Inception (with implanted spoilers)

Also, ledge, you didn't recognize the being stuck in a tight alley while you're being pursued as a classic dream moment?

uh the silly thing ledge pointed out wasn't that he wasn't stuck in a tight alley, but that the actor clearly wasn't trying that hard to get through the space.

the second wasn't should be a was, sorry

it was an enjoyable thought excercise. Also Leo's scrunchy body is shaped like a 'v' from above making it appear like he wasn't turned sideways in the tight alley

another optical illusion!

seemed like leslie nielsen wrestling with a towel thrown in his face to me

and its not a big movie-capsizing deal or anything, just a lol

The actor wasn't trying hard enough to get through the space? You guys are silly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4bu4DF7ewo

again, just an action-movie-cliche lol, not a chink in the armor that needs defending

i loved that scene. since i've had a ton of sleep-paralysis inspired dreams like that. usually im trying to run to or away from something and can't. fucking. move.

i also had about a 3 month period where a sensation of falling would jolt me awake about 2-3 times a night.

I figured out why leos limbo is full of crumbly office buildings - they represent his teeth falling out

sometimes i think the whole dream angle is a bit of a red herring though. if anything, it's a shared virtual reality created by a particular subconscious. what's intriguing about that is that the movie suggests and such constructs are inherently unstable and uncontrollable. (ie, not even the virtual space of our own mind is under our control)

ie, that these virtual realities always threaten to become dreams...

turn off as soon as characters in other books or films start relating their dreams, and also in real life.

O T M

That's massively subjective though, and not a reason to call a film bad, merely a reason to avoid seeing a film, same as if you don't like films about dinosaurs or romance.

or teenagers

DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE

Now I'm thinking about elephants.

I liked Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors better

That's massively subjective though, and not a reason to call a film bad, merely a reason to avoid seeing a film, same as if you don't like films about dinosaurs or romance.

Am not calling it *bad* for that reason, just having a stab at explaining why it's not very emotionally engaging.

It's in the same area as feeling cheated by an "it was all a dream" soap plot. You were invested, but it turned out the consequences you cared about didn't matter (in the context of the world you buy into).

Partly why Cillian's parts are more affecting: the consequences for him are real, they're trying to affect him in the real world; matters way more than kid-on-van-about-to-hit-kid-on-water.

sometimes a movie can be about ideas and concepts and not necessarily have to have characters you can relate to.

Soooo how was it that Cobb and Mal (?) only had to kill themselves by train in their limbo to get out?

I think we're getting limbo's rules confused with the regular dream states. the "kick", as explained by the chemist, was for the regular dream states, because killing yourself wouldn't wake you up, but the sensation of falling would since the sedative didn't affect the ears.

However, limbo was explained as raw subconscious activity. they never explained the rules for leaving limbo. They only explained that you could be stuck there for as long as 50 years or more. hence why Leo pulled the gun for Saito to presumably use on Cobb, then himself.

so presumably only the 'regular' rules applied

So limbo is dangerous because it is unpredictable? Its the easy ticket out if not. It'd make the kicks kind of pointless.

Also kind of dumb as pointed out somewhere above that the rolling van didn't wake them up when the chair tipping over did during the tests.

because it wasn't a free fall, whereas the chair tip was.

how many threads feature people arguing over an instruction manual?

how many threads feature people bitching about the same things over and over?

oh wait, a lot....

Just trying to get the movie, thats all.

I was a bit bummed that with all the portent and ambition, huge hunks of the movie still boiled down to people with machine guns firing at each other in pursuit of making a giant energy company less powerful. The B- James Bond snow stuff pretty much made me snicker. Appreciated a lot of it, regardless.

The thing is, in "Memento" all the narrative trickery plays perfectly into the narrative itself, with a sad, tragic result. Here, all the trickery, as such, largely amounts to sound and fury signifying nothing. Per that interview quote somewhere above, the most interesting way to think about the movie is as about an implied character that exists both before and after the movie (Cobb possibly being incepted, etc.), but agree with the actor/interview subject that Nolan is so literal minded he would never do anything that radical. I mean, I like "The Prestige" a lot, but almost because of its acute literal-mindedness, where the big reveal turns out to be impossible but you just sort of go with it. In this one, the rules and metaphysics are kept so loose they don't even matter, and the only guy you end up caring about at all is the guy the super team has been assembled to con.

