Coming Around Again started as an occasional series in which Nick Rogers revisited films from at least five years ago that he reviled or which perhaps never quite clicked for him as they did most everyone else. But he didn’t write anything for that series in 2025. So, in the second-chance spirit of the series, and his own masochistic inclination to see through something he spun up, Nick is making it a monthly thing … at least for 2026. Did Nick have a bad day when he saw these films? Was it not the right time of life for that movie or message? Prescient in a way he couldn’t perceive? Each essay will highlight how Nick felt the first time, why he wanted to revisit it and his contemporary opinion.
What film is coming around again?
Insomnia, a 2002 mystery-thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Hillary Seitz (based on the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name), and starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan, Nicky Katt and Paul Dooley.
Two Los Angeles homicide detectives dogged by internal affairs investigations are dispatched to assist with a murder investigation in a small Alaska town called Nightmute where the sun never sets for the season. When one cop (Pacino) is involved in an accidental shooting witnessed by the killer they’re chasing (Williams), that murderer concocts a scheme to avoid going to prison.
And …
The Prestige, a 2006 science-fiction thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan (based on Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel of the same name), and starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Andy Serkis and David Bowie.
Near the turn of the 20th century, dueling magicians (Jackman and Bale) take to life-altering extremes their competition to create a superior onstage illusion that features teleportation.
How did I feel back then?
Summer 2002 is largely a blur of what I saw where as it was the official onset of my professional life. In a matter of weeks, I interviewed for the position of arts & entertainment reporter at The State Journal-Register, a newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, received a rejection letter and then a surprise offer, and moved to take the job. But Insomnia opened early enough to have seen it at a multiplex in northwest Illinois, where I lived with my parents after college at the time.
Memento remains among the very few films I’ve seen theatrically on consecutive nights. My love for it endures. And having seen the original version of Insomnia, it felt to me that, like so many filmmakers before him, Christopher Nolan was well on his way to being swallowed up for stylish, for-hire retreads of other people’s superior thrillers rather than crafting more of his own creation. It wasn’t bad per se, just baggier than the folds beneath Pacino’s eyes, and its infusion of bankable beats for American audiences made this take longer and goofier rather than better.
By the time The Prestige opened, I was four years into that job in Springfield — regularly driving three hours round-trip to St. Louis for film screenings. While I didn’t go to a screening of The Prestige or review it on its initial run, I did see it in St. Louis during its theatrical release; based on the timing, it was likely a double-feature with a screening of either the original Borat or the 2006 Casino Royale.
By then, Batman Begins had clearly disabused my post-Insomnia feelings about Christopher Nolan, and I was eager to see what sort of chamber-piece / one-for-me project he had put together before the follow-up in his Dark Knight saga. Back then, I put far more stock in the disappointment I felt when figuring out a film’s biggest secrets early on, and I was disappointed to clock what The Prestige counts as its climactic reveal in … well, more or less the first five minutes. While beautiful to behold, the journey toward that reveal did very little for me.
Why did I revisit it now?
A little thing called The Odyssey. But it’s mainly because Insomnia and The Prestige are the only Christopher Nolan films I hadn’t previously grown to like. Following and Tenet remain other comparatively weak works. But the former is a freshman filmmaker finding his way and the latter benefited greatly from a viewing where the sound and vision were not headphones plugged into a boombox below a drive-in screen at the height of the COVID pandemic. I also hadn’t seen either Insomnia or The Prestige since their initial theatrical runs, and in the spirit of some dialogue from Insomnia: “The second you’re about to dismiss something, think about it. Look again.”
How did I feel this time?
Even in the early throes of a new decade and century, the charms of ’90s-era killer thrillers hadn’t waned. In fact, they had become magnets for Oscar-winning performers, and on paper, Insomnia had one of the strongest pulls of all in Pacino, Williams and Swank (along with executive-producer credits for George Clooney and Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh). Pair those actors with an enticing premise and Nolan’s gift for pounding pliable pulp into something with a psychological punch, and Insomnia should’ve been a can’t-miss proposition.
Swank’s role amounts to a suspiciously furrowed brow with a pulse, and the supporting cast is largely window-dressing; the exception is a melancholy moment in which Tierney says “I hope I was nice to him” of a recently murdered man she’d briefly met. Certainly, the finest sustained sequences of Insomnia find Pacino and Williams respectively chipping away at each other as the cop in trouble and the murderer trying to manipulate the situation for both of them. Like a tarantella with choreography accented by slowly revealed switchblades, the two performers dance around what is, ultimately, an exchange of deceptive promises for absolution. Only in these moments does Pacino hint at a deeper, more desperate darkness of his otherwise confident, composed character; lines like “You’re as mysterious to me as a blocked toilet is to a fuckin’ plumber” feel more like Heat’s Vincent Hanna than this weary warrior. And although a more prominent role later that year in One Hour Photo offered a more confident and compelling curdling of Williams’ comic persona into something sinister, Insomnia lets the actor deliver a captivating prelude.
The problem is that Seitz’s screenplay simply treads chilly Alaskan water for too long before these two characters meet, also cluttering the original film’s clarity with an onslaught of monumental improbabilities. Isn’t it common for cops to clear rooms when serving a search warrant at the empty premises of a suspected murderer? Doesn’t it seem unlikely that an author popular enough to be at least a minor local celebrity would have his number in the phone book? For any cop worth a damn, wouldn’t the choice be clear between “corral a perpetrator who has knocked me out before he gets a shotgun and tactical high ground” and “scold my mentor over disappointment in his moral failings”? In a town where the sun doesn’t set for part of the year, wouldn’t an inn ostensibly built to serve uninitiated visitors hang better blackout curtains for its guests? Didn’t even something lightweight like My Cousin Vinny give us more scenes of Joe Pesci acclimating to unwelcome sleep adjustments than we see here from Pacino?
