Hey, but before you go calling Nolan, Spielberg, don’t forget “The Prestige” and “Memento” I didn’t see any CG Trex in either of those, and are we really going to let afronsky off the hook for “the fountain?”

but yes, black swan looks dam good, the cast is amazing at the very, very least.

Nolan is I think is more Spielberg, whereas Darren is more Kubrick…, or maybe Nolan is more Mann, and Aronofsky is more…Aronofsky…All I know is that every time I hear the soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream, I want to vomit…

Inception brings a fresh original vision and style to this, but what I appreciated especially was the structure and rules Nolan imposed on this theme, particularly with the concept of time and consciousness. A few minutes equals an hour in the first level, then a week in the next, years in the third level, decades in limbo…This is not a new idea, the most recent example I can think of is Wiley Wiggins (how I love this name) and his hour and a half long journey that was compressed into a single moment before he gets hit by a car (Waking Life)–the idea that we could be on our deathbed right now, dreaming our entire “lives” within the span of a moment before our death.

Nolan presents a dreamworld where there are absolutes–where time elongation and compression can readily be calculated, where “real” space and gravity matter and where roles are easily defined and separated as “the dreamer” creating the architecture and the “projections” as human representations. Nolan gets away with all this by utilizing the device of new future technology–shared dreaming–that can explain all these absolutes for what would only realistically in the present be more akin to chaos, randomness, and (save lucid dreaming) passivity that more accurately describe a dream-state.

This is Nolan’s Big Metaphor for Films and Storytelling and his proficiency as a Sci-Fi-but-seemingly-not-Sci-Fi Director.

Directors take the chaos, the passivity, and illogical reality that we live in and create a narrative, an alternate reality on celluloid. On Film, an entire lifetime is represented in 2 hours. This is the logic of the Director–the logic that governs Inception’s dream “levels” and is explained as future technology.

Nolan does the same thing in the Prestige, by not even exploring the logic or plausibility of his “Sci-Fi” devices, but instead uses them to create strange, inventive narratives.

That is one of Nolan’s marks as a great director; he takes impossible notions (human duplication, Dream-sharing) and creates his reality.

He is playing God as a Director, and presenting his own dimension where things are slightly off from our world based on deliberate, thoughtful changes. In a way, narrative films are all like this, and, thus, are like one of the many dimensions in a many-worlds quantum theory. As viewers, we escape or confront or participate in these different worlds. Nolan slyly injects this idea into his films, and so may be trying to concoct his own way of performing inception.