Nolan’s Dark Knight Had a Major Downside That Turned Into a Huge Trend 16 Years Later
Seems like the proclaimed director did change the game rules.
Summary:
- Christopher Nolan became a proclaimed director long before he released last year’s Oppenheimer — the director’s epic trilogy The Dark Knight got to be a highlight of his career and even determined some specific cinematic trend.
- In one of his interviews Bruce Timm, an animator who worked on multiple Batman ’s projects, pointed out to a certain downside that The Dark Knight had thus implying that there was Nolan’s mistake there.
- Despite such an opinion, the so-called mistake seems to have inspired many other filmmakers to do the same, with Todd Phillips being one of them lately.
Christopher Nolan may have swept the latest awards season with his epic drama Oppenheimer for which he finally got that long-awaited Oscar for Best Director, but it’s not yet Oppenheimer that became his true cinematic legacy. Having directed The Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan thus created one of the best film adaptations for Batman’s story.
And though he surely had an absolutely different (thus risky) and much more sinister perspective of the superhero narrative, it nonetheless helped him create some sort of trend that other famous directors are keeping up with now.
However groundbreaking Nolan’s work on The Dark Knight would seem to be, not everyone thinks that the director chose the right way.
Bruce Timm, famous for his numerous Batman-related projects like Batman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Batman Beyond and others, in one of his interviews confessed that he had seen one big flaw that Nolan’s feature film had, despite the fact that Timm generally loved the movie.
According to the animator, Christopher Nolan may have made a big mistake by turning the Batman’s story into a narrative for grown-up people, but not for the kids that were initially the target audience for all the superhero franchises.
As The Dark Knight’s characters appeared to be complex and more fulfilled in their life philosophy, the trilogy became just too complicated for the younger audience.
Though it may seem like a reasonable point as the superhero stories indeed have a very specific and even limited audience, Christopher Nolan has apparently brought to the cinematic world some other vision of such narratives — and such a vision was borrowed by other filmmakers who turned it into a full critically acclaimed trend.
Even remembering Todd Phillips’s Joker in this case will be enough. Coming from the same universe as Batman, Joker also used to be a character that would appear in films or series that would catch only kids’ interest — but not anymore.
As the director elaborated a complex portrait of Joker’s personality, he brought to the light the character’s dark side that exposed all his personal traumas to the viewers. And it does sound like something that only grown-ups will comprehend.
As Todd Phillips’s case clearly shows, the seemingly childish story can also be transformed into something totally different and even frightening, but simultaneously revealing in terms of human flaws — and Christopher Nolan was the one who started it after all.
Source: Think McFly Think