The life of a police officer, who has been sent to a distant town in Alaska with his friend, in order to find out the hidden truth behind the mysterious murder of a young teenager girl, has turned down, after the accident shoot for his friend, during chasing the suspect, the thing that puts his professional life in danger.
Who allowed these performances, or maybe even encouraged them? Christopher Nolan, that's who. He was so intent on dolloping pizazz onto this story that he didn't notice the visual syrup was drowning a six-inch stack of toaster waffles.
Christopher Nolan's Insomnia adds 11 minutes to the Norwegian movie of the same name and manages to make everything that was fleeting and tantalizing in the original weighty, literal and dull.
The film represents a triumph of atmosphere over a none-too-mysterious mystery. Which is to say that Nolan makes you feel the end-of-the-earth bleakness of his setting, makes you feel the way it can discombobulate people once they internalize it.
Scene by scene, screenwriter Hillary Seitz follows director Erik Skjoldbjaerg's original closely, but this remake deepens and improves upon the Norwegian film by giving Dormer a more complex relationship with Eckhart.