Inception (with implanted spoilers)

broken link - MUST BE A DREAM

The projector broke midway through my screening, and someone predictably (but amusingly) yelled "it was all a dream!"

and how do u know it WASNT?

The dream is coming from inside the message board.

I was thinking they need to make a version of this movie about alcoholics, called Ginception

SPOILER SPOILER DO WE HAVE TO KEEP DOING THIS OR IS IT NOW ASSUMED THAT WE'RE SPOILING

I really liked how the three dream levels were happening at different speeds: three-pronged stories (see Traffic, etc.) usually do it with color or film quality, so having the speeds be the central thing was pretty ingenious.

In the end, to make a big generalization, I think movies about dreams are too meta to engage me fully. Good movies work like dreams, anyway. Same trouble I had with Synechdoche and Jacob's Ladder: if it feels like none of this might be real, then the stakes disappear and even the fundamentals of suspending disbelief and seeing characters as characters goes away. It ends up feeling more like video-game logic than dramatic logic.

So I spent the first half admiring it more than enjoying it, and not trusting that anything I was seeing was actually part of an actual plot. But I left wanting to see it a second time, just to reconcile the first 15 minutes with the last.

SPOILER

Can i just say that the thing i really liked was the way they got around the stando bipartite climax, that is, i assumed there would have to be a second attempt at dreaming that they would have to go into where they would have to be winging it, but instead they had the option of going deeper into the dream world so that each reality had to be passed back through.

Also thought he kindof gave himself a get out of jail card w/ regard the emotional sterility w/ the ciaran murphy plot where his emotional journey is itself just an object of their tactics, manipulations and mechanisms just as theirs are to the film. Like he was stating pretty outright that the whole thing was just an elaborate contraption.

this was amaaaaazing but

fuckin everyone mumbled in this movie

― max

felt like i missed a lot of dialogue.

Too drawn out for me ...and two sections I really hated: the snow section and the CGI city bit that Leonardo had created with his wife.

I'm sure I'll hate this movie

i didn't hate it but tried to take a nap in the middle of it. i liked the collapsing buildings. it was about 30 minutes too long.

this was really great but yeah, coulda tightened up the last 30 mins with the snow army and yet a whole nuther level. no mumbling in the Cinemark as they had it cranked up to 20

they also showed the trailer to Shamalamadingdong's Devil which looks godawful and had the whole theater groaning in unison when we learned it was his.

quite entertaining!

i thought the following things were kind of funny: using michael caine in the vaguely maternal stern but forgiving wise man role again, using edith piaf as signal music when US audiences know mlle cotillard for that role, and giving joseph gordon loveitt all the crazy wirework fight scenes

oh and wtf are you guys on about w/ "spy who loved me", the snow scenes were a straight rip of the snow level in MW2 right down to the rifle leo was using

nah fuck that...they were bond/goldeneye

hm yeah the base itself wasn't very MW2...

thought the whole thing was fairly good but had that feel of a movie people say "oh wow this was amazing" about without actually being able to rationally explain why diff stuff happened...not sure it'd all hold up to much analysis.

the simultaneous timeline stuff was brilliantly done tho, and the way the whole thing made you confused as to what was reality and what was a dream was quite effective. by the end i was trying to remember which layer was actually the top one...

i was never really confused as to which was which tbh, they always made it pretty plain... except for maybe the ending. which i guess you could interrupt as, leo never got out of the "deep" final dream layer state he went down in to find cillian murphy and he's still there. that would be my "alt" explanation.

Just exited the theater. Good for summer fare, but I think the longer term appraisal will be not great. Stylistically a bit slipshod, and not in ways motivated by the plot. (Spoilers) As video game levels I'd prefer to spend more time in zero-gravity hotel elevator and less time in snow prison FPS. The Mol background doesn't add the gravitas Nolan thinks it does. Same film with one less dream recursion would be tighter and require less exposition. And DiCaprio still thinks squinting is an emotion.

Would watch Existenz over this - JJ Leigh groks fantasy dream femme way better than M Cotillard.

everyone can stop saying spoilers now

nah i mean i knew what was reality and a dream but by the end i felt the sheer amount of levels made it sort of convoluted in a way that made the dreams vs reality theme heighten in a good way.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_R5WS6_kmmTI/RglCKlg1zqI/AAAAAAAACek/h05pzWVIBz4/s400/jennifer_jason_leigh_gallery_14.jpg
Aren't you dying to see what's so special about the special? ...

This was great and i'm pretty thankful that i got to see an original mega-budget sci-fi actioner this summer rather than the thousandth iteration of a franchise. Long may it continue.

The whole movie took place inside an I Phone

this was amaaaaazing but

fuckin everyone mumbled in this movie

― max

felt like i missed a lot of dialogue.

