Remaking the acclaimed 1997 Norwegian thriller, a film that featured the up-and-coming Stellan Skarsgård and that anticipated the pitch-black Scandinavian kinkiness of the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” novels, Nolan stuck close to the original but also made it his own thing.
Nolan’s first foray into big-star, major-budget studio filmmaking seemed, at the time, the most natural — and accomplished — of evolutions. Remaking the acclaimed 1997 Norwegian thriller, a film that featured the up-and-coming Stellan Skarsgård and that anticipated the pitch-black Scandinavian kinkiness of the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” novels, Nolan stuck close to the original but also made it his own thing. He coaxes an arrestingly “sleepy” performance out of Al Pacino, cast as an L.A. detective who is called to an Alaskan fishing village to investigate a sex murder, as well as a spooky and restrained one from Robin Williams as the conniving suspect. Yet “Insomnia,” in hindsight, looms as a Nolan anomaly – the only film in his canon that isn’t a true “Christopher Nolan movie” — and it has often been derided for that reason. I personally wish that Nolan had made a few more films like this, but “Insomnia,” while an absorbing procedural, is more calculated than inspired. It’s not, in the end, as good as the original. What it dramatizes now is the stalwart conventional career that Nolan could have had but clearly never wanted.