A Christopher Nolan Primer

At 40 years old, director Christopher Nolan is something of a wunderkind in the industry. With just seven full-length features under his belt, it's fairly stunning how many of them are among the best and most inventive films of the past decade. His most recent movie, the sci-fi noir thriller Inception has been getting almost universally positive reviews, so it looks like Nolan isn't planning on slowing down any time soon. He's got another sequel in his wildly successful reboot of Batman and he's also slated to give the update treatment to the Superman franchise as well. Before diving into Christopher Nolan's world of heroes and the darkest recesses of the human soul, here's a quick jaunt through his body of work.

Christopher Nolan's first big hit was 2000's non-linear detective drama Memento but Nolan first got his feet wet in achronological storytelling with the ultra-low budget Following. The film was made for a paltry $6000 and was a labor of love that took nearly a year to complete. Nolan, just 28 at the time, thrived under these limitations and managed to produce a truly stirring psychological drama. Following finds a young writer played by Jeremy Theobald entangled with an artful burglar named Cobb. The shuffled story reflects the young man's own confusion about what's happening to him and the whole story doesn't become clear until the film's final moments.

Similar things can be said about Memento except that it got away with a $9 million budget. That's still relatively low for a Hollywood picture but it was plenty to get a few popular actors in the cast and a more expansive setting. The story follows Leonard, a man with a severe case of anterograde amnesia which prevents him from developing new long-term memories. His whole life is consumed with finding the man who raped and murdered his wife, a mystery that's as confounded by the horrible people he meets along the way as it is by his memory problems. Memento is two simultaneous films, one moving in chronological order and one in reverse. The movie was such a success that various filmmakers around the world aped the reverse-storytelling method for similarly shocking conclusions.

But Christopher Nolan has always been more than just a clever hand in the editing room. In 2002 he tackled a remake of Erik Skjoldbaerg's Norwegian murder mystery Insomnia. Nolan's version set the story in an Alaskan town under almost 24 hours of daylight and made a few key changes to the plot, but it does retain its core as a story about a crafty killer who takes advantage of the ethically questionable detective on his trail.

While his work in the first half of the decade put Christopher Nolan on the map, it was his adept handling of Batman Begins that made him a superstar auteur. For over a decade the Batman film franchise was associated with the neon-colored, increasingly dire Joel Schumacher films of the 1990's. Nolan's darker, grittier take on the Caped Crusader rescued the series and ushered in a new era of comic book adaptations with serious artistic credibility. A few years later, the sequel The Dark Knight broke box office records with its combined $1 billion take, and with good reason. The Dark Knight is the gold standard for super hero movies and an unsettling examination at how fear drives human behavior.