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Whenever I watch a film directed by John Carney, I'm left with this very unsettling feeling. Watching his films makes me feel like he's never actually met another human being in his life, that his entire knowledge of what people are like comes from watching other people's movies.
This wasn't always true of Christopher Nolan (the performances in Memento are remarkably naturalistic in spite of the contrived plot), but has become the case over time. No one in Inception, Interstellar, Tenet or Oppenheimer talks or acts like a real person (particularly damning in the latter case, given that 95% of the characters are based on real people who actually existed).
The weirdification of Nolan's films has always astounded me. How could someone who started so competently and strongly, and was given so much due to that success, essentially only go downward with regards to his portrayal of human beings on screen? You can even see it as early as The Dark Knight, where things happen for the convenience of the plot, and not because they make sense. Actually, as I detailed in one of my comments, I can forgive that as long as it's effective, and it was. However, by The Dark Knight Rises it really became a mess when you asked even one question about how things worked.
I will slightly disagree, in that a good few of the characters in
InceptionInterstellar feel very real, but it still does have that undercurrent of "Nolan thinks he's deeper than he is". I also, as my OP indicated, have a very strong space/sci-fi bias. Even with that, I think Memento and The Prestige are by far Nolan's best. What a triumph The Prestige is.That and Memento are probably the only films of his I'd put in the W column without major qualifications.
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Oppenheimer was not evenly awful about this, which is the sadder part. A couple of the scientists (and notably Kitty) were fine. Oppenheimer was being portrayed as a weird autist. By far the worst thing about that movie was about how Nolan portrayed his relationship with Tatlock; it was like watching two wooden blocks rubbing together. The infamous Bhagavad Gita line is somehow... a seduction tactic? I vaguely remember some backlash over it.
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