While Seitz miscalculates by letting plot complicate the characterization, an aesthetic embedment in Pacino’s existential disorientation — the most obvious tieback to Christopher Nolan’s credentials carried over Memento — is nearly absent altogether. The closest it comes is inverting typical tropes of nighttime subterfuge in a town where that powerful disinfectant always looms large. But again, that’s an element of the story and not the mood or malaise. Not only is Insomnia generally indistinguishable from similar high-concept thrillers of its time, it’s barely recognizable as anything that interests or intrigues Christopher Nolan.
It’s hardly a coincidence that he never again took on a project he did not at least co-write. Seitz’s approach to convert the core tale of Insomnia to a parable about confronting culpability rather than an exploration of pure corruption is not bad on its face. It’s just a perpetually clumsy botch. Neither does it feel like a coincidence that it was three years before Christopher Nolan even delivered another film, taking time to re-evaluate the course of his career and eventually cementing his status through the one-two punch of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
Now, there was an unrelated Christopher Nolan film between those two juggernauts. But while The Prestige comes out swinging, it’s an undulating bob-and-weave rather than an uppercut.
Yes, the filmmaker’s stock-in-trade of swooning, mammoth visual language feels distinct and direct here, and the sight of Bowie entering the film with charisma and swagger amid a literal lightning field as Nikola Tesla remains one of the director’s most striking images. But that’s the only compelling statement of purpose Christopher Nolan makes here. This should be a madly entertaining meta-movie manifesto of his own consuming passions and perceived purpose as passed through characters who are clearly his proxies. But we’d have to wait for Inception and Interstellar for that to really sing. Instead, The Prestige could be called Interstitial. It plays like affirmations that Christopher Nolan has written on a steamed shower mirror or plastered on Post-Its across the appliances in his apartment. Something like “Batman can giveth but, if I’m not careful, also taketh away” or “When in doubt, deploy a trick.”
Meanwhile, the psychologically thin rigmarole of recriminations between Bale and Jackman’s characters (in any form they take) quickly adopt a frustratingly repetitive and narratively flimsy cadence. Even foes blinded by their disdain for each other could surely see through their nemesis’s flimsy disguises that result in social embarrassment and / or physical maiming. And attempts to conceal the final twist are even more klutzy than I recall. After all, the prestige (or payoff) of a magic trick means nothing if its introductory pledge and improbable turn don’t work.
Upfront narration from Caine insists we’re not really looking to extract the magic from an illusion we see. We want to be fooled. The film also demands that as soon as you give up that secret, it’s worth nothing and impresses no one. And as these magicians often literally give their blood onstage, everyone assumes it’s all part of the trick and couldn’t possibly be a tangible, irreversible sacrifice of a part of yourself. That’s because people hope for accidents and often see them.
None of these big-ticket assertions from The Prestige, or its other presumptions about patrons and producers, are subtle. They don’t need to be. Even in his quietest films, Christopher Nolan is a whammy-bar kind of guy. There are also some occasional, darkly funny elements about a creative man’s struggle to persuasively market himself and his wares, particularly in the increasingly absurd evolution of qualifying adjectives on how these competing magicians advertise their “Transported Man” illusion. The difficulty of doing something people have seen many times and yet with a flourish unlike any before is certainly analogous to Christopher Nolan’s own Batman efforts, as is the idea that he’s now the most marketable director there is. At one point, Jackman’s character laments not getting credit where due if he’s the man stuck in the box and not bowing to the crowd, much as an offscreen filmmaker might, but Nolan long ago escaped that hatch.
However, a bespoke pitch deck for what to expect from 20 more years of Christopher Nolan unleashed from franchise obligation is still just a bespoke pitch deck — a primer and a précis rather than a spirited story. The Prestige flirts with a clash of parental obligation and individual greatness more effectively integrated into Interstellar. Here, it’s a literalized, flimsy notion about being in two places at the same time. Tenet also at least countered its own just-go-with-it silliness of similarly inscrutable sci-fi with eye-popping spectacle. Instead, The Prestige is a strangely non-transporting film about transporting men. It’s a movie obsessed with the corrosive effect of mimetic monotony on creativity that falls prey to that very fate. It’s a clinical calculation crafted with the impenetrable chill some have found in later works. It ends on a solo warble from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke: “There’s no spark, no light in the dark.” Sounds about right.
Was I wrong way back when?
Sadly, no.
Insomnia remains a largely anonymous, middling anomaly for nearly everyone involved. Now able to cast whomever he wants in whatever story he wishes to concoct, Nolan has notably never again turned to Pacino or Swank (although he did pluck Donovan and the late Nicky Katt for respective roles in Tenet and The Dark Knight), and it seems to exist primarily as proof that he could play along with studio executives as a means to the end of bankable Batman films.
At least The Prestige is now more intriguing under the hindsight analysis of all that Christopher Nolan has done since. To paraphrase another of that film’s many insistences: The world is miserable. And if you can fool someone even for a second, you can make them wonder and see something very special. That Christopher Nolan got a lot better at this is the obvious silver lining. But it’s also the double-edged sword here to make this trick go wrong, leaving you to watch something rather carelessly sawed in half for real. Perhaps the most humanizing element of Christopher Nolan’s career? He, too, is capable of the occasional clunker.
