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Inception
Inception opens with a shot of the ocean, a traditional symbol of the subconscious and death in English literature. Christopher Nolan has used this symbol similarly in many films, such as Batman where the dark waters of the subconscious lurk in the caverns below the city, but there is no need to leap to them…
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Skyfall
Skyfall is a critique of authoritarian systems of government and the violence unleashed by the inevitable cyclical struggles to control them. This is the reason the film starts with a succession crisis at MI6. And it is the reason Sam Mendes goes so far as to depict the spy organization itself as the essential villain…
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Pan’s Labyrinth
Pan’s Labyrinth is a fairy tale about the importance of moral disobedience: for refusing to harm her brother, even at the cost of her own life, Ofelia is resurrected before a heavenly Trinity with the rose of eternal life imprinted on her shirt.[1] By setting Ofelia’s tasks against the coming of the full moon (associated…
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Fury Road
“I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead, hunted by scavangers, haunted by those I could not protect. So I exist in this Wasteland.” — Mad Max “Where must we go, we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?” — Epilogue George Miller opens and closes Fury…
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Westworld
Westworld is the place where mankind will transcend his biological programming and become divine. Jonathan Nolan tells us this mythologically through the park’s association with Delos (the Greek island where the Gods Artemis and Apollo were born and death was defeated) as well as through his depiction of the hosts as assembly-line versions of Virtruvian…
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Captain America: Civil War
Civil War starts with the creation of the “Winter Soldier”, a figure whose personal and political history establishes him as a negative doppleganger for Captain America. Significantly, it is political ideology (the “red book”) that makes this hero a villain, overcoming his rationality, eradicating his individuality and transforming him into a willing tool of the…
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Interstellar
As in the Batman trilogy, Nolan’s structuring metaphor in Interstellar is Eden imagery. The film starts with Cooper falling out of the sky, and transitions to shots of dusty corn fields that suggest a metaphorical fallen garden, with dust literally burying the farm in death imagery (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”). Themes of destruction…
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The Dark Knight Rises
Opening with a shot of ice cracking in the shape of a bat symbol, Nolan’s latest film starts with a metaphor it returns to time and again: that of the dangerous waters below consuming those who fall into them. The device in use here is the literary association between water and the subconscious, a technique…