I can't help thinking of Inception here
And as with any unequal distribution of wealth, awkward questions follow – such
what as whether having huge sums at their fingertips is actually good for film-makers, or whether they're the right people to have it in the first place. The thing about the kind of grandiose spectacle the biggest budgets buy you is that, CGI or otherwise, it all starts to look the same. Not literally, of course – even I can tell the difference between Narnia and Pandora. But the set-pieces of the most extravagant blockbusters always seem to share a certain sheeny sensibility so that, however expensive, they never look real. In such circumstances, true creativity is all too often sacrificed for size.
Predictably, I can't help thinking of Inception here – a film in which the $160m budget goes on a smorgasbord of ornate, effects-heavy money shots. Yet impressive as all the dreamscape malarkey is, I left Inception convinced that the best vehicle for Christopher Nolan's talents remains something like Memento – one simple great idea spun out into a terrific, taut, modern thriller. For all the recent hullaballoo, Nolan still feels like a lost maker of brilliant B-movies, with studio largesse inflating his "vision" beyond its natural limits – a phenomenon that has also afflicted Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi.
None of which is to deny the charm of sheer, vast, gleefully ridiculous spectacle, or to imply that anything made for pocket change is intrinsically wonderful; Lord knows I've seen enough films to disprove both sides of that equation. But it's also true that, once the budget starts to climb into nine figures, displaying it onscreen becomes a perversely dreary end in itself – so that rather than allowing a director to show the world the wonders inside his or her head, the game becomes to find ways of visibly splashing the cash just to heighten the sense of the movie as an event. (At this point, it seems apposite to mention that the most expensive film of all time is Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End.)
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