade that Eames fires at the subconscious attack team: Time, feeling, and the troubled mind of the troubled man. These three ideas, while not exclusive to Christopher Nolan and his films, are some of the biggest themes that Nolan exacts immense precision in investigating time and time again, in nearly every movie of his that comes after Inception.
Time. Perhaps the most common-man theme of Nolan’s–a theme he can never pull himself away from trying to understand on a deeper, more complex level. A level, you could argue, that emits a special sort of feeling (more on that below). Within Inception, Cobb, played fantastically by Leonardo DiCaprio, is tasked with completing, well, inception; the act of dreaming within a dream in order to plant an idea in someone’s head. The ultimate end goal is to make that idea seem so natural and so real that the subject believes they truly thought it up. In Cobb’s case, the idea would make Robert Fischer, brilliantly portrayed by Cillian Murphy, believe it is his idea not to take over his father’s world-renowned company and instead forge his own path.
Not only is this a classic narrative “working against the clock” move that Nolan employs here, tying Fischer and the inception to the impending alarm of Maurice’s death, but the act of inception itself is built upon the bending of time. A single dream level is 20 times longer than reality (10 hours of dreaming feels like a week), a second-level dream is 400 times, and the third level of dreaming that Cobb and his team must enter is 8000 times longer than reality–10 hours of dreaming is 10 years.
This obsession with time and how to stretch it, preserve it, rewind it, and toy with it has presented itself in every single movie since Inception (again, excluding The Dark Knight Rises). Interstellar–most famously on Miller’s planet where every hour there is seven years on earth; Dunkirk–a narrative that closely mirrors Inception’s skewed timelines in presenting one week on land as the same as one day at sea as the same as one hour in the air; Tenet–a movie that revolves around reversing time and altering its entropy with human force; and Oppenheimer–a story split into two distinct timelines with it’s paralleled narratives.
Nolan is a time guy, simple as that. Always has been (what’s up, Memento?), always will be. Inception just gave him the absolute perfect sandbox to explore how to visually coalesce his passion profoundly.
Nolan offers up his revisitation of such themes on a deeper level with each project since Inception. Returning to an idea, a narrative driving force, isn’t something inherently special. David Lynch does this with the duality of human nature, Denis Villeneuve does this with isolation, and so on, but the way that Nolan revisits one central theme is what remains so fascinating. From Inception, a wholly original idea, all the way to Oppenheimer, an adapted story, Nolan specifically uses the degradation that time causes to the human spirit to give his films depth beyond what we’ve come to expect from even the very best of directors. The forthright commitment to engaging with a resounding idea time and time again, only to let it evolve and grow and mature, from the groundwork laid in Inception, cements Nolan as an auteur of the highest level.
Feeling. Mal (Marion Cotillard), Cobb’s dead wife, who appears in every dream he finds himself in, represents feeling–the inescapable chokehold that emotion has on our every move, even when we aim to dispense with it to achieve greatness. “You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?” Mal whispers to Cobb deep within a morally forsaken dream conversation between the two.
Nolan is unafraid to pit his most confident of ideas; how time’s rigidity never ceases to change who we are and how the changing of who we are is one of, if not the, biggest human experiences, laden with grief, concern, and passion. He sparks this joyous juxtaposition in Inception, targeting how Cobb can’t stop allowing Mal to take over his dream spaces due to his inability to let go of the past; in Interstellar through the outpouring of emotion we see in Cooper in that scene, and most famously, I’d argue, in Tenet: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”
Since Inception, Nolan has perplexed audiences with the continually growing challenge of emotionally identifying with something that is in between the lines of the clear narratives he presents instead of simply understanding the logical framework he has built out in a film. Something that drives some people mad and others to a cinematic catharsis of sorts, the constant confrontation of logic vs. emotion defines Nolan as a filmmaker unafraid to skirt around the sticky subtexts of the human condition.
Finally, the troubled mind of the troubled man. Inception sees Cobb risk life and sanity all for love, to be with his wife and children one more time. Whether that risk pays off at the end is a question that can be debated thoroughly, but the point remains that Cobb exhibits Nolan’s “troubled man with a troubled mind” narrative perfectly.
Torn between the reality he has to accept and a reality of his mind’s creation, Cobb is plagued at his very core. The most important connective tissue that presents itself here with this theme is the idea of responsibility and self-acceptance. Is it all his fault? Every single ounce of it? A question that ripples throughout the most emotional of Nolan’s narratives: Did Cooper’s journey in Interstellar ruin his relationship with his family? Or better yet, himself? Was Oppenheimer’s creation of the atomic bomb a necessary evil that he and he alone could’ve prevented? Or would it have always turned out the way it did, with or without him?
Nolan never shies away from such monstrous quandaries, although he seldom answers them in any of his movies–such questions and lack of answers make his films so rewatchable. New flakes of insight into these tormented leading characters shake loose with every viewing, revealing the sheer genius of Nolan’s investigative nature.
Time. Feeling. The troubled mind of the troubled man. Three sensationally delicious elixirs that Christopher Nolan has added at least a dash, if not a healthy dose of, to all of his movies since Inception’s debut 15 years ago. Three profoundly provocative themes that have ultimately driven Nolan to be the filmmaker that he is today, and will, without question, guide him in his future endeavors of 2026’s The Odyssey.
“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed–fully understood–that sticks; right in there somewhere.” Nolan’s ideas of time, feeling, and the troubled mind of a troubled man have become impossible to eradicate within his own lexicon of storytelling. They’ve stuck right in there somewhere, forever to define and never to disappear from Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker.
Flash forward to today. Nolan is one of the most prominent filmmakers working in Hollywood; a man with a Best Director and Best Picture Academy Award, an “event” director for Warner Bros., a distribution and production company that has quite literally curated their entire 2026 theatrical slate around The Odyssey releasing on July 17, and a filmmaker who truly believes in himself and his ability to continue to add substance to themes and ideas that he’s been investigating for 15 years. All because of Inception.
Editorial Courtesy of Ethan Simmie
Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros.
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