― just1n3

amazing movie. it didnt drag in any way for me (partially thanks to my cleverly timed pee break where I probably didnt miss much)
having a huge screen and giant rumbling bass effects to accompany the higher symphonic music kept my attention. plus they were all "we have to hurry" the whole time so the general pacing was pretty upbeat.

however, our projector was extremely out of focus as soon as they started rolling the previews. me and some people went out there and told them to fix it. they had it fixed pretty quickly but I could tell it was a shabby fixing because there was a distinct blur around all the text in the previews. This bothered me enough to tell a manager about it and get free re-admit passes for my whole family. My older sister was like "everything looked great I don't know what your talking about. So what if the credits looked a little blurry". Ehhh, maybe it didn't bother her because she didn't notice and have this problem in the back of her subconscious during the whole movie. I dunno, have any of you ever been bothered by a bit of blur when the projector is slightly off-focus?

Plus the lady next to me had on one of those jangly bracelets that make a lot of high pitched clanky noise everytime she moved her hand... and she answered her phone during the movie and was on it for like half a minute.

yeah they were totally goldeneye! it was so hard not to lol

lol'd at max's line that leo shd've kept the accent

at one point in the movie he toasts and says "ay?" at the end like he slipped back into danny archer mode

also ellen paige was HORRIBLE in this

her role in this was like the opposite of paul dano in "there will be blood" -- dano's was completely overblown and completely amateur and terrible, and ellen paige was totally stone faced and emotionless... and was still completely amateur and terrible -- ellen paige didn't ruin the movie or anything but she was really jarringly bad i thought

movie was cool tho

it was cooler to look at than think about tho

*SPOILER - SOME PEOPLE SHOULDN'T EVEN BE READING THIS THREAD - THERE IS BOUND TO BE SPOILERS*

Are you all assuming that the last reality was real and not a dream? That's how I took it even if there is evidence for the contrary despite the top sounding and looking like it was going to fall at the very very end. The totem isn't necessarily proof of anything and lead to false security. Also, the grampa dude saying "come back to reality" at the classroom scene from the beginning and the kids in the same position and wearing the same clothes at the end sure made it seem like Leo could be dreaming (or rather stuck in an elaborate subconscious world). I like to think of all these scenes were there to plant a seed in our mind (inception) which is a good parallel to the seed planted in Mal's mind.

I'm sure I'll hate this movie
― is breads of india still tite (admrl)

Well maybe reading a page full of spoilers would do that
This movie was a lot better than Shutter Island and it was even more stunning visually.
(I have a friend who was dead set on not seeing this movie ever since the first previews for it came out. Maybe he just can't handle Leo or is gay for him and doesn't want me to find out. He seems to not want to see any Leo movies which is odd)

I liked how this movie kept me thinking or kept my mind stimulating the whole time per se (lots to marvel at when there is so many levels and time lengths going on + artistic beauty). I know that I was in the thinker pose for ten minutes - the one where I have my fingers rolled back under my chin or pinching my goatee. I noticed this because I don't normally do that

Plus I saw most of Brazil a couple weeks ago and it was ten times better than what I remembered from when I saw it in High School

yeah DEVIL was one of the previews and when it finally mentioned 'from the mind of m. night s_____' everyone started laughing. harsh.

liked when juno said the word 'buried' like a canadian. kinda wondering how old she'll be before she doesn't seem like a teenager.

eternal sunshine handled dreams/memories way more "realistically" and interesting
― max

I hated the artistic direction in that movie so much that I couldn't watch more than half the film. It was so conveniently placed that I couldn't stop thinking of it as nothing more than a tool for "let's shove some art in these bits because it's so easy to to picture it in this scene and it will look cool"
- Lorax

spoiler
spoiler
it was definitely a dream at the end--the kids were wearing the same goddamn clothes theyd been wearing all movie
spoiler
― max,

that proves absolutely nothing.. read my take on the dream vs. reality thing 2 or 3 posts up

*It is implied multiple times that being in 'limbo' can cause great harm to one's mind. When Saito says he will honor Cobb's agreement shortly after he is shot, Cobb replies that if he goes into limbo, he won't even remember they had an agreement. Yet he goes into limbo, and does remember, in the last sequence.* -San Te

I could be wrong but I thought that Cobb was talking about "if Japanese dude goes into Limbo". Also, maybe what he meant when he said this is that if you go into limbo you might be gone for a long time or forever and therfor forget the agreement. Also, maybe he didn't remember going into Limbo - I don't see real proof of him remembering. - Lorax

*Cobb says he and Mal spent about 50 years in limbo, and there are shots of them 'growing old together', hand in hand, as elder adults. Yet when both lie on the train tracks, committing suicide and returning to reality, they are both their young selves again. - San Te

Maybe they shape-shifted - Lorax

------

A couple things:

The Japanese dude realistically wouldn't have been able to help Leo be accepted back in US. But it's not a far stretch to believe that something like that could happen in a crazy fiction movie where people go into other people's dreams.