Intrigued by the (again, unsupported) idea there may be multiple teams at work throughout the world, but again, the specifics are so vague. Like, what are Cobb's qualifications, exactly? What wisdom did (extraction inventor?) Michael Caine impart, and what made Cobb so (uniquely?) receptive to it? Is extraction a massive national security issue and, if so, is it in and of itself illegal? Etc. A prequel would be totally justified were this movie not already so focuses on circuitous exposition.

Evan -- comment was for Tape Store, not you. I apologize that I didn't make that clear!

Its OK! It was a response to him ultimately.

Another weird thing: how could a movie explicitly about the subconscious and dreaming be so totally sexless? I guess you can say it's just as explicitly about guilt and control, but still.

i have a theory about that

but meanwhile though i definitely <3'd this movie, i do think the snow fortress stuff was probably the biggest mistake. it was competent enough, but nothing more. if they'd made it zero-g, that would have been something.

If they had made it zero-g, that would have been "Moonraker."

so i take it ilx did what i did and didn't overanalysise this film, instead just treating it as a fun james bond movie for yr summer?

oh wait its ilx, what should i be complaining about

Watched it again yesterday to see if it would pass the second-time-through test as an engaging view -- and it did, which was handy. I concentrated a little more this time on specific plot/script/visual details to see if the film really was as tightly locked in as it felt like and while there are a couple of lines I need to catch again whenever I see it next it really did hit every beat to make the internal logic work. If anything I felt a little more engaged with the Mal/Cobb throughline if only because I wasn't suffering from 'I have no idea how this is going to end!' syndrome.

That's pretty much exactly how I found a second viewing.

so i take it ilx did what i did and didn't overanalysise this film, instead just treating it as a fun james bond movie for yr summer?

this is a really stupid zing imo

it's obviously not just a fun lil bond movie

but the people who say this kind of stuff -- i kind of wonder what movies they think don't deserve condescension

it really did hit every beat to make the internal logic work

Here's just one obvious question that, for me, collapsed any idea of "so beautifully crafted internal logic wow":

+ Why did Cobb have to "inceive" Mal with the falseness of their world?

Because according to him at the end of the film (in the limbo conversation on top of the building with Ariadne and Mal) she was so far gone into the shared dreamscape that said inception was the only way to get her to snap out of it.

The follow-through being Cobb's realization that Mal ended up thinking the real world was itself false -- inception can be successful but it can be too successful.

Because they were in limbo, and purposely building environments from memories and desires, so their understanding of whether it was real or a dream was blurring; Mal (consciously?) decided she preferred it 'down there' in beatific limbo, as it were, and hid her totem, intending to stay there forever, but Dom wanted to wake up and go back to the kids. So he planted the idea that the reality was fake, and sadly it stayed with her back in reality, so she was convinced she needed to wake up one more time. Of course, there is (circumstantial) evidence to suggest that they DID need to wake up one more time, and that she was right.

xposts

Saw it a second time last night too. It was on a smaller screen in a regular theater (saw it on IMAX the first time) and a lot of the dialogue was suddenly harder to make out and it did feel less impressive. I wonder if that has anything to do with anyone else's experience. It was still a fun movie however and the six people I saw it with who hadn't seen it before seemed to enjoy it and debated various elements of it on the drive back home. I've seen so few movies with people that actually get them talking about it afterward that this seems like a positive thing.

I think this thread is pretty key evidence for it being a very good film, purely for the amount of discourse about it.

this is a really stupid zing imo

it's obviously not just a fun lil bond movie

but the people who say this kind of stuff -- i kind of wonder what movies they think don't deserve condescension

― pieter brogel the elder (history mayne), Sunday, 25 July 2010 15:52 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Ok yeah you are right but this thread is gigantic and I just don't know whether there is really that much to talk about other than lol dreams.

I also saw it in a smaller/non-IMAX theatre and it didn't feeling as punishingly overwhelming on an audio level for kinda obvious reasons. If anything I caught a little more of the dialogue, and 'smaller' lines and acting moments stood out though at the same time that's probably down to having had seen it the one time already. My friend Matt was seeing it for the first time and was fully engaged with it, really liked it.

Saw it for the second time I should say.