Talking Movies

The arrival of Christopher Nolan into the lucrative indie scene happened twenty five years ago.

Based on a story by his then unknown brother Jonathan, Nolan crafted a mind bending thriller from telling his story backwards. At least in the colour sequences. The black and white sequences were more or less linear, dealing with the insurance investigations of Guy Pearce before his traumatic brain injury. Said TBI resulting in a total reset every ten minutes for our hero as his inability to form new short term memories leftbhim navigating a perpetually new world where the line between allies and enemies could shift suddenly, and the only true guide was his orienting tattoos.

Fincher Begins. Ahem. An object lesson in how star power, applied well, can move mountains.

Alien 3 could well have sunk David Fincher’s movie career. An alternative universe has that as his only entry. Instead he returns to commercials, and maybe some HBO gigging work years later. But instead he found Brad Pitt a most game collaborator, a partnership still in operation as we speak. And without Pitt’s flexing of his muscle in his contract we would never have got the searing cry of “What’s in the box?!” Fincher knew what he wanted in the box. One could imagine him giving a variation of Jack Nicholson’s A Few Good Men “Wall” riff on the topic. And so was born with a bitter ending that many copyists omitted in their pastiches the subgenre of the serial killer toying with the cops in the service of thematic carnage.