Regarding the Press quote upthread: "None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they're doing." - Rex Reed
-That's not exactly true. There's people with real goals in this. Not to mention that some groups work well together solely because everyone in it is cool in their own unique way (we don't need to hear everyone's exact motive). The Inception posse was just there being cool like Buckaroo Banzai's posse or The Warriors gang
-And what "convincing logic" did this Rex Reed guy expect out of this fantasy film? Scientific explanations as to how people can go inside other people's dreams? What an idiot

I really loved this! Saw it in a packed theatre and there was a huge "AWWWHHHH!!" at the end. I definitely lost the plot some way through, with whose dream we were in and what had to happen in what order. Also the different dream layers meant the end of the film could have an action climax, an emotional climax and I guess the espionage plot climax all pretty much at the same time. Nice. It did feel a bit Shutter Islandy in places, though.

one of my friends just facebooked complaining that Mr. Nolan didn't need to make his movies "10 hours" long. Is 2 hours and 20 minutes really that long?

It REALLY didn't feel like a long 2 hrs 20 mins to me. I was flat out exhausted yet it kept my attention the whole time.

then again this friend is a contrarian idiot

I just saw it tonight and quite liked it! I think the strongest argument for it holding up to repeat viewing is its lack of a reliance on a twist.

Nolan's non-Batman movies (Memento, The Prestige) while v. v. good are both completely different watches the first time around - they rely on the viewer to know nothing in order to surprise and manipulate them. Ironically, while Inception was shrouded in secrecy and I'm glad that I went in mostly blind to the plot, I don't think there's much here that is particularly shocking. The set pieces and the characters and the handful of emotions that there are stand on their own quite successfully.

Needless to say, stunning visually - best depiction of lucid dreaming since Waking Life and/or Eternal Sunshine. I liked how they papered over the moral implications of inception fairly quickly at the beginning - bla bla energy monopoly bla bla. If it's that risky and difficult one would think that motivations and so on mattered more, but that is the point of Leo's monomaniacal guilt about Mol.

best depiction of lucid dreaming since Waking Life and/or Eternal Sunshine

or even vanilla sky

hiyoooooo

Thought the love story side of it wasn't flawless in that mol was this total harpy in Cobb's subconscious. You never saw whatever the good side of their relationship was or had been. But perhaps it was just a story about Cobb and nobody else.

(Possible spoilers)

Just reading the Philip French review in the Observer:

But because he's suspected of killing his wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb cannot return to America to see his children. He has, in fact, left her isolated in a distant dream limbo, which not unnaturally has left him riddled with guilt.

The second part of this isn't right is it? She's dead, so Mol is only in Cobb's subconscious?

yeah the story he tells us is that they both came back from limbo via getting run over by a train

but she couldn't deal with the idea that maybe nothing was real

so she killed herself irl

and she 'exists' in what i think is dream space designed by cobb? that elevator shaft that juno gets in on is something he's 'created' i guess, given that she is able to access it.

bothered me a bit how they played so fast and loose with the time differential between the different layers - if they were really on different clocks the gravity shifts wouldnt be so sudden, etc. but i was generally ok with it, it was for a reason.

This isn't right, though.

All of those actions are happening at the same time; the issue is that perception stretches the sensation out. You would expect the jolts in the van to affect the dreamscape in the hotel exactly when they happened, only the sensation in the hotel would last what, 12 times? as long to the people in the dream.

The part I thought was interesting was how they handwaved multiple layers of the dream away from each other; GGL's dream was directly influenced by the physics of the chemist's dream, but since he wasn't in the forger's dream the spatial weirdness didn't translate to there and being asleep in that dream buffered everyone else from it.

it's a fine movie. it was hardly the second coming of Kubrik or something that all the secrecy and advance hype would lead you to believe. I think it's a pretty good crime movie but as far as depictions of lucid dreaming, I preferred Eternal Sunshine. It's still really good.

My biggest problem was that everyone seemed too young. I know that makes me seem really old. But like, didn't we just see Ellen Page playing a high school kid a year ago, and Joseph Gorden Levitt still seems like the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun, and I don't konw when Leo Decaprio is going to seem like an adult to me but he still looks like a kid wearing a fake beard.

JGL is a more convincing adult than Leo, I think.

didn't we just see Ellen Page playing a high school kid a year ago

And she was playing a college kid now -- not a big leap!

**spoiler**

still dont "get" the whole "limbo" thing? if you can just get out of it by killing yourself, why did leo and marion stay there for like 50 years? or did they never leave????????????

― max, Friday, July 16, 2010 1:04 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

@max -- I think the concept behind "limbo" was that it was raw mental activity, and you don't necessarily know right away that you're in it. Which makes sense as to why Leo's character had to 'plant' the thought in his wife's mind that the world wasn't real.

My interpretation is that Marion and Leo did leave. but, the Japanese guy was then in limbo since he then died before the "kick". they never showed him offing Leo, so whether they actually woke up at the end is debatable, as evidenced by them not showing whether the top stopped spinning.

Good lord I'm going crosseyed.

― San Te, Friday, July 16, 2010 3:09 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

did anyone have a better answer